This is mostly here for notes on things I'm working on, or playing with, if there's a difference. As a Systems Administrator I don't experiment with new hardware much; I tend to conservatively stick with Dell systems, only occasionally custom-building a test system or two. But there are a lot of new experiments in software, particularly with the organization-specific enterprise software that the others may not use. If you're more interested in hardware experimentation, or individual computer experiences, I suggest you check out the Daynotes Gang, and see where it leads. (Daynotes Gang page (c) Bo Leuf.)

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.

1:00 PM Well, that was fun. A pleasant mini-vacation at a new resort in Scottsdale. Fun, relaxing, and no computers. <g> The symptoms are beginning to fade, thanks.

Looks to be another fun week at the office. I've got the items from last week to finish up, and we'll see if our luck is better this week than last. There's also more minor things to take care of, including some Project installs I need to take care of right about now. I'll update more later.

4:00 PM Another day of fun and frivolity. We're ramping up for Internet World (Booth #303) and a major super amazing contest giveaway at said trade show, so next week should be sheer hell. Since my wife and I decided to go ahead and move this weekend instead of waiting 'till the end of the year, it'll be interesting to see if I survive.

But that's not interesting technical stuff. <g>

I see on CNET this story about Tripod paying customers for setting up free web sites. Basically, if you generate at least 100 hits per day, per site, you get $.50 US per 1000 hits. If you generate at least 1000 hits per day, you get $1 per 1000 hits. And I thought the Warez sites were bad. People are going to be using the BYTE column phenomenon at its worst trying to generate more hits. (I'm referring to the way columns are now split across multiple pages to generate more hits and expose you to more advertisements. But it's all in the name of reduced download times, of course.)

Also this week, probably starting tomorrow, I'll be setting up a new multi-line RAS server. That should be an interesting experience. Stay tuned, same bat time, same bat channel, for the further adventures of the overworked sysadmins...

8:00 AM The lists are long, with promises to go longer. Dios Mio, and this is called fun...

Since Tom was too busy writing to work on Daynotes.com (Working? Instead of playing around with web pages? WTF?) I spent some time yesterday playing with some CF scripts one of our developers pointed me at. The two sites (Syroidmanor.com and Daynotes.com) are both active, living in the same iTOOL account, but serving different directories depending on which domain you want. It's not complex; there are two directories, "Syroid" and "Daynotes", that serve as the root directories for the two domains. The CFScript parses the "GET" request to determine which domain the user wants, and redirects the session to the appropriate directory.

Here's the script:

<CFIF #Right(CGI.SERVER_NAME, 15)# IS "syroidmanor.com">
<CFLOCATION URL="/syroid">
<CFELSEIF #Right(CGI.SERVER_NAME, 12)# IS "daynotes.com">
<CFLOCATION URL="/daynotes">
</CFIF>

The script can be expanded for more domains, of course, simply by adding more <CFELSEIF> statements.

There are two problems with the script; one is that the URL bar at the top of the browser shows the folder structure; when you link directly to Daynotes, so that the url appears as "http://www.daynotes.com/daynotes/," but that's pretty minor. The other is that if someone links to Tom's account name URL, the script can't handle the request. Going to have to think about that one.

* * * * * Question; why is it that Windows 98 refuses to print in Simplified Chinese, but NT can do it? Windows 98 doesn't display any errors, but the characters (which are displayed properly on the screen) will not print on our HP 4000N laser printer. Instead, you get a mix of gibberish and Japanese characters. NT, however, prints perfectly with the same document on the same printer.

Probably not a hugely critical problem, but it's annoying.

9:00 AM Solved some of the CFScript problems. The new version is much longer; you can see it here. Basically, if you go to the direct account page (tsyroid.itool.com) you get a plain HTML page asking which of the two pages you need to get to. Click the link, and off you go.

That doesn't solve the URL folder-structure problem, but I'm not worried about that one. I also doubled the entries on the <CFELSEIF> part of the script; before, if you entered "www.daynotes.com" you got an error, because the script couldn't parse that. It's fixed now.

8:00 AM Well, that was fun. We got Tom's site working with both domains AND Front Page. There are a couple of things to consider if you're planning this amazing feat yourself.

• You must be running ColdFusion, of course, for the ColdFusion scripts to work. That's on the server, not the client.
• When you create the Front Page web, it will insist on replacing the index.htm file in the root directory. If you import, it will be the HTML portion of the CF script.
  • This is OK. Let it have it's fun, and let it publish that file. CFM files take precedence over HTML files, so it won't affect the site at all. It wastes 1K or so of space, but on a 30MB account, we can afford it.

* * * * *

And now for something completely different. I started playing with the RAS server yesterday (which means it's now on my desk, rather than under it) and need to continue with that this morning. It's also every Sysadmin's favorite time of the year...

Wait for it...

BUDGET TIME!

Yes, that's right, it's time once again to convince the money people that we REALLY DO NEED new hardware and software, and no, not the bargain stuff, thank you. Yes, we really do need some available capacity for upgrades, and yes, thank you, some new tools would be nice... <seg>