Email Me
Most of the events described here take place at my work, a fairly new company called iTOOL.com. We are a rather specialized web-hosting company; iTOOL is the first hosting company that allows you to create, edit, and maintain your web page, email, and server status from your browser, without using any of the more usual HTML editors or the need for FTPing updates to the site.
Anyway, I hope you have as much fun reading the site as I do making it.
Jump to newest update at 10:30 AM Saturday, MST
Required Daynotes Element #11
I got to thinking about it this weekend, and you know - I really don't need another Linux box. I've got a cheap little P200 sitting over here, I'll load RedHat 6.1 on it. Which frees up the other 5GB on this Windows 2000 Professional box. I think I'll make it a dual-boot running W2K Professional and W2K Server. Now, to glance through the disks at my disposal... WTF??, as Tom would say, why are there two? What, pray tell, are the differences between "Server" and "Advanced Server?" Piffle, I say, and a pox on both their houses; my life was complicated enough with managing Workstation and Server, now there's THREE divisions, plus Millenium, if it's ever released. So this week will be an interesting look at IIS 5. I need to do that; someday, after all, iTOOL will most likely run on this platform. I'd better be ready for it when it happens.
I think they're both right. <g>
It seems to me that subsidies have done a marvelous thing. The Internet grew and became a place where new fortunes could be made. Not a place where the "old money" families could expand their wealth and take over new things, although they could do that, too. But a place where entrepreneurs could start with nothing and end up with new fortunes. In history, the times when this happens are very rare, but usually rich times, full of advancement and discovery and adventure. Well, we're seeing that now. We rarely look back at the past ten years; as my history teacher taught, "If it happened in the last fifty years, it's not history, it's current events. Studying the last fifty years as history is like studying your hand with it pressed against your face; you get a very distorted view." He was right, but for once, let's break the rule. Look at how much things have advanced in those ten years. It's amazing. Bob should be happy; in those ten years, it's become possible for any citizen to broadcast his or her views across the globe, and to encrypt it or anonymize it so that governments can't effectively interfere. And this would not have happened if there hadn't been subsidies in place to force growth of the internet and its related technologies.
On the other hand. Bob is also right, in that subsidies have, in the past, rarely helped enough to be worth their cost. Once the government starts taking money away, for any purpose, it is very, very difficult to pry their hands back off of it. Do we really need the subsidies anymore? With cheap satellites, inexpensive launchers, and pizza-sized satellite dishes, there's no real need to string cable across the countryside. One or two years of development could see dramatic improvements; in ten years, cable may seem a laughable way of transmitting information.
But the only way it'll happen is if there's a profit in it for the companies involved, and there's no profit in it if the government is subsidizing cable.
So they're both right. Subsidies have done great things for this industry, and by extension, for those of us that serve or use it. But they've also done a lot of damage to the very innovation and rapid change that made the industry, and were once its greatest strength.
Guys:I read your journals as well as the others in the Daynotes Gang. I am starting my own web page with a journal and would like to copy something off each of you if you don't mind. I would never copy content just some of the style and structure off each of your web pages. Any text would only be used with your permission of course. If you have any problem with me copying something off your web pages please let me know.
I am a physician and do not have the computer expertise that you guys have. My journal will not be about computers as much as it will be about things that happen to me in my daily life. That will of course include computers as I love to play with them. My family and close friends always seem to be interested in what I do during the day so I thought I would write it down and see if anyone other than my family reads it. I don't have the writing talent that all of you seem to have but by doing it hopefully I will get better. My journal will be called "Doc's Progress Notes" and will be at docjim.com. The site is under construction at the present time and there is no content there yet. If you have time in the future please surf by and give me any feedback you care to about the site and journal.
I really enjoy reading you guys and have learned a lot from each of you. Keep up the good work.
Jim Crider (jcrider@tdn.com)
- NNTP Server built in to IIS5 (which is integrated into Windows 2000 Advanced Server)
- Native support for server clustering
- Native support for network card load-balancing
All of which is important to us as a company. Now we just have to wait and see how long it takes for these things to actually work as advertised. <g> And now, I actually get to go home. Good night all.
"NET SEND /USERS The world will end in five minutes, please close Outlook in order to permit an orderly shutdown..."
This worked, but it was a minor annoyance. I had to open a command line window, enter the NET SEND and message, then wait for it to execute, watching for error messages, as it scrolled through all the users and sent each one the message. Annoying, if not critical. So, I fired up my trusty web browser, went to Google, and entered in "net send gui". And right there, halfway down the second page, I found this handy little app called, appropriately enough, "Net Send GUI." http://ic.net/~cierhart/netsend.html to download it and read more information.
Not only that, but the blasted thing went through and, for no apparent reason, changed all the <center> tags to "justified" style tags. Which is not exactly a direct replacement. I could see replacing the deprecated <center> tags to something like CENTER style tags, but not justify tags. Ticks me off. And now it's changed the justify tag for this block of text to center. I'd be laughing if my blood pressure weren't too high.
If you like WYSIWYG editors, HomeSite is better than average, certainly. But I can't really recommend it, because I refuse to use it anymore.
It's possible that it's not actually in Pittsburgh. I see from the listing above the map that the second-to last hop to his server from here is listed as being Pittsburgh, but the last hop has no location listed. But, in any event, this is an incredibly useful tool. Recommended very highly, if you need that sort of thing.
Off to stomp some more brush fires, including Svenson's email problems. Later.
Well, actually, I am. <g>
I started with an email (or series of emails) from Svenson; our system was convinced that he didn't exist. The reason was that our email server, in order to cut down on spam for our customers, does an NS lookup on mail servers as messages come in. We had to change that, though, because not all mail servers are in our DNS server, and sometimes the output from NSI is not as good as we would like. Now, though, the system will check the IP address of the server, as listed in the mail headers, so hopefully this problem will go away.
While we were working on that, I noticed my new monitor doing odd things... similar to what my old one was doing shortly before it left us for that big parts closet in the sky. This is not good. So we started looking for external causes to the problem.
Well, it seems that right opposite my desk, through the wall, is the rack containing the main iTOOL systems. Five Dell PowerEdge 2300 servers, all putting out prodigious amounts of Electromagnetic Radiation. "Aha!" Spoke I. Thus we reach the story of the aluminum foil; large amounts of it, taped to the wall behind my desk, solved the monitor problems. What worries me is that no one asked WHY I was putting aluminum foil on the wall.
Let's see; the snurf guns were one of our VP's ideas to improve morale. I tried to tell her that money is the best means of doing so, but she insisted snurf guns would work, as well. She was right, but I still think I was more right. (For a definition of a snurf gun, see "User Friendly," by Illiad. Shoot, go see it anyway.)
The rest, believe it or not, was just business as usual. I try to have fun here, after all, since I spend so much of my life at this desk, or at least in the building. And as for the rocket-glider; well, I have to keep my hand in the Aerospace field SOMEHOW. <seg>
But now I'm going to go home. Goodnight.
8:00 AM Working this morning on completing two test systems we purchased the parts for yesterday. These are intended to be small, cheap web servers we can try out new software and techniques on; around here, test systems don't last very long, so it's a continuous process to build more.
The base systems are Pentium II 400Mhz, 256 MB of RAM, a 10GB or larger hard drive, and a video board. These two are Intel SE440BX-2 motherboards, (obviously) PII 400s, 256MB of name-brand, quality RAM (at $2.30 per MB - ouch!!) and Maxtor 13.0 GB hard drives. The rest of the systems are bargain-bin specials, which is more than good enough for test machines. Having finally convinced the bosses to let us spend a few dollars more on the test systems, I had the first system completely assembled and running NT4 Server and Service Pack 5 by 6:30 last night. The last batch of test machines, with Freetech mother boards, bargain RAM, and refurbished hard drives, took an average of two days to complete and get running, and most still have serious problems.
The best part of the story is thatI may be finally getting my new system. Probably even get to "roll my own," selecting the components that I feel are the best for my purposes. Fun, huh? And it ain't even my birthday...
Another day for rest, relaxation, and lazing away the day whilst watching everyone solve their own problems and receiving a nice paycheck all the while.
Not.
Although it IS payday, and (thanks Tom!) it'll be a little larger this time around. (For those that haven't been paying attention for the last three weeks, I jokingly told Tom he should tell my boss I needed a raise. He promptly emailed him and asked, nay, demanded a raise for me. This week I finally got one. It can't be a coincidence.)
Today will be spent with a mixture of machine-building, YANTI-ing, and physical labor. It seems hanging whiteboards in every office is part of my job description. I am going to start examining Windows 2000 Server and Exchange 2000; THAT oughta be good for a few laughs. We are in dire need of something along those lines, though, so I think I will be forced to give it a try. Fair's fair; Tom calls on me whenever he has a problem with iTOOL, now I get to call on him when I have a problem with Exchange, right? I think you know the answer. <seg>
My replacement monitor from Samsung should be here today or Monday; I have to hand it to them, there monitors may break a lot, but they apparently have put the practice to good use. Ten minutes after calling, all prepared for a full-fledged foaming-at-the-mouth, knock-down-drag-out fight with the customer service people, I was giving them a credit card number (no, not mine, and no, I won't list it - cheeky monkeys!) to insure shipment of the replacement. No charge unless I don't have the old one on hand when they arrive, which I most certainly will since it's sitting in the doorway of my office. I've avoided a lot of nasty assignments that way.
I am using yet another new HTML editor, recommended to me by Tom; Adobe GoLive, a truly excellent WYSIWYG editor. Normally, I hate WYSIWYGs, but I am going to have to make an exception. I have not yet found anything - ANYTHING - in this program I don't like. When I tell it to show me the source code, it shows me the source code. All of it. Including the nasty FrontPage stuff in client sites. AND I can recognize it! It is recognizable as something resembling HTML! Amazing!
It passes the Jerry Pournelle test for WYSIWYG editors - no pause between a keystroke and the letter appearing on screen - and the image editing capabilities are, as you would expect from Adobe, definitely above average. There are also lots of interesting Site Management tools; a link checker, a spell check that automatically crawls the entire site, and an interesting graphical site mapping tool. It imported my entire site in seconds without any fuss (granted, it's not exactly huge) and it isn't messing with the source code on anything that was already here. There's an embedded CSS, JavaScript, and DHTML editor, with plenty of sample scripts. In fact, my only complaint is that it doesn't handle ColdFusion tags very well; it doesn't know what they are. Since ColdFusion is proprietary from Allaire, I suppose I can understand that, and live with it. Recommended.
And, finally, I see that I have gone a whole week without jumping rashly into a debate on some topic or another. Too busy, I guess. Rest assured, I am as opinionated and stubborn as ever, and after a nice, relaxing weekend, which I expect to get when pigs fly, I'll be ready to jump into the fray. What fray? I don't know yet; if I have to, I can always start one. <g>
In talking with Tom last night, I came up with a quick list of 3 things that any NT sysadmin will really like about Windows 2000 Advanced Server. The list consisted of the following:
- 1. The ability to load software without rebooting - This is key; the joke in the industry, as I'm sure some of you know, is "You've moved the mouse; please reboot to allow the changes to take effect"
- 2. The vastly improved interface from IIS 4 to IIS 5 or IIS 2000 or whatever the hell they're calling it
- 3. The auto-recover features on the NT services. I love that; it ought to cut way down on the pages I get in the middle of the night because the web service isn't running.
They don't make it worth rushing the upgrade to W2K, but they might make it worth doing. The white paper from Microsoft on migrating from NT4 to W2K is incredibly long; we won't be doing THAT upgrade over a weekend.
I do, however, think we'll be putting a backup domain controller on our office network; that BDC will be reformatted with Windows 2000 as soon as it ships, and over time, it'll become the PDC. We're already using our test Windows 2000 server on the network to serve internal newsgroups and an intranet, and unless we run into major problems with that or with Exchange, I think the PDC will be upgraded, as well. But I forsee interesting times ahead with this network and with the iTOOL system in general; we're going to have to upgrade if we want to stay with NT, because SQL 7.5 is going to be Windows 2000 dependent, according to my spies. Interesting times, indeed.
And now it's time to spend the rest of the weekend with my family. Have a good weekend, everybody. WE're off to Home Depot and the bookstore.
| Professional info | Favorite sites | How to reach me | Current projects | Personal info |
| Personal activities | Daily maunderings |
Copyright 1999 Matt Beland. All rights reserved. Guaranteed 100% Free-Range Electrons.