If I only had the time!?

Not much on IT today.  Mostly been fighting with the power grid.  Where I work, we have many large horsepower motors and we can get a cut in our utility rates if those pumps are off when the power grid hits it's peak for the day.  Yesterday, we really needed to run and found out that our Diesel Generator wouldn't run.  Why wouldn't it run?  Because the folks in Maintenance weren't doing the test runs on it.  If they had they would have discovered that it wasn't functioning correctly and we could have got it fixed during "off peak" times.  Instead, here we are watching the power grind and gambling on whether or not to shut down.  It's always a dice roll. 

Gotta go for now.  The diesel repair guys is here!

I had a pretty bad experience yesterday.  My linux mail server was going nuts and it looked like it was trying to relay.  I had done everything I knew of to lock it down and it still looked not good.  I massed the troops and we began to investigate the source of our problem.  From watching the logs it looked like it was coming from within my own network.  Great I think.  I git a bot somewhere.  Turns out, we didn't have a bot so much as an Exchange server that was relaying by default.  I have two mail servers, one internal and one external.  The linux is external and the internal (Exchange) sits on my private LAN.  Now about a month ago, my hard drive crashed on the linux server.  Well, exchange will handle all the mail, so I configured my routers to forward all the mail through to the Exchange server and we were back up and running.  Now I got the Linux server fixed and back up, but forgot one very important thing.  To remove the forwarding to the Exchange server.  Now, here is a little secret.  If a piecve of mail hits an Exchange server and there is no user listed on the Exchange server, it turns it right around and sends it back out.  So, if you were like me and forgot to change the routing back like it should be, Exchange can become a very willing spam center for an industrious spammer.  I don't think I like that default operation of Exchange.  Anyway, we got the routers reconfigured and we were back up and running like we were supposed to be.  Learned my lesson there I did.

Well, I've done it this time.? Trying to configure a new client front end for a data server.? I was in the process of setting up client security and permissions.? When you first start the app it automatically enters under a guest account.? I was trying to configure these settings to restrict them to nothing but being able to log in.? I thought that I was doing pretty good until I logged out and tried to log back in.? Seems I set them too low and now have locked myself out.? Bad programmer.? Oh well, the tech support guys are working on it.? Hopefully they can come up with something; soon I hope!? Till later!