Home Pages of Matt Beland

8:00 AM Well, that was an interesting weekend. Several new posts, including the conclusion of the nuclear power argument. If you missed it, the week starts Thursday with a report of Internet World. Go here.

I posted a commentary on growing up as a member of the so-called "Lost Generation" on Saturday, down at the bottom of the day's updates. I posted it because I saw yet another new story on the "lost youth" of Generation X, how foolish and stupid we all are. And this morning I found this response in my Inbox, from Dave Farquhar:

Hi Matt,
Don't worry, I'm in the same generational boat as you are. And I'm surrounded by two Win98 boxes (one dual-booting Linux) and typing this on a Win95 box (which also dual-boots Linux), and somehow people still talk to me.
I read your Saturday bit on growing up, and it definitely hit home. I went through college in the public eye, publishing almost every little tidbit in the student rag, and did a lot of stupid things for the same reasons, as it turns out. I don't worry about the generation to come very much, because I recognize myself in them too. I think the biggest problem is that previous generations don't necessarily recognize *themselves* in them yet.
And as for FUD, yes, there's tons of it in the media. That's why I majored in journalism, got fed up with having my accurate stories turned into FUD by editors, finished the degree, and took a job as a systems administrator. That desire for risks is why I'd now rather be a book author than a systems administrator.
Thanks for helping me understand myself and my generation better.
Dave Farquhar
http://www.access2k1.net/users/farquhar

Gee, and all because I got annoyed by the news media. I'd suggest that maybe I should do so more often, except that I don't think my blood pressure or my wife could stand my being exposed to more media coverage of anything...

Yes, Tom, I know the Vikings lost. Apparently they've had their good seasons, now they're back to business as usual. <sigh> Sometimes it just don't pay to be a fan of the hometown team... then again, the Cardinals are nothing to be excited about, either, although they at least won yesterday.

And on with the business of the week at hand. There're some annoying problems in the mail server to be fixed, and then it's time for Round 3 of the Budget Decisions. Hopefully, that'll end the discussions for a while and I can get some real work done.

More later. Have a happy, wonderful, productive... oh, wait... it's Monday. Never mind. Survive, that's all I can ask. <g>

11:30 AM Fun, fun, and more fun. I hate Mondays.

Letter from Brian Bilbrey on my reference to the "end of the nuclear debate":

Yeah, riiiiiiiight. <g>
Do you remember Heinlein's "Blowups Happen" (I think that was the title, early in the Expanded Universe collection book). Some debates don't end. But Clarke thinks that cold fusion will save the day, until quantum energy sources displace all else. Who knows - When my g'father was born, they didn't have cars yet... what are we going to see in the next 100 years?
have a lovely (survivable) monday
regards,
Brian

Yeah, I remember Blowups Happen. Fun story, wasn't it? Personally, I've always reserved judgment on the whole Cold Fusion thing. On the face of it, it doesn't make sense, but there's too many questions - like, why are so many prominent scientists starting to hedge their bets on the whole thing?

And it wouldn't be the first time the entire scientific community condemned something as wrong only to have the whole thing blow up in their face. As for the quantum energy thing, I think he's skipping over a few minor details in there, but what the hell - he could be right. Having read his initial prediction from 1950-whatever, I'm certainly not willing to bet he's wrong. <g>

Due to an exchange of email with Tom Syroid, I finally got around to reinstalling PGP again. There've been some changes made since the last time I played with the program, but everything's at least recognizable. One new thing it's doing, though, is logging all network activity; that might be of interest to Shawn and the other members of the Gang that've been talking about securing their boxes.

Oh, and my public key, if anyone's interested, is here.

Tuesday

9:00 AM Well, I survived Monday. That may not seem like a lot, but consider the alternative. <g>

Budget day. After weeks of fiddling and arguing and checking prices, today I get to go throw myself to lions... er, I mean, present the budget to the bosses. Here's hoping they don't notice the company car...

Spent much of yesterday playing with PGP and sending "secrets" to Tom. I'd tell you what we talked about, but then I'd have to kill you, of course, come on, I had to take the line. You would. We did discover that although PGP in general is extremely well behaved in its interactions with Outlook 2000, there is a problem if you are using Word as your email editor. You see, the option buttons don't show up in Word, so you can't select to encrypt or sign. And, another neat little trick, any time I replied to Tom, whether his message to me was encrypted or not, Outlook would automatically encrypt the message.

So if you're using PGP and Outlook, make sure you aren't using Word as your editor.

Wednesday

9:00 AM Well, I'd just like to say that yesterday's budget meetings went very, very well, and we're getting everything we need.

Pity it didn't happen that way, but I'd like to say it anyhow. <g>

Actually, things did go pretty well. We're probably going to get most of what we really, really need; we added enough fluff to be able to do some judicious trading. I was quite surprised by one item the big bosses asked me to ADD, and seem serious about; frame relay T-1 lines to my home and the home of my immediate superior. No, they weren't kidding. Of course, there's an ulterior motive; by doing that, they could still claim 24-hour monitoring without having to hire as many sysadmins. But hey, I don't care; it's a T-1 to my house. I'll take it. <seg> I bet THAT'd make Tom stop talking about how wonderful his cable modem is...

Speaking of Tom, was anyone else reminded of the Oregon Ghost from "Fallen Angels" while reading his post this morning? He certainly seemed to be enjoying himself with that little dialog he had going... Anyway, the book was written by Jerry Pournelle, Larry Niven, and Steve Barnes, I believe, and the Oregon Ghost was a character that you never met, he simply communicated through a computer network, apparently text-based, similar to IRC. His statements were always a running dialog between himself (the "Prime Self") and an imp named "Alter" (presumably for "Alter Ego.") In his case, though, the dialogs usually ended with Alter screaming something like "No! No! Not the Spell! Not the Spell! Aaaagh!" and then the command <LOGOFF>. Highly amusing. And an excellent book. I'm sure Jerry could manage to point you to it on Amazon.

And we're still getting responses from our latest budget suggestion. Someone complained about how expensive the Dell workstations we've been buying are; so we suggested an alternative. Taped up an ad from this week's paper for one of those Mattel Barbie computers. Oh, hey, Tom, if you need that for Danielle, I can mail it to you... <g> Our other "helpful suggestion" is a Digital Decision Maker for our CFO. It's a coin-sized piece of metal, painted red on both sides. We gave it to him with the instructions that he's to flip it when he needs to make a decision; Red means No, Green means Yes. Unfortunately, he's been using it on our budget. Piffle. <g>

Well, on with the wars. Have a good day, all.

11:30 AM Just a quick update to post a picture of the iTOOL booth at Internet World. No, I'm not in the picture; I'm actually behind the camera. This was less than five minutes after the opening of the show, and already the noise level inside the show was incredible.

2:30 PM John D. Vogt tells me the character from "Fallen Angels" was a real person:

Matt;
Actually the "Oregon Ghost" was an actual person. He was an SF reviewer in one of the pulps in the '70s and '80s (In Amazing or Analog? Your mind goes after forty. <seg>) Anywho; almost all of the characters in "Fallen Angels" were copied after people active in FANDOM at the time.
I think references to this are made in Niven's "Playgrounds of the Mind" or its follow-up.
I enjoy reading you guys, and occasionally; chiming in myself. Keep up the good work!
John D. Vogt
jaydonalds@aol.com

Now that you mention it, I actually recall reading a few things by him in Analog, back in my misspent youth. I think it was Analog. I don't remember; I think your estimate of when the mind starts failing is off by 20 years. <g>

5:00 PM I've had a Tom-style day today. Many and varied were the plays on WTF?? that I uttered today. But hey; it's almost over. And I have to agree with Tom on this one - Dr. Keyboard's column for today really did help. I too, had the Daynoter's Syndrome, although a milder case; I may have forgotten to eat lunch, but there's always Fig Newtons and Runts. <g>

And whilst taking a small break (or is that brake?) from solving the world's - or at least iTOOL's - problems, I glanced through the headlines on CNN and found what has to be the best headline I've seen in a long time. I didn't read the story; I don't care about the story. The headline was quite enough. Here it is:

Anti-Milosevic protesters beaten by men with sticks

It's a horrible tale, I'm sure. Atrocities, deaths, general maiming and mayhem. But it's still a good headline.

Thursday Happy Birthday, Honey...

8:30 AM This is going to be a long, long, day. <g>

Starting off with a question from John Doucette:

Ok Matt, I know what Fig Newtons are but what the heck are Runts? I don't even try to figure out what Dr. Keyboard is talking about when he goes on about food as I have never visited the UK. But I thought since we live on the same continent, and eat mostly the same foods in Canada and the US that Runts are either a local name for a common treat or some local variety of treat.
John jhdoucette@home.com

"Runts" is not a local name; it's the brand name of a candy. I forget who makes them; it's the company that uses the Willy Wonka brand name. Runts are basically pure sugar, molded into hard fruit-flavored shells that are shaped like the fruit they taste like. Perfect for sysadmins for whom caffeine is no longer enough. <g> It's possible that they're not sold in Canada; I for one wouldn't argue with classifying them as a narcotic. They certainly are addictive.

And now, on with the important stuff.

My day began with the receipt of two copies of a new "Meliisa-like" virus. If you receive an email from someone you know with the subject "Check This", message body "Check out these links. Bye." and the attachment "links.vbs," delete it immediately and teach your friend about not opening attachments that are Visual Basic scripts. So I get to spend my day repairing problems and monitoring the mail server.

12:00 PM The morning's been filled with deploying (finally) Norton AntiVirus. The afternoon will be filled with more of the same. But this afternooon should go smoothly, helped with the knowledge that I have learned this morning.

Complication number 1: It seems that the products of Network Associates and the products of Symantec get along about as well as the two companies do. A few of the machines in the office had copies of NetShield installed, you see, and those same machines mysteriously failed the installation process. Odd. Very odd. Especially when every other machine in the job definition completed successfully in no time.

Investigation revealed that when NetShield and NAV are installed on the same machine, they do battle and, sadly, no one wins. Both programs start, both appear in the task bar, and roughly 15 seconds later, the machine locks up tighter than a bank vault. After much wailing and knashing of teeth, I managed to kill the services remotely through SMS. Victory? Nope. The machine still locked up.

But I did manage to reset the startup configurations on NetShield so that the services wouldn't run. Ten minutes and a reboot later, I wiped the last vestiges of NetShield from the machine, and was finally able to install Norton as originally intended. From now on, I'm checking machines as I go.

I have to say, though, I really like this product. It's called Norton AntiVirus Solution, and it contains every single AntiVirus product that Symantec makes. AntiVirus for Server, Workstation, NetWare, OS/2, Routers, even Windows 3.11. And it all runs off my machine using the SMS protocol, though not, thankfully, the MS provided SMS clients. I can set up my own LiveUpdate Server, push the location out to all the clients, and now we need one monthly LiveUpdate rather than dozens. Definitely a good product for any company bigger than 5 or 6 people.

After reading Brian's thoughts on writing a Daynotes Site, I found myself thinking about it as well. Heck, I even paused for lunch, I was thinking so hard. (Thanks Brian!) I'm a full-time sysadmin in an underfunded, undermanned, completely overworked IT department for a kick-ass web hosting company. I have a wife, working on a family, and I'm in a position with a lot of respect and responsibility at a time when most of my high-school classmates are still swilling beer at Frat parties or working in low-pay entry level positions. And yet I decide to start a website, get drawn in with a bunch of professional writers and computer consultants, and spend time I honestly don't have writing a daily column for a site where I don't get paid, have no prospects of being paid, and would be shocked and surprised if someone suggested I might.

Talk about over my head.

I've probably got the lowest stats of any member of the group; well, as the newest member, that's to be expected. The numbers are growing, and like Brian said, you are the ones I have to thank for it. Thanks also to my fellow Daynoters for linking to my site, encouraging me, and giving me so much feedback. This is the fourth week I've been doing this, and I can honestly say it's been a lot of work, but it's been worth it. I've met a lot of new people, by email at least, and learned some interesting things. I've learned what it's like to feel the pressure of a deadline, if a self-imposed one, while not having anything to say.

I recently got an email from someone who asked to remain anonymous. This person asked if I was still having fun. Well, having been asked, and having thought a lot about it, I can answer that - I am. And that is all thanks to you.

Have a good day; I'm off to vanquish more viruses.

Friday

10:30 AM Oof. What a morning.

Finishing the Anti-Virus install this morning, although events seem to be conspiring against me on that score. For some inexplicable reason, the network-based control system won't push AntiVirus onto the Windows 95/98 machines on our network. There aren't many, but there are still a few, and it would be annoyign to have to go around and manually install on each one. That, however, is what I had resigned myself to do; after all, those machines need the anti-virus software, too, and if I can't do it throught the network...

The only thing was, I was griping about it to my partner in crime, Dave, and he mentioned that the software stated it COULD install to 95/98 machines over the network. I checked the manual, and he's right; it states that it does, without any additional software installed. I should have thought of it; SMS is installed on EVERY MS machine, whether it's NT or not.

So far, I don't have a reason for this oddity. It's only the Windows 95/98 boxes that are having problems; the Alpha server loaded like a champ, every version of Workstation and Server is working perfectly. It's only the Windows 95/98 boxes that are causing problems.

2:00 PM Got it. I think.

The problem is that our network is not a simple one. We have a switched 100BaseT network with backbones of 1000BaseT to the router. My machine, like the rest of the IT machines, is located on one of the backbone segments. Makes downloading patches and updates REAL nice. <g>

The problem, though, is that NetBEUI doesn't work well on these switches. It's a broadcast protocol, intended for use on hubs and peer-to-peer lans. On a switched network, like ours, the machines can't broadcast to each other, and NetBEUI breaks down. The solution, according to our poor excuse for a network administrator, is to use NetBEUI over TCP/IP. That works - sort of - by encapsulating the NetBEUI information inside TCP/IP packets and sending them through the broadcast IP address. That way, every machine sees the packets and can respond the same way. The problem with that is that it's a major security hole - go to Shields Up and find out - and no two MS operating systems implement this the same way. So although it's good enough to allow Windows 95/98 machines to browse the network and share directories, it's not good enough to allow SMS to operate through it. Which, in fact, is probably a good thing, considering the security risk it poses.

The real solution is to do a series of software upgrades and reprogramming on the switches. They're good equipment, Cisco brand, but we haven't had time to do it, and as I mentioned, our Netowrk Admin doesn't see it as a problem. Perhaps a few whacks from a two-by-four will change his mind.

Later.

3:30 PM Uh-Oh. Now we got a problem. It's 3:30 on Friday afternoon. The SysAdmin is bored. But he can't leave. He's got fresh CDs of Windows 2000 Professional (RC2) and of Redhat 6.1.

Time to rebuild machines!

Actually, one machine... I've got a PII 400 with an 8 GB hard drive just sitting here, languishing away since my last series of tortures... er.. experiments with RedHat 6.0. It's a shame to waste this whole machine on RedHat 6.1, when it's not really my main machine... and never will be, as long as iTOOL requires ASP and IIS. So... why not split it? 4 GB is PLENTY. Let's give 'er a go...

More details as the situation warrants...

4:00 PM Sigh. The Win2K install's not enough. It's just not enough. The installs so danged SIMPLE. So I'm also editing the site in Allaire's Homesite Editor. It looks all right, I'm okay with it. I dunno if it's good enough to replace AceExpert, though. We'll have to try it and see. So far I like it well enough.

I spoke too soon on the nice, simple Windows 2000 install. Either the hard drive - a 10 GB drive, not an 8 - is bad, or the Win2K installer is not good at determining the status of drives. Since RedHat has been running on this machine for three months without a problem, I somehow doubt it's the hard drive. But you never know. MicroSoft COULD be right. It might happen. And ice cream cones could fall out of the sky.

5:30 PM Well, I got it running, and I must say I'm impressed; I've never gotten all of the hardware in this system to work at the same time, but it all works now. No extra driver disks needed. It was all in the base configuration. Windows and Office 2000 are both loaded in less than two hours, and that's with futzing around with the hard drive configuration. I'll play with this OS for a while, and I'll install RH 6.1 next week, but overall I'm very impressed. Granted, there's no sound card in the system, and I haven't actually DONE anything with it yet (other than turn off those damned fading menu bars) but so far, all's well. And now, I'm going home. Good night, all.

Saturday

Today was gobbled up by my ISP losing the ability to see outside their network, a company picnic (with a Moon Bounce! Oh Joy!) and a late-night DVD party with peach daquiries. Half a can of sliced peaches in heavy syrup, coconut rum, ice, and peach schnapps in a blender. Delicious.

Sunday

6:00 PM Piffle. Network connection's still down, I'm stomping a few brushfires AT WORK, curse it all, and the Vikings lost again. I see they're now back in the cellar, last place in their division. Old home week. Maybe I'll just go to bed early, and see it tomorrow's better. Again I say, Piffle.