16 posts tagged “work”

For the first time in a while I actually had some fun on the job. It involved the smallest full-featured PC I've ever worked with and the Ubuntu Linux package that came with it.

We've had a number of older dedicated compact PC systems fail recently due to age, more than anything. I'd been looking for replacement solutions... something that is very small and only needs to do one job: serve up Web pages from our online library catalog system. I'd thought about Mac Mini and heard good things about their use. Still, I really wanted something less expensive that could run Windows. I know, "Windoze." We have certain tools that make configuring a Windows box easy so I was leaning in that direction. Then I read about the fit-PC. When the machines were first offered for sale they were so popular amongst enthusiasts and tinkerers that they were immediately sold out of stock! Recently, however, our need became urgent and the fit-PCs became available.

Ubuntu Linux comes pre-installed on these little machines but Windows XP can be installed by the end-user if desired. This was a perfect opportunity to see just how good Ubuntu is and, if it didn't fit our needs, I could always dump it and trudge back to the familiar territory of Redmond.

It turns out I didn't need to change a thing. Ubuntu with its expert user community provided nearly everything I needed. To create a secure browser kiosk I needed only to do a few "Linux things" and install and set up Opera's browser in its kiosk mode! It works great.

The fit-PC uses only 5 watts of electrical power (monitor not included) whereas the machine it replaced ran on 75 to 100 watts. The Fit is installed in a bracket within the base of the carrel that supports the monitor, keyboard, and mouse. Users don't notice any difference -- they're still looking at our catalog Web pages -- and the system has the added benefit of being practically silent. Fit-PC is air-cooled (no fans) and its internal notebook hard drive contains the only moving parts. It runs using free, open-source software bringing the CPU system price in at about $300 compared with more than twice that price for the system it replaces.

I've also become very enthusiastic about Ubuntu. I'd played with Red Had Linux a couple of times over the years. I have also installed and used Solaris. They seemed very difficult to install, required payments and registrations for basic OS updating, and never seemed to have the kind of polish necessary to make a good system for desktop users.  Servers are another matter and another story though, as I've said before, Sun's update process is weak. Ubuntu is beautiful. Installed in half an hour on an old PC in my shop, another 15 minutes for initial automatic updating, and shows great promise for special applications around the home and office.

Fun at work returns --for a while anyway-- at last!

I came in to find the email server was down. The system power was "off" so naturally I tried to turn it back on. No-go! Power would come on, then go off. Working by phone with a Dell technician, he concluded that the system processor or main board had failed. It's the machine I did a simple backup on last night. It was fine when I used it at 12:20 AM from home as a test. Apparently it was just "its time" and the system went down. So, at the support person's suggestion, I upgraded our support service from next-day to 4-hour turnaround and Dell's dispatching parts and an on-site tech to install them later today. I don't know what time they'll arrive but I'll have to stay til the bitter end. Nice way to start the day... especially before a planned trip out of town on what was supposed to be a pleasant astronomy workshop weekend! On the bright side, some businesses have declared No-Email Days on certain days of the week or month. It's supposed to force employees to make personal contacts through face-to-face or phone conversations instead of via electronic memos. We get to do that today at no extra charge! Surprising, though, how much we really need email now to get our work done.

UPDATE: It turns out there was a misunderstanding down at Dell... I had purchased (for several hundred dollars) an upgrade of service level from next-day to four-hour turnaround with the understanding it would help our immediate situation. Dell wasn't going to put it into effect for about 48 hours but I didn't know that! When nobody called me after three hours, I called Dell Support and was disappointed to learn what was wrong. The Support Technician worked hard and ironed out the issues. Things moved really fast after we got the service grade straightened out. Within a couple of more hours the prescribed replacement parts arrived and five minutes before their promised earliest time. The technician arrived about a half-hour later. By about 6:10 the Mail Server was back up and doing its mail serving thing. At 6:30, only an hour and a half late, I left for home. Our spam filter system had been saving up mail that it couldn't deliver all day and, over about an hour, delivered all of those messages. Apparently the Mail Server failed between 12:20 and about 4:00 AM. Whew! What a day.

As I noted in an earlier entry, this was an exhausting week. Fortunately there were no incidents at work that demanded my attention either Friday or today. I got a decent night's sleep --a fairly solid six hours-- leaving me wanting for a bit more but feeling like I'm recovering. Today She Who Must Be Obeyed took her car in for service and we took off for a McDonald's breakfast followed by Saturday shopping at Target, Kohl's, lunch at Bruegger's Bagels and provisioning at Mustard Seed Market. The atmosphere was foggy all morning and the sky gray all day but there was no rain or snow falling. It was great to be out and about without the weight of any crisis or deadline. Just palling around with "She" for the day. The car needed little service and the mechanic was very pleasant to deal with -- a positive experience. There was supposed to be an Observatory open night tonight but the solid overcast and expected snow caused me to cancel the event. {Ma Nature stepped in to slow me down a bit more.} So tonight we try out a veggie version of a Rachael Ray recipe, enjoy (I hope) a little local wine --"Redemption" from the Wolf Creek winery (beautiful location, okay wine), and kick back for a restful evening. Ahhhh.... time off!

Wine note: Yes, it's a "red table wine," and those tend to be mellow and sweet. Redemption has those characteristics plus a strong cherry flavor and ruby red color. Not a fine wine but it should go well with our "meat" loaf dinner! And isn't that what a "table wine" is about?

It's Friday and, because of my weekend rotation schedule, I get to stay home! The rest comes not a moment too soon. It was a busy and stressful week. Some things take care of themselves: no change in my job/career situation (for better or worse) as the decision was made for me. Projects at work don't usually resolve themselves: after many hours of troubleshooting I finally devised a workaround for an intranet site problem and that made a few people happy. Now my coworkers can create their paperwork without paper. At least there will be less paper wasted. Finally the week was capped off by an 11-hour day partly spent "upgrading" our PC scheduling system followed by a 9-hour day yesterday watching our networked PCs gradually grind to a halt because the "upgrade" was somehow toxic. Fortunately I hadn't tried to permanently improve all of our PCs at the same time. Of course it wasn't the software vendor's fault -- no, no, no! My repeated and increasingly urgent calls for help went unanswered. Hmmm... their phone was busy all day. I wonder..... I finally remedied the situation myself, at least for a while, by shutting off the automatic portion of the "upgrade" and rebooting our PCs allowing them to regress to their stable former, non-upgraded selves. Those machines that suffered the permanent effects of the "upgrade" are hosed; I'll have to try and repair them Monday. Very stressful day. Not a nice week. I hope I don't get phone calls today... I need this day (and weekend) off! Thank Goodness It's Friday!

I got to work just fine today (my weekend to work). No real trouble getting up the hill out of our condos. Our city streets were packed snow but the state roads were fine as were the freeways. When I arrived the snow crews were on the property in force. They'd cleared the lots pretty well but the drive-up window couldn't be driven up to. This photo will give some idea of what they had to work on. Tomorrow ought to be pretty easy by comparison! A pretty, snowy day, or a  pretty snowy day!

Had to work yesterday. Had to work today. That's weekend rotation for you. Still, I sometimes don't mind it much... the pace of the day is different from the weekdays and I can often pursue projects that I can't during the week. This weekend I spent a lot of my time working out the last kinks in our new public computer print management system. We were supposed to be able to offer printing services to visitors who bring their own notebook computers with them. As we finished up the system installation we hit a snag... the visiting notebook module wouldn't print through our system. After a lot of troubleshooting we determined it was some component apparently missing from our server. I spent several hours Saturday working on the problem. Today I discovered the problem and how to resolve it. Years ago, when I originally set up the server for work in the Internet, I had made a number of changes for security's sake. Unfortunately, I hadn't documented them! Today I rediscovered what I had done {geek alert} I had set the hidden device NetBIOS to Disabled which, in turn, shut off Windows File and Printer Sharing -- the service critical to success of the notebook project. Yeah... the HIDDEN device! So, after closing and a server reboot, success at last! Visitors will now, with great ease, bring their notebook computers to our facility and, with a lightweight and temporary software download, print to our networked printers! Just a couple of tweaks remain to the network setup so that wired as well as wireless users can access the system and we're all set. Are you still awake?

Newsy Bits: I think my efforts (above) were aided by finally getting a full and restful night's sleep -- the first I've had in about a week! She and I braved temperatures in the teens, strong winds, and blowing snow to go out to breakfast and grocery shopping this morning before I had to go to work. She is recovering after a week-long fight with a cold virus. Very nasty. Tonight She's feeling much better and, so far, I'm showing no signs of infection. Tasha has been throwing up which had me worried. I'm hoping the fix is as simple as this: she really dislikes some new litter box filler we've tried to switch to and I suspect she's not been using it. I think she's been holding back (if cats can do that) and it's been making her regurgitate. We'll see. I cooked dinner (pesto pasta and corn) and baked cookies (chocolate chip) tonight. Temperature has fallen to the low single-digits (+3.6 degrees F right now). Good thing the sky is cloudy: keeps it from getting even colder and saves me the guilty feelings of not going out under a clear sky and freezing my stuff off. And it's approaching 11 PM and time, soon, for bed. Still reading this? Hmmm. Are you still awake?

As expected, this was a very intense week of work. The software installation project went well. Working with the vendor's on-site installation technician we installed the system on 50 client PCs, two staff management PCs, three print release stations, and the server. He was able to write an installation script that removed the old --and lousy-- software system and installed the great new stuff. Made the process consistent and quick. Still, I wound up with work days no shorter than 10 hours and extending, on Monday, to 16 hours. Had lunch out twice with our director and the technician and discovered a couple of good places to eat. At the end of four days the system was running excellently well providing users with computer use time management and print management services at a level they were not used to. Only one component did not install and that was due to a Windows Server service that somehow went missing in the past several years. I'll fix that and all will be in good order. Spent today watching a movie on TV (U-verse is great), going out to lunch at Chipotle followed by a walk around the mall, and generally resting and relaxing at home. Tomorrow is my Saturday to work on weekend rotation so the grind starts again. Yeah, one heck of a week.

It was a decent week, for the most part. Two days of deep moodiness were followed by a revival. I completed installation of an email archiving system --for compliance with state and federal record-retention laws-- which was a big deal. Yeah, not a bad week.

We spent little time at home today. Took Her car to the dealer to fix a rattle. The noise turned out to be, as expected, the catalytic converter heat shield coming loose. The thing fell clean off as they raised the car on the lift. We did our weekly grocery shopping and set some sort of record for the total spent! We still don't know why, though we did stock up on a few pricier items and seasonal things that are unusual for us.

We picked up the repaired car midday, headed home for a quick lunch, then out the door for some holiday shopping and, well, just to get out ... the sky was mostly clear and sunshine beckoned. In the later part of the afternoon we paid a visit to Hinckley Lake, mostly to visit the boathouse outdoors shop there. As we arrived the shop managers were also arriving, back to make sure they had shut something off when they left earlier! They very kindly let us in. We examined some nice sweaters but bought nothing as She does not like items that are marked DRY CLEAN ONLY. Too bad. The storekeepers were very nice about it having been inconvenienced not at all; in fact, they were downright cheerful and friendly. Nice way to end the day out in the world.

Lucky me! Tonight I've assigned myself to try again to move our network user files from one server to another ... one with a lot more disk space available. So, saying goodnight to everyone at 9:00 PM, I retreated to the Server Room to begin my night's work. Last time I tried it was some months ago. I thought it worked but the permissions were wrong and, basically, it was all "Read Only." That's fine for security but not so good for usability. So, as I write this, the first part of the transfer is taking place. Once the backup and restore to the new location is complete I'll change the login script to point users to the new file location. Ideally the only things users should notice is there is more space available for all of their crap and their crap is served and saved faster than it was. Ideally.

I did succeed in installing updated software to our email server while I was waiting for the big file copy operation. I dearly hope the vendor fixed a problem we've been seeing where Web messaging just quits --the ASP service crashes in the background-- because that means most of our users lose their email service until the server machine is restarted. The operation was a success; only time will tell whether it helped the patient!

Update -- 11:12 PM  The Backup took 1 hour, 30 minutes, 40 seconds and verification took 3 minutes, 34 seconds. I've started the restoration process that unpacks the files to their new location that (this time) has access permissions that match their original home. It will take about 40 minutes for this process to complete. Then I get to test the thing by logging on using several different accounts and checking my file access. That will be at about Midnight. {Yawn!} Thank goodness I'm able to maintain Internet access during this vigil. Helpful in getting support information and in staying mentally active!

Update -- 12:42 AM (Thursday) By Geroge I think I've got it! Restoring the files to their new home took 41 minutes, 9 seconds. The files didn't unpack the way I thought they would so I had to create a new shared directory, move the files and directories into it, and check permissions. Sure enough, they were set to "Read-Only." This time I removed the read-only attribute on everything except some restricted access files --Windows knew what they were-- changed my login script and gave it a go with a low-level user account. Yea! I was able to access files I should be able to access, make changes, save those changes, and not get into files I've no business getting into! Yes, it looks good.

Of course the real test is when all those real users get logged in. What will they experience? Opening of business in a few hours will tell. Hopefully I'll come in well rested and not find a bunch of panicked librarians gnashing their teeth and pulling their hair out! For now, however, I'm goin' home.

DirecTV's "101" channel featured a showing last night of one of the Sundance Channel's Iconoclasts series films. This one featured a one-on-one conversation between comic Dave Chappelle and writer Maya Angelou. It was really quite remarkable seeing those two individuals from very different times share the thoughts and feelings about their own and each other's lives and feelings. The viewer could easily see Chappelle's respect and admiration for Dr. Angelou. What may have been a little surprising was Angelou offering up her own words of respect and encouragement for Chappelle. We don't receive the Sundance Channel but I hope to see other films in this series -- this one certainly was a surprise and delight.

There's a special event at the library so I get to work tonight as tech support and AV crew for the speaker. Former FBI profiler, now best-selling author, John Douglas will be giving a talk. I get to make sure the notebook computer, LCD projector, and sound system don't fail him and spoil the show. The subject matter sounds especially grim (he has worked some especially horrible cases) so we'll see whether I stay in the room for the presentation. I may just go to my Server Room, after getting him started, and tend to my precious machines! At any rate, the night's to be cold and cloudy and since astronomy is out of the question, and if I can't be snug at home, I guess I might as well be earning comp time!

We were supposed to try again Monday night to host a star party for the college astronomy class but the weather's looking dicey again. October isn't known for its clear skies and it's really living up to its reputation.