Stranger Here

Yes it has been weighing on me that I have not posted is a long while. Thoughts of even giving it up came to mind. I think it is the thought of needing to fill in the gap in a huge effort to catch up. That is just not going to happen tho.

I have been trying to get a raise the past couple months. Seems I may have met my challenge in proving my worthiness. Also just that thought of having to prove myself may not be the point and that my boss may have a different idea of what I am worth to him. IMHO, he doesn’t reward based on your efforts but by your loyalty and social status. May be a sad mis-diagnosis of a fellow Christian… I know. However I will not stand down without a stiff answer. Seems as if business has kept us from meeting since my initial inquiry. That and the lack of courage and preparedness. So I suck!

I’m hoping that we will once and forever lose Made2Manage. The latest stunt is a stiff price for doing our customization. Somewhere about $67k and the kicker is the no liability warranty sticker to go with it! For just a bit more… $87k we can go with a much better IMO, ERP package called Abas. This includes our training, customization, setup, installation, and product. This is a German company and has thoroughly impressed me. Problem is I found this company without much effort. This may be bad based on the lack of research into other companies. My search was narrowed by Linux requirements tho. The next bet was an OpenSource project, but I just didn’t want to back it. If I had a team of supporters here in the office it would be different.

Serving at the church has been picking up too! I am now a “Small Group Connector” who finds a group for individuals looking for Community Groups or Men’s Breakfast/Mentoring groups and such. I also have been helping out with a ToolBox project with the church website. Won’t be helping too much with this as they insist on using Microsoft products. So they are mostly interested in my direction I guess. The other thing is I have been meeting with two mentors quite regularly. Doing some workgroup type studies including some memory verse practice. I also have been helping out with Wednesday evening 4th grader classes. Tonight I have them by myself as the main teacher is out of town. I’m hopping next year I will have my own class. I like the 4th grade too. Not interested in moving up with my class. Still seeking an answer from the Lord on what to do about helping out with Summer Camp next month. It is looking more and more in favor tho!

I have been working on my old hard drive once again. I had been playing with some new partitioning tools from various CDs and ended up using the old standby fdisk for Linux. The trouble had been creating the same partitioning scheme I had written down at the time it was working. I have since figured out how to do this but also figured out a more damaging concept that may be the last straw… c/h/s. Cylinder/Heads/Sectors geometry. Seems I even documented this in the working stage before I doused it. What I wrote down was not the manufacture geometry shown on this drive. So I assume the geometry was changed about three times in the midst of all this. Testing on the documented and recommended geometries didn’t work. What doesn’t work is that I can’t mount the drive. It won’t recognize the system file type. This has not been formatted since either so there may be some extra levels I just don’t comprehend about it needing it. IMO that would be the last straw… in a sense wiping the drive.

This week I have tightened the noose on the spammers. I have been building a blacklisted.rules file that is now up to about 200 IPs and networks that have been blacklisted. With the rampant viruses and spyware out, this is a difficult task. Mutation through the networks seems to be never ending.

MAC Mystery

Yes the possessed IBM PC is back. I’m working on it’s replacement as I type. It continues to freeze up on boot up. Never fails that after fixing this some other problem occurs. This time it was a network issue. The MAC address security between the two access points seemed to be missing this IBM’s MAC address. Which was fine by me I guess because it wasn’t supposed to work in the first place! I first thought that this NIC had some how changed it’s address. I have seen this happen before but only by one character… this was the complete address. Anyway adding the MAC to the second AP did the trick. I need to check for updates on their firmware I guess. That goes for my other wireless network as well. I had trouble with enabling the encryption on that. It still runs open!

On the M2M front… my coworker and I have been waiting for the right time to ask the boss about the upcoming conference in Las Vegas this June. Interestingly enough today the boss forwarded the email about the conference to both of us. I think this might be some type of praise! Yesterday ADS called the boss trying to win us back I suppose. Not sure what he said, but the boss transferred him to me. The impression I got was that he and my boss have “made arrangements” to talk with each other at a later date. So I’m not too sure why he needed to talk with me. I didn’t offer any information as to our dropping them. Seems they only pay attention to us when there’s money to be had anyway. I sure hope that dance is over!

It seems one of our Mormon coworkers is now leaving this week. I am happy for them but sad they (he and his family) are leaving. I had taped some informative Mormon beliefs videos for him some time ago. They are rather new to their faith and passionate about God. I have concluded they have no idea what they are getting into and had to step forward. They didn’t have much to loose if they were to step away from them. No family ties or works involvement yet. So when he broke the news to me yesterday, I pleaded with him to watch the videos. I had lent him my flight stick and a couple old PC games. I told him he could have them under the condition they would watch the videos. That reminds me… I was thinking in bed last night that I should pick up the book “Purpose Driven Life” for them before the week is over. Another condition for them to read it after watching the videos. You never know who God may put in your path, but I’m getting the hint that you’ve got to work fast these days before the opportunity passes. We had two Jehovah Witness gals come to work here and I don’t think I said enough if not at all about His Word. I did a little with one, but her interests didn’t bring out any questions. She was the stronger of the two if that means anything.

Went out for dinner with the family and some friends. They bought dinner. Didn’t want them to. They have financial struggles as we do. Was nice of them to do so. Got lots of cards and the wife and kids got me a nice T-shirt. My folks send my money and my mom’s old coat she didn’t like any more. I needed one. It smells nice like my mom! It’ll take a while to get used to the color. I don’t think I own anything yellow. Waited up watching TV just in case the folks called. I guess I slipped by them for a change. Then again I hope it wasn’t pay back time. It seems that I have forgotten a time or two birthdays. I really need to get an automated reminder scheduler going. I think my uncle got his going because two of his sons emailed me. Today my cousin Brad from the Navy wished me a happy birthday. That was nice. Wish I could have gotten to know him better as a kid. He was born about 10 years late for the group. Of course they moved often and made it hard to keep up. He’s a good kid. I wish him the best out there on the boat.

Well it seems I can’t get the dang firmware upgraded on the AP’s. The screen spins into infinity and refreshing the front screen shows the old version still. Been working on Symantecs AMS service. I had taken a stab at this some time ago to no avail. Seems it may be once again. Did make some progress however. So now to deliver the PC to Building B tomorrow.

A Weeks Worth

What a busy week! Just now got a chance to begin posting this weeks goings on. On Monday I got the call to fix the CNC shop server. Coincidentally the power supply was discovered dead the same day Bresnan was to come in and install their Internet service. Luckily I already had a power supply from a clone of the same PC I had refurbished last year. Plus I grabbed some RAM for this. Although it only recognized half of it’s capacity, I installed 256 to get 128 out of it. Oh well… it won’t be in service too long. It only had 32MB previously, so still much farther ahead. Bresnan was amazed at what they’d have to do to get their service into the building. Being so tall and on the opposite side of it’s destination. They ended up doing what I had suggested even! Crossing the ally two times and enter through the phone conduit. They got it running and we’re happy with the speeds so far!

Tuesday through Thursday I spent troubleshooting the AS400 connection going to our second “Building B”. They manufacture shipping containers there for exporting. So they have one node over there to our main office. Coincidentally when they have trouble we have trouble with our packing slip printer. The beauty of serial networked connections. I think it’s called twin-ax? So I spent most of my time building a PC from old parts to connect the modern way. Last summer I installed a wireless connection between the buildings using two access points with boosters mounted inside PVC boxes outside both buildings. Started with putting Windows 2000 on this PII 300MHz box using a Dell by proxy. You see we only had it on a restore CD so… well we won’t get into that here okay. Anyway… plopping the HD back into the destination box and booting up, it freezes during boot up. So I figured there must have been some difference with the HD parameters between the two boxes. I then put it back into the Dell and installed Windows 98 but this time putting in in the Dell just for speed. Again back in the other box it freezes but only after some new devices are installed. I discovered something was corrupting the registery. This was fixed by removing some of the Windows updates and skipping the loading of the registry. I get into Windows and reinstall the updates. This seems to smooth out the flawed registry! You would think it was smooth sailing after this, but then I get keyboard problems. Switching keyboards doesn’t help. Some combination of removing the keyboard and booting, failing, rebooting with keyboard does the trick. BTW this is an old IBM tower. Okay so once in the Building B more troubles including boot failures, bad monitor and tight network security. Geez Louise! Needless to say I am working on a different, hopefully not so possessed PC for them. For the time being they are running.

On and off through the week I have had to attempt getting another PC for our QC dept. It has been ready for them for weeks but was just waiting for the chance for them to accept it. They have been too busy to let me set it up that is. Two troubles cropped up here. Wireless network and COM1 problems with some ancient DOS application. As of yesterday I have gotten the COM port working but now have software problems… possibly OS incompatibility. I need to call to find out and then maybe just upgrade! For now I have two wireless networks for him to choose from: one is secure and the other is open but farther away. Yeah yeah… it’s open! Working on it! So the secure AP is closer but seems that every time this exterior door opens I loose connection. Strange but also I’m not getting DHCP to move through either. Seems to be working fine for the mentioned IBM box in the Building B warehouse. For the time being it’s just using the farther but open AP.

Made2Manage sent their customization consultant Wednesday and Thursday. I feel it was a good visit. However my co heart data analyst seems to be showing truer colors now. I am suspecting she is contributing to some failure in the process of our migration. At times the boss wants to just fork out the money to get this show rolling but she consistently steps in and makes show stopping issues and then blames it on money. Next would be the training issues. These ppl have been trained over 2 and a half years ago and have had a bad experience during this training due to technical difficulties. I had a ton of training a couple summers ago and a lot has changed to that point even. My experience was rather smooth. Problem is we have some flunkies that can’t handle being in a class scenario where you have to pay attention and try to lean something new. We also have such a flexible system now that they don’t want to tie themselves down to one way of doing things. There is a pride issue at play too. Our way is the only way! What does it hurt to see how others in the industry are doing things? Then of course nobody wants to be doing it the M2M way because it’s their way and not any one way. Our ppl don’t want to learn with some bogus test company. They want to train with our own part numbers. Waah Waah! A bunch of whining basket cases. I say model with the damn test company data, learn what works and doesn’t, customize and then maybe model again with our data. It’s all very time consuming and may require hiring a consultant to model with, but we’d be moving forward. We’re into something like our third year migrating!

Tonight will be a fun one! Our babysitter finally called last night to agree to watch the kids this evening. We were wondering if she was avoiding us. Anyway our community group will be rehearsing for this weekends sermons at church. One of the pastors asked if we would do a skit for all four services. It’s probably only for the first few minutes of the services. I chose to take care of the kids early on so not to worry about what to do with them. I wanted Kassie to do the skit because she used to do this stuff in high school drama class/club. She needed to get more involved in the group anyway. She has taken care of the kids too many other times like this. Then after the rehearsal we head to our normal biweekly community group meeting. Our community group has a passion for serving. So many of us do little things for the church and community, I feel that the church picks on us to be examples. This is our second group we have joined. The first was with an older group but we were there because our mentors were apprenticing with them. They moved to Laurel and thus giving up leading a group so we needed to get with a group more of our age and with kids. We are still a bit younger than most and so are our kids but we are getting some younger. We have sort of a love/hate feeling about our group too. We hate making preparations to go but love the fact that we did go. I keep thinking it’ll get better but I really should expect it to get worse. You see Satan attacks you most when he sees that you are getting out of his grasp. How’s that for making sense? I have to share one quote from someone I chat with often. He has a major lacking of moral values and he was getting upset with me for my lack of political involvement. He wrote “I encourage you to get involved with me in politics… because I think it has more of an impact on people than a church visit every Sunday.” You draw your own conclusion. I chose to ignore what he said. At that moment I couldn’t respond while my blood pressure was cooking. The truth of the matter is that what he says may have an immediate point but my purpose is not for my future life but goes much further than that. I choose to do the things in my temporary life for eternities sake not just the here and now.

I had a nice surprise yesterday. One of my mentors called for lunch unplanned. I just so happened to be available. This week was so busy that I hadn’t had time to eat much but to work during the chow. I let him know about how I was feeling down from the previous Thursday morning with my accountability partners news. I was happy to hear that I wasn’t far off key for feeling this way. He too thought it was not a very cool thing. I’m so happy that he is always honest with giving it to me straight. I informed him about how God has been so good to us over the past couple months. Not that he never is… it’s just that we have grown to put such faith in God and he has shown faith in us.

The Dueling ISPs

Just as I was leaving to head home last night I get a call from Bresnan trying to set up a time to schedule our install for Internet connection at our CNC shop downtown. Not knowing the time he agreed to call back first thing in the morning. With the cold temps the past weeks our CNC shop has been having great difficulty with their wireless connection with USA Digital. Being very close to the tower on the rims across from the Conoco refinery posed a problem during the winter months. The steam and vapors coming out of Conoco has been so thick the connection would fail to the Internet. So I thought I’d call Bresnan to find out about business service thinking they aren’t ATT@Home any longer, why would they restrict their service still? They actually have great service plans! At any rate, I also called our current provider OneEighty to hear their offer. They have DSL for cheaper but slower as well. It would take a bit longer to provide the install also. They would also take over our normal lines making it cheaper in the long run. I needed to call Bresnan back to cancel the installation. A while later Bresnan calls back with the deal of a lifetime proving that cost was my issue. They offered twice the speed for the lower cost and dropped the installation fee! Ooh that reminds me I need to inform OneEighty too now.

Just got off the phone wthi M2M. We’re going to do a WebEx session today! Lets pray this does the job.

So I guess the second strain of this latest virus is out: mydoom.b. Not sure I have seen this yet unless my system thinks it’s the A strain still. I had to turn off notification of the virus to it’s destination. Strange it took my coworkers this long to start asking questions about all these virus notices. So now only I get the notifications. I cheer when I see a virus by a different name tho

After 2 hours and 45 minutes on the phone with M2M at $165 per hour, we got the SQL2SQL update done! Turns out it was some drab technique ADS used to install our Made2Manage system. They assured me it wasn’t something I did. So I’m glad to have this behind me and we are now progressing without ADS.

Gallery Target

You may already know but I’m a Gallery forum support moderator. I’m ranked about #8 these days for top posters. I have been helping another fellow Christian brother out with his PostNuke Gallery. Seems he can’t upload pictures. Even this one is lacking words for me to figure. Although I straightened him out on several path issues, it still has not changed. So last ditch effort is to re-install I guess. Waiting for the results now. Sounds like he is going to try this. I like that kind of attitude! Some cringe at having to dismantle their Gallery. He has nothing to loose anyway… no pictures to speak of that is.

Opened my M2M case again! Last night proved some good and some no news bad news. Well after failing for the umpteenth time to 5.5, I went back to 5.02 SP5. But this time I got the previous errors ironed out! So that’s the good news. So now we have a consultant coming in a couple weeks to evaluate our data for possible customization. We want M2M to do our customizations… besides it’s nice to have them praise the possibilities. For my problems, we will have to either fly someone in to fix our server or they could do a WebEx session for $165 per hour! Hmm… ~$3k to fly them in or spend <$1k possibly? Plus we’d have to wait for a convenient time for them to come. It’s only been -14 degrees this morning with -30 degrees windchill!! I think the webex will do.

Virus Haven

It started yesterday… got a few new viruses called Worm.SCO.A by our ClamAV email scanner. Of course I couldn’t find any info by that name. Looked at Symantecs latest info on new viri and W32.Novarg.A@mm looked most promising. They rated it a category 4 out of 5 being the highest. Seems this one is a call to all zombies to attack www.sco.com. They are notorious for attacking Linux companies claiming ownership of Unix code. So I have spent part of the day looking for email statistical applications to start tracking some of this type of activity. Seems that this has been the heaviest hitting email I’ve ever seen.

M2M has closed my case last night. This doesn’t make me happy since every single problem listed still exists. Sometimes I feel they need to try desperately to close cases by a certain amount of time. They haven’t spent any time on this case of mine because any time spent on it was by my calling them because I was tired of waiting on them to call back on my mission critical issues. After meeting a lot of their staff when I went to Indianapolis last spring, I had a better appreciation for them. Now that they seem to have forgotten what we look like they tend to fall back into their routine of sell sell sell instead of fix fix fix.

Surprisingly a lot of spam containing links to their sites for unsubscribe instructions actually work! Some seem to host about a thousand different companies so you end up seeing the same screen but I think they are legit for each company. I definitely don’t use the ones who only accept unsubscribes via email only. For one I wouldn’t want to take the time forging the address. Was a little surprised to see one site today that sends back a email for confirmation. So my next thing will be to create a blacklist I think I mentioned yesterday with helping Scott out with. Man! Speaking of Scott… he still hasn’t added a virus scanner to his system. Just trusts the stripping of attachment types to do the work. So now with this sco virus he has to temporarily strip zip files even. Those are fairly acceptable files used to compress file or files contained for delivery on floppy or email. Pretty soon he’ll just have to strip all attachments because just about anything can contain virus these days. Hmm… if I were devious I’d have to create some virus that could be transmitted via jpg. The jpg would even be viewable, just that the header would contain some type of virus. They have already proven that cryptographic data could be stored in them.

Well it turns out that ADS IFE reinstall uninstall didn’t do the trick. So back to opening up that case!

Quick update

I’m not going to do too much filling in from the past posts in the archives. I’ll just try elaborating when detail is lacking.

Today I wrestle once again with our M2M sistem upgrade from 5.02 SP5 to 5.5. I keep getting into trouble with the SQL2SQL conversion. Talking with M2M again today didn’t make me much happier. But they did spark a thought about the data I restored from previous restores. I had restored data prior to removing ADS’s IFE package which is what we are trying to get away from. So after that I had to once again go back to square one. Amazing how only 2 ppl can hold up the show between testing this thing out!

Other topics I have been working on are to flesh out the denied logs of ads in the squid-cache server. Tired of scrolling through those denies. So I think I need to make a firewall table for that. Also been researching some viruses that have been hitting pretty heavy. They must be new enough that they are not searchable yet on Google. Also was helping Scott out with his MailScanner to try getting rid of some pesky spam that doesn’t get detected on his system. Both my servers are detecting them but it’s not high enough to trash them. I need to get a tighter hold on trashing the same daily ones I get.

We had Gaven dedicate to the Lord this weekend! Prayed lots that he wouldn’t cry or do is normal tantrum up on the stage. He slept through the whole thing! I need to make a mp3 tract of all the kids’ dedications to email or post on the website. Cristina was gracious to watch Adea and Garidy while Kassie and I could go out to dinner for a date night. We took Gaven of course. He was not a happy little guy. I ran to Shop-Ko to get a pacifier and that didn’t work. Kassie fed him and changed him… that didn’t work. So by the time the food came we had them box it up and we left. :/ Don’t remember the last time we went out for a date. We will have to try again some time after Gaven is a bit older. We need to rekindle our marriage!

Indianapolis or bust!

Hello from Indianapolis! Will be here for four days at a Made2Manage conference. M2M for short. This is a business software that my work is currently migrating to. My first time east of North Dakota! Making lots of contacts… not too many Linux users here, but did find a couple. One who has used Linux and one who does use it daily on SuSe. M2M is not Linux friendly… very much a follower of the Microsoft movement. One of the sessions I was in asked the crowd if they would rather see them follow Microsoft’s API or not. Most would like them to, I didn’t comment. I don’t like to see independent companies such as M2M follow the coat-tails of another golopogus. Nothing wrong with that if the golopogus would listen to others and not force their new ideas down your throat. I mean that because you have no right nor ability to change their API. End of discussion there.

So here at the Marriott Hotel down town Indy., they have a LAN access in the Business Center; it is connected to many of these Golden Tree connection box. Seems to be for hotel networks. Don’t have time to find out what it does exactly, but it does start your browsing with a GO screen then their Hotel web site. From then on you can go to other sites. I haven’t had too much of a problem connecting my Linux laptop from work on it. I can’t seem to get mail from my IMAP server at work, but can get mail from my IMAPS accounts. It may be the iptables setting I suppose but doubtful. Note: A week late but got it posted anyway…

Got Patience?

Already missing a few days of blogging! Lots of stuff these past couple days… where to begin?

Tuesday I installed the bosses computer at his mansion. Had some trouble connecting to our existing AS/400 server from his house. Sound Wave installed the wiring and Linksys DSL/Cable router for their AT&T cable connection. I suspect there must be some firewalling blocking this IBM telnet client at some point. Will be going back again soon to finish tucking the web of wires into a cabinet.

Created a Red Hat Install server at my home. Using NFS I got my athlon box a new installation. Planning to migrate my existing RH 7.2 out soon. The installation was very smooth! Very fast! Opposed to using CD’s… it was much faster. After setting up the partition scheme and packages, it only took 8:05 minutes!

Taylered three new Dell workstations simultaneously yesterday in the conference room. Was much smoother than the bosses did. But I guess learning the correct sequence of installing Made2Manage helped. Been trying to troubleshoot installing it on an existing workstation of our programmer/analyst’s. It seems to be giving me the same fit as when I installed the bosses last week. May be related to having msSQL installed previously on the same box. Now M2M wants me to reinstall the SQL server on that workstation and point M2M back to itself to see if it helps. Ball is back in my court I guess.

Today in my adventure to test a M2M install on an existing M2M box, I chose my own Windows partition. Before I was to do this I wanted to clean Windows up of it’s needless programs. I need to mention here that I get side-tracked very easy. I decided to trim Windows from 14GB to oh lets say… 5GB. Using Partition Magic, I shrink Windows and attempt to pass the excess to my /home partition. A total of 6 operations to complete this. I always hold my breath while doing this. Well I must have took a breath… it locked up on the third operation. After a reboot with the Partition Magic disk, I get a big ‘ol yellow block with an error #110 or something like that :-[ So now I have been trying to salvage at least my /home partition.

Another success day finally!

Out of the woods! Had lots of troubles installing our Made2Manage software to the bosses new Dell last Friday. After verifying that I did not hose the SQL server service pack or other, I tested a new install at another workstation flawlessly. After that I tried some restore feature in XP but that didn’t bring me any success. So out came the Partition Magic disk and I axed the NTFS partition leaving the factory 30MB Dell util partition. Booting with the XP install CD and I was on the way back to success. I actually did more in one day from scratch than from a head-start with Dell’s pre-installed OS/CRAP!

Sadly the only Linux items I really got to do today was grepping our web server logs for a Taiwanese. Hey I found them! Dumped it to a file and sent it to one of our sales guys. Oh and I guess I took a two minute stab at my migrating web/email server’s email server. What?! Yeah, I had been trying to get Postfix going but seemed to be spinning my wheels and since I know Sendmail better, I switched it back to the default Sendmail. Got a little traction, but still have some bugs to work out with relaying.