11:00 AM Good morning, evening, afternoon, whatever. Hope everyone's doing well...

The new projects and excitement I alluded to last week is coming along, and will hopefully officially "start" RSN. As soon as they do, I'll fill you all in, but right now they're not official - and no one wants to tempt fate, right? Right. Wish me luck, anyway. <G>

Other than hush-hush top secret stuff, there isn't a whole lot going on. But I'm told the "Deep Thoughts" must continue from last week, so I guess I've got to think of something. Hmm. Let's see... who's pissed me off lately... no, no, can't talk about that... hmmm. Well, maybe later. Too much work to be done.

Almost forgot - a question for all of you. I'm investigating some colocation centers for a friend of mine; never having done serious remote administration through a colocation center, I thought I'd ask if anyone out there has strong opinions on the matter. Not about which colocation center to use - that's already settled, and there's plenty of information about it. I mean about the tools and procedures you've used to get the job done. PCAnywhere? Cybex KeyView? What about backup solutions? Don't talk to me about ssh; this is (for various reasons) going to be an NT server, probably more than one. Suggestions?

Today was devoured by archiving duties, boring meetings, and lack of caffeine.

9:30 AM Yeah, I knew you wouldn't buy the "lack of caffeine" bit. Like that would ever happen. The rest was true, though. Any spare moments when I WASN'T chasing shadows, rebuilding a workstation on a crash priority, or in a meeting, my machine was occupied archiving data by burning cds. Such is life. I was frequently tempted to take the BOFH route - reroute /dev/tape/ to /dev/null/ - but I resisted. Besides, the boss was watching.

Registered a couple of domain names last night; rearviewmirror.org for me and hiddenstar.net for Keri. Those links probably won't work just yet, and even if they do, right now they both point right here; but they're registered. Used Joker to register them, too - and you know what, I really liked that service. Not just because it was $12 per year per domain; the control panel and interface were easy to use and well defined, and the service was fast. Twenty minutes after registering the domains, whois lookups to COCE were returning the proper answers. It will take a few days for the root servers to catch up, but hey, for $12, I won't complain.

I can already hear the question. (Literally - someone here noticed the domain up on my screen and asked it) "Why rearviewmirror.org?" Because sidemirror.com was taken. <SEG> No, of course that's not the case. The reason for the domain is that one of my two favorite sayings is "Happiness is Earth in the rear view mirror." The other is "Here's your paycheck," but I digress. Anyway, I ran through a long list of possibilities, and that's the best one that came up. There are a few others I might be grabbing, though, so we'll see what happens.

Those secret projects I mentioned are proceeding nicely; hopefully I'll be able to make a few announcements in a week or two. Until then - and likely for a while after - updates will continue to be brief.

8:30 It appears that the URLs are now working - rearviewmirror.org and hiddenstar.net. Send me an email it they don't work; I'd like to start using those domains for email and other things.

I spent most of yesterday playing with NAMED, OpenMail, Sendmail, and Apache. My little server box at home can manage all of that without a problem, although that would, of course, be a violation of my service contract with Cox cable. So I won't. But it's nice to know I could. <G>. I like OpenMail a little better than I like Sendmail, although that's really just a matter of prejudice. I'm an Exchange geek, so I like a product like OpenMail more than I like the minimalist approach of Sendmail.

OpenMail WAS more difficult to set up than I'd expected, however, but not because of anything HP did. No, I think it's much more likely that it was my fault. <G> See, this isn't the first time I'd played around with Sendmail, and there were still some scattered fragments here and there on the machine. OpenMail is very specific, though; it wants Sendmail 8.9.3, and nothing else, it seems, will do. I had installed the latest Sendmail - 8.10.1 - and OpenMail just didn't like it. I'm not entirely happy about that, since 8.10.x contains some serious improvements to the anti-spam tools, but I guess I can live with it. OpenMail contains some security settings, and once I figure them out I should be fine.

Why would I want to mess with all that when I'm a senior admin at an internet company? Why don't I just use the corporate servers, since they're at my disposal anyway?

Heck, that wouldn't be any fun.

So anyway, that's the big news of the day; the new domains appear to be working (I can hit them from work and home, anyway, so that's a good sign) and we'll shortly get them pointed to the right spots. First order of business was just to get them working.

Later.

2:00 PM A pox on all their houses, especially the really expensive ones...

Microsoft did it to me again. I was rebuilding the conference room (and boy are my arms tired! No, wait, that's something else) and the machine in there - a Dell Optiplex G1 - was upgraded to Windows 2000.

First, the network didn't work. Beta drivers from 3Com fixed that; they're releasing dribbles from EtherDisk 5.2 as they develop them.

Then, Office installed, but wouldn't run. It seems that when I told the tech who did the installation (color me important!) to make sure he got all the critical updates for Windows 2000, that included SR-1 and so forth. Offic ewouldn't run without being registered. Office couldn't be registered because the installation media was from the MSDN kit, and is subject to the same problems as the media review copies. So it didn't work. Took a full uninstall of Office and a reinstall before it worked properly. Piffle.

And then I went home. To my trusty home network. With the trusty Linux gateway server. Ahh. Solid, reliable, performance.

What's "Kernel Panic" mean?

Yes, I know what it means. It means there's another problem to deal with. Sigh. After about an hour and a half of mucking with that one, I discovered that OpenMail libraries were still roaming free on the drive. I got most of them, but somewhere there was something - calling itself OpenMail - and I just couldn't get rid of it. So I got out my trusty Linux Mandrake 7.0 cd and had at it; and now, after about an hour of work, it's ALMOST back where I want it. Piffle indeed.

I did learn something interesting - Tom, pay attention. The documentation I use - here - makes use of a route command to add a host for Windows clients on DHCP. Well, as it happens, the DCHPD file in the /etc/rc.d/init.d/ directory contains this command as well, commented out. So if you uncomment that, you don't need to put the command into the rc.local file, and in general it just works better.

Finally, one more useful tidbit I stumbled over; Reactor-Core. This is a free Linux/Unix server for the use of all who have something controversial or unusual to do or say. As the home page says, "This site is dedicated to the notion that if you give ordinary people the right tools, they can do extraordinary things." No censorship, no sponsorship, no exploitation, no rules. How refreshing.