Playing Catch Up

Yikes.

I had hoped that the advent of blog-by-email for me would lead to more frequent updates for this site. Alas, blog nirvana is not mine to be had. (Then again, were it, there would be no 'me' to attain it, now would there?)

OK. There's a password reset to talk about, a little codec fun, a microsoft vulnerability (so what's new?), laptop backups, and some upgrade-of-doom paranoia. Let's begin, shall we?

Password reset hell. I have a fun time resetting passwords for users here, not because the process of resetting the password is a pain, but because there are so many accounts, the users can never keep them straight. ("Ma'am, is this the third password, after the EXEC comand, or the fourth one, at the telnet login screen?") Inevitably you end up resetting the wrong thing, despite having asked the question six different ways, and getting the same answer every time. ("You're absolutely sure it's this one? OK...") Then they get irate. Well for the last three days, I've been resetting this one user's password for a particular system. Come to find out today that the reason this particular system never gets the reset is because that's the one system that I can't reset the password on. Sure, the reset works fine elsewhere, but not there. So for three days I've been doing something I'm not allowed to. Wish I would have known.

Microsoft released their October vulnerability list. I guess one of them was pretty severe, because I got several notes from management about it. I mean really high up on the food chain management. So a few pushes and several reboots later, we're patched, but not without a few minor missteps. I had forgotten my rule about not rebooting the DB servers at the same time as the domain controllers. So SQL failed to come back up last night. (At least, I'm pretty sure that's the reason.) Ran all the jobs manually this morning, and everything's cool, but I feel kind of stupid for that one. Still, it's all working out fine, and I'm now REALLY glad I installed WSUS a while ago. Patch management is a lot simpler now.

Codecs: Wondering if there's a nice, simple way to convert wavs to MP3s without a lot of loss or other problems... That's for another project I'm considering if it generates any interest. We'll see if server space holds out.

I've been working out a plan for backup of the work laptops around here, and I think I has the solution. (Bonus points if you got the Homestar Runner reference, there.) I'm going to schedule NTBACKUP jobs on each laptop to a designated place on the network. With those done, the nightly tape jobs will come and pick up those files, so I'll have about 4 weeks worth of laptop backups ready to go in the event of the next hard drive failure. We've had more than a few cases of laptop flu around here. I'd like to have something in place before the real pandemic starts. (Think hardware refresh time. *shiver*)

Finally, do you remember when I was upgrading Mercury Interactive's 'Test Director' a few months back? Well, I just got a notice in email today that they're already talking about End-Of-Life for that product. So I get to attend a web seminar next week on the upgrade procedures. Hopefully this won't be nearly as bad as the last time, when even Mercury tech support couldn't get it to work. My back is getting a little sore from all this bending over.

That's all for now, folks. See you later.

CS