Fun in IT Life.

So we are getting @Road software installed in our shipping department
today. This requires that the Shipping department have Internet Access
from a PC with IE (Bleah). Since our shipping departrment has only used
IBM 3151 Green screen dumb terminals in the past, this is quite an
upgrade. I rebuilt an older PC from our sales department, and installed
my standard image. After making sure all of the WinBlows software is
patched and up to date. I be bop down to the shipping department and
realize the shipping manager leaves at 2:00pm Doh! So this morning I
bring down my New(rebuilt) PC and start installing it. Everything goes
well, until I go to remove the nasty IBM 3151. IT HAS A SLAVE PRINTER
ATTACHED TO IT.

Ok, Ok, This isn't the end of the world, but it might be the end of my
Friday. ARRGH! I run back up to my office and unearth an HP JetDirect
that I have been kicking around for about 8 months. I ripped out the
serial card from the Okidata Bill of Lading Printer (multi-part forms
yuck!), hooked up the printer to the jet direct via a handy dandy
parallel printer cable, and connected the HP JetDirect to the printer
and the wall. OOPS forgot to connect the patch cord to the network.
BLAST! I just remember that my new Network switch has not arrived and I
don't know if I have another open port. I run back up to the server
room and luckily find a port that is not turned on. I will just hope
that person doesn't need it today. I will need to stop by Fry's and
pickup a mini 5-port switch to hold me over.

Ok, now a quick call to our ERP software vendor and have them turn on the printer and away we go.

... Time passes

... Time passes

... Still more time passes.

Finally a call from the ERP provider. Hurry! connect up that printer, I
got an irritated shipping department manager that wants to print Bill
of Ladings. He does, but sets the IP address to the wrong subnet I have
to spend 20 minutes figuring it out. ARRGH!

My 45 minute job turned into a 2 and a half hour job, because of an over-looked slave serial printer.

Oh well it all turned out in the end. Live and Learn.

Job Cacka

    So my network consultant and I were poking around
the other day in the Symantec Security Center, and we decided that it
was time to run a managed audit for the network. We fired it off an
came back a few hours later, and low and behold ther were unmanaged
Anti-Virus clients out on the network. The previous admin had problems
installing it in the first place, but my fault for not checking
earlier. So we still had a couple of hours to go and split up the list
of half dozen or so PCs and set to work. Work was progressing nicely
until I bebop up to the design department ancient artifact of a
fileserver (slated to be replaced soon). This is a box that's whole
function is to act as an intermediary between the broken graphics
software and Linux. I turn on the monitor and "WHAT THE HECK IS
THIS!?!" Procomm Plus is running with a big text window that says,
"Waiting for incoming call." Oh, maybe the phone is not connected.
Nope, phone cable is securely in place. maybe it has been turned off at
the switch, or connected to the PRI T1. I run upstairs, grab an analog
telephone, and plug it into the jack at the design server. DANG! A
dial-tone. I dial my cell phone number without pressing 9 first. Double
DANG! It rings through and I am now talking to myself. Because it is
not connected through the PRI, it has an outside number that is not
logged, and it was set to autoanswer.

    I call over the design manager and ask her why her
server is waiting for incomming calls, and connected to the POTS phone
system. She explains that before they had email (8 years ago) they used
this system to allow a vendor to retrieve files from our fileserver.
She usually turns off the Auto-Answer script in Procomm Plus, but she
must have forgotten to last time. I explain to her in short one
syllable words that when something is running that is not needed she
should feel free to bug me and have it turned off. AAHGHH! Users!
Fortunately, the Procomm log didn't reveal a break-in, and nothing
appears to be tampered with. I just hope that War Dialers are out of
vogue now. They were something to play with when I was in High School.

    Fortunately, the most of the half-dozen or so AV
clients that were unmanaged were working. There were only two the
needed to have the definitions updated, and they are all managed now.

    The motto? The best network security is Scissors.

    So I was tooling around this morning and the VPD
(Vice-President's Daughter) asked me to help fix a disappearing Excel
file. Applications are not my specialty, but I have seen a few things.
I told her I was amazed she was asking a work related question in the
first place. She did think that was funny. So I procede to open the
Offending Excel file and absolutely nothing happens.
    Hmm, no errors, no excel file, no nothing.... A real
head scratcher. As I am thinking about it I decide maybe I should
remane the file. TILT! Windows does not let me because the file is
Open. Or so it say, but I am not seeing the 162K of information that is
in this excel file, and it is supposedly a copy of another file.
    I am trying to change the View in the View menu, but
every thing is greyed out. Then BINGO! The stupid file is hidden. She
must have clicked on the Hide menu option and saved it that way. Sure
Enough the UNHIDE option is in the menu. One click and it is up and
running.
    I wish all problems were so obvious.

Job Cacka

    We are a relatively small company and we still use
Static IP addresses. Today I set up a new HP 4350, a very nice laser
printer. After spending about two hours getting it configured, placed
and operational, I got a call from our shipping department. Their new
printer setup is broken and won't print. I delay my lunch long enough
to run smit and stop and start thier print queue. I call shipping and
all is right in thier world, so I go back to lunch. Twenty minutes go
by and I am 3/4 of the way through a great article about Microsoft's
connectivity problems across WAN's (DUH), and finishing up lunch, I
hear the overhead paging system requesting my assistance in the
shipping department.
    So back I go to the server room and use the good old
lpstat command to look at thier print queue before I trudge downstairs
to the shipping office. Hmmm, no shipping print queue. That is odd.
       CLICK!!!
    Light comes on. The new printer I installed must
have the same staitc ip address as the old printer. I must have forgot
to update my Static IP database the other day in my hurry to get
shipping up and running.
    So I run over to the new printer, unplug the
Ethernet cable and run back to the server room to restart the shipping
department's print queue. A qucik call to shipping verifies they were
having problems again. I told them I found the glitch in the new
printer configuration and it was now fixed.

Motto: I must remember to keep my Static IP Database up to date.

    Firefox 1.5 was released recently. I downloaded it this morning to try out before I recommend it to all of my Internet users. In the past there has been an upgrade icon that pops up around the upper right hand corner of the screen. I did not see it, so I assumed they were not really pushing it yet. I downloaded it from the site and was disappointed that three of my extensions were not compatible, so they were disabled.
    While it is a bummer that they were not compatible with the new version, there are some positives.

1. Firefox detected the incompatibility. 
2. Firefox notified me of the problem during install.
3. The incompatibility did not break the install.
4. Firefox automatically disabled them until they are upgraded. 
5. Firefox allows me to check the compatibility in the future.
6. I haven't really used them that much, at least since I finished my HTML course last summer.

    So I was tooling around in Firefox after the upgrade, and I am going, "Ok, what changed?" So I did a google search on some of the new features. Of course they beefed up security, anti-malware, and popup blocking. One that caught my eye was drag and drop tabbed browsing. I am going "What are you talking about?" So I openned up a new tab in Firefox 1.5 and start admiring that new Firefox smell. I click on a link, drag it to the tab bar, and VIOLA! It opens the link in a new tab. WOO HOO! No more right clicking on a link and selecting open in a new tab! This is worth the download and upgrade.
    I can't wait to see what else they included...

    It is amazing that anyone would still be using IE, I guess they just don't know how much time they could be saving.

Hmmm, It has been a while.


    One of the best inventions of all times is the thin client. If you are not using them in your company you are wasting time and resources. The PC is dead man. It is a relic of a recent past without spyware. The IT person does not have time to reimage 150 PCs every night. Even if they did, what would be the point? You might as well as have used thin clients and saved that step.

    The thin client will allow an organization to save a few hundred per unit just in hardware costs, but the real savings is in the administration. Everytime you do not have to go to a site to do upgrades, security patches, and the like is time saved. Now there are those persons that are so religious about having local control at the desktop of everything. I will not get into a religious debate about the ability to use your USB ThumbDrive, but from an administration and pure business standpoint it only makes sense. Politics will always be the driving factor in many of the decisions that are made in a business. Which is to bad, because ultimately what will make or break a company will be how effective they use the time and tools they have at hand.

    Thin Clients, PCs, Servers, and the software that runs on them are all tools that allow a business to operate effectively and efficiently. They are not usually the product of the company, nor are they anywhere near the main focus of the company. So why do so many companies spend so much on the wrong, or to many tools. Is it because they are sexy? faster? flashy? Are we more concerned with status and keeping up with the Jones, or do we need to keep the business running smoothly? The answer to this is of course the economics of the business must always come first. If they don't then the business will decline.

    I am in the process of converting some users from green screen terminals to Linux based Thin Clients. My hope is to record that transition in this Blog. I know I will have some challenges, because this technology is foreign to everybody here. I think it will Ultimately have some success, in fact, we already have.
   

    As I mentioned before we started
fully implementing the thin clients in our customer service department. They
had been using terminals to enter data into the company database, but this will
allow them to interact with modern email, without the security problems.

    The best
way to handle these issues is to find someone excited about change and willing
to give you the benefit of the doubt. If I were to start this process over I
would have forced myself to use the thin client for about two weeks before
handing them off. There was a small learning curve for me also.

     I found
that the simplest problems took some time to fix. For instance, with my thin
clients because I configured them the way I did. I had to create new boot
CD-ROMS to change the screen resolution. We created a new user template, and
then discovered that evolution email broke when we used it. Of course this was
discovered only after the thin client was in use.

     Even though
we have had problems and difficulties, most of the serious ones have been ironed
out. I am looking forward to my next wave of installs where I will utilize a
purchased thin client from Neoware (I think, the demo is still on the way).

     We are way
ahead of the curve on cost savings. In this time we upgraded from OpenOffice
1.1.2 to 2.0.1 and we were able to upgrade all fifteen in about two hours. Try
upgrading fifteen Windows clients from Office 2000 to Office 2003 in that
amount of time. Good Luck, you would be lucky to get 3 upgraded. And to upgrade
another 15 thin clients would have taken about another 15 minutes.

     We are
going to save a bunch on administrative costs. Maybe I will get a chance to
upgrade some of the databases here after all. I may soon have the time to do
it.

   We have finished our thin
client testing, and here are the results...    I
like the reusing aspects of using the PXES CD-ROM boot Linux
distribution. It is based on RedHat, but the database software that
we use requires a bell notification. This works through the PC
speaker and on the older PCs that we have the volume is just not loud
enough. We would like to experiment with adding sound at some time to
the Thin Clients, and I have heard this is possible, but it is really
just a bonus, and not really needed for our work. However the
Terminal Bell is critical in our database application. It notifies
the user of important events, during operation.     The
other drawback of PXES is that it has to many dependencies for Red
Hat ES 4. We are extremely hampered at this point in creating boot
CD-ROM images. The GUI works well, but the configuration takes too
much time to customize. I burned about 15 CD-ROMs one day trying to
get everything correct, and It does work ok, but there are a few
things I would like to change, and they are just too time
consuming.    So what to do?  
 The only course of action that really seemed logical was to
test manufactured thin clients. This setup has proved to be the best
all around. We settled on a Neoware C50 with a Linux OS. The NeoLinux
is based on Red Hat, and the configuration screens are simple to
setup and configure. In about 10 minutes I was able to connect to our
three servers. It was just shy of intuitive for this admin. I will
admit I looked at the documentation to adjust the terminal bell, but
once I got that configured, I was able to Change the pitch, volume,
and duration very easily. It worked out well, and we are ready to
start implementation.     Buy-In has been
great. We are changing out our older green screen terminals and
setting up the customer service with email and some with web access,
in addition to the OpenOffice 2.0.1. Using the KDE desktop on Red Hat
was not the easiest choice, but it was available, and we had the most
experience with it. If I was to start over I would probably use
Kubuntu or Mepis instead. I think they are better new user desktops. 
We are significantly altering the Red Hat desktop to make it less
cluttered and only offer the options that our users actually need.
This is advantageous in that it promotes focus and limits options to
the user. As they become more familiar with the desktop we will add
features. There are two that I am looking at right now Tomboy (a
post-it note style desktop wiki) and Speedcrunch (a scrollable,
keyboard optimized calculator).     Overall I
am pleased with our progress. The learning curve has been steep, and
there are few things to learn yet. Much of the learning curve was
from starting with PXES instead of a manufactured Thin Client. If I
was to make a recommendation to anyone I would tell them to forgo the
PXES experience and go straight to the Manufactured Thin Clients.
This is great if you are using Neoware, and are planning to purchase
thin clients anyway.

    So I was going to try out SpeedCrunch today on my Windows box, and I got busy ordering some new Thin Clients for our Thin Client Project. After it slowed down a bit I saw that TR was advertising some Windows Calculator + (I may try that yet too). I thought this would be a perfect time to try it out and post a review.

So, Here it goes...

    The first thing that I like about SpeedCrunch is it is Open Source. If you don't know what this means then go here. The next obvious plus is that it has a current windows installer (which works flawlessly) and it is also available in various Linux flavors (Although I would probably build it from source). It is also programmed using Qt (pronounced cute). I fell in love with the idealism of Qt when I first began researching it. The idea is to create a toolkit that allows you to write a GUI program for many windowing OS, but I digress.
    So I started using SpeedCrunch, trying out a few moves I learned in High School algebra and trig. I wish I would have had this tool back then (I did have a TI-85, which was great). I quickly found that if I drag 'n' stretch the app hieghtwise I would not have to scroll as much to see what I had previously done. As a bonus the GUI tracks all of the previous calculations and the operators or functions that you performed. This comes in handy for back-tracking any mistakes. Not only does SpeedCrunch have the built in variable pi, there are many built in functions.
    What I found to be the best information was the simple and easy to use documentation on the webpage. Just by learning crtl+f you can pull up as dialog with all of the functions that you might need. Or ctrl+i for pi or the last answer.
    I think that SpeedCrunch provides a much better calculator for this user at least, that is easy to use, fast, and much better than the standard MS Windows calculator.
    Oh, and if you are multi-lingual it comes in English, French, Portugese, and Russian (with a Spanish translation on the way)

Here is the website: http://speedcrunch.digitalfanatics.org/