Week End

The Wifi saga had another story to tell. The WEP security did lock out the Orinoco clients. I guess I should have thoroughly checked it out. I got a call Wednesday morning with complaints of not getting access. Not much I can do while at home shaving! So when I got in I had swapped him with the D-Link card. All is well with him now. Next is the far back users… he is using a Linksys card but Windows 98. After switching to WEP, I again failed to follow through and reboot his to test. Now his card doesn’t authenticate until after logging in. So he can’t authenticate with the domain server and map network drives until after the initial logging in. I still need to do some research. So I wanted to improve the signal strength by using a booster. Low and behold… Linksys doesn’t sell the signal booster any longer due to FCC restrictions. The remainder of them were pulled off the retail shelves probably two months ago. The good thing is we have two! Since we ended up hooking up our bridge outside the buildings, both were not needed. This did increase the signal strength indeed by about 25%. Unfortunately it didn’t help the Win98 login issue.

Well with the increase in spam these days, I decided to reevaluate the spamassassin scores. I have dropped the high filter from 8 to 6 and the minimum filter from 5 to 4. Also found some settings to enhance the RBL blacklists. Changing this from 5 to 2 will create a better hit and deny more of them at the door.

More phone troubles. Been getting lots of calls that lag at the start of the conversation and causing the receptionists to hang up on ppl too fast. They are trained to wait longer however now but now we need to figure out what it’s coming from. We have 8 lines and it seems to be happening just on our main line for incoming calls. Learning more about our phone system almost daily now!

Seems to have been a rather slow week in some ways here at work. Got time to answer some backlog in the Gallery forums. This brought my status back up to #8 but not by much; something like a 7 post lead over #9.

Got to meet with both mentors this week for lunch! Even got a call from the men’s mentor ministry leader Wednesday night! It sure is wonderful to have great friends watching out for me. Laying all my troubles out for them on the table seems to help tremendously. Some troubles just can’t be fought alone. Having a group of friends praying for you helps fend off the evil one. On the flip side I find that I am not alone when it comes to the same kinds of struggles. Nothing worse than getting advice from someone who hasn’t been in your shoes before. This new toolbox is going to help me help others.

More Hodge Podge Topics

Not a good start this morning. Didn’t even finish shaving this morning before my computer trouble found me! Kassie had trouble booting up the home PC. We have a Dell 2350 with a 15″ flat panel and a add in NIC and add in graphics card. Sometimes that on-board stuff is just crap! The on-board video couldn’t handle high end colors and resolution even in Windows. The on-board NIC kept freaking out in Linux causing me to restart the network to repair. All that got very tiring. So I looked at the Windows updates manually last night and saw a video driver was available. Installed and reboot… into Linux then and wrote yesterdays post and shutdown for the evening. So this morning as Kassie boots up, Windows sat at a black screen. I remove the driver in safe mode but upon entering normal mode again it reinstalled and instantly brought the PC to a crawl. 10 to 8AM and I just couldn’t wait to fix it. So no games for the kids today. However Linux is running just fine. Kassie hadn’t been in her profile for quite some time now. But I did see she had done some emailings. So this evening maybe I can get to that turtle and rip out the hotfix. If not then I’ll have to just reinstall the other drivers once again to override it.

Today at work… The banner ad cleanup seems to be working fair. Nobody has come complaining to me yet. I have seen a few blank spots on pages where the ad should have been but some of these folks need about a week to figure that something was wrong.

Looks like I’m going to get bumped down to #9 in the Gallery forum. Paour is firing off messages like a mad man! He has just released a major release for the Gallery Remote and of course, the trouble tickets come roaring in. I haven’t been in that arena for a bit. My last glitches were proven to be too much for me to debug with him.

I got on an online chat panel with Linksys this afternoon. Trying to troubleshoot the dang wireless access point. This gal didn’t provide a lick of knowledge on the the topic. All she could offer is restart the AP. Or can you ping it? I ended up changing it to use no WEP and it works. I did find that the authentication method had to be set to “both” as in open and (I assume) shared. Seems setting it to either one of those would not work. In that event of turning off WEP I had to re-enter the new keys and noticed key one was different. I should have known. Some how it was buggered up and that was probably it. But as usual around here… nothing ever goes without something else breaking. The QC dept. PC now connects to the secure AP but not after a reboot. So in attempts to go back to the insecure AP I can not get it to connect there at all now. I wrote a note to leave the PC powered one with it working on the secure network. Another priority job to tackle I guess.

The boss is leaving again tomorrow so I need to sync up his “My Documents”. This proves to be a slow and tedious task. I tried using rsync but then I would need to mount both PC’s and that proved to be another stumbling block. Cant seem to mount the damn XP laptop! I’m sure I had this idea once before, but I don’t recall what part I stumbled on. Transferring via MS Networking between XP and 2000 also proves to be tedious. Seems MS had a patch that screwed up network performance.

I just might not get to the home PC. I have church this evening and then a mens mentoring meeting afterword. That should be odd. Guys can’t do much before the comfort level increases. I have a feeling the place will be packed with guys who want to mentor rather be mentored. Well we all need some level of mentoring… it’s just a matter of pride I guess.

Tieing Up Loose Ends

Some breakthrough with the QC department PC. In my venture to find upgraded software to run this Hummel T500 unit, I found that I needed a dongola for the software. I should have known! A quote for $1,400 software to run this includes the dongola. After finding this the old DOS version we have now works! Too bad the newer DOS version we have still won’t work. So now I wait for a new quote without the dongola. Still want to upgrade if not just to be able to choose a different printer besides the LPT1.

Working on a coworkers aunt’s PC today. Somewhat of a favor. However I’m doing this for her for free since she is a fellow Christian. I do just about anything to help out another member of the Body of Christ. This is the third PC I have brought back into our shop to use their compressed air. So nice not to have to waste the canned stuff. Plus it doesn’t freeze in your hand and it’s more powerful. Still trying to get a little reserve tank for myself.

My Birthday is tomorrow. I’m getting to be a bah humbug about celebrating them. Kassie wants to have friends over but I’m just not feeling up to it. Probably because of this little depression I am going through. I have been here before but for far longer and I don’t want to be this type of person much longer. It seems most of my childhood I was an introvert. When I started college for CAD schooling, I suddenly was this fun extroverted guy! Now over the past year I have slipped back into the hiding place to wallow in my own pity party.

Man I need to get back to helping out in the Gallery forum! Take a few days off and end up getting way behind. Seems I’m about the only one offering any help in the nuke forums. Was just me in the random blocks but I am happy to see Joerg is back! He took about a year off. I guess I should see what damage I can do there today. Looks like I need to upgrade to RC2. Probably should do that but will wait to see what the questions are in regard to first.

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.

What’s New?

Well it’s been a few days since installing MovableType. I’m not much of a blogger, but I like to test out other management systems. I plan to integrate Gallery into this site as well. I guess that is somewhat my primary purpose of this. Sometimes the hardest part of installing these applications are the simplest errors. Probably due to a lack of patience and time spent on trying to figure out what to do. I didn’t really know if there was a problem at all yet but did figure out how to view the main page of this dang thing today! I just had the static files in the wrong place and just needed to tell it where they were going to be from now on.

Keep posted and watch for new developments. Offer any guidance you can offer. Hmm… where is the spellchecker…

Second day of unconfiguring Windows…

This morning started off on the Windows box by running defrag a second time after I left it running last night defragging. Had a bit-o-trouble getting it to go online since the Internet Config Wiz was broke. Seemed to have this kind of trouble with various apps since we came down from Windows ME to 98SE. Finally found one wizard to work from it’s exe and off to the races I went! The bosses son only called me two times today asking how I was doing

Backing up nightly pays off. I had converted another user here at the office from the old Netscape to Mozilla for email. I normally don’t remove the old email app until I know they are happy with Mozilla. Today he accidentally goes into Netscape and proceeds to delete all his Inbox email. Now we run most email from an IMAP server and he doesn’t have a Trash box, it just deletes. Needless to say he waxed them. Fortunately he had read the new ones for the morning and didn’t need them anymore. I keep an rsync copy on my workstation. Every night via cron job, it syncs up and another cron job BRU puts it to my local tape drive. Since he come to me quick enough I only needed to transfer from my rsync copy not the tape. Quick and easy! I thank Scott D for that idea; he does just about the same thing at his office

A little worried that a discussion on the Gallery forum I help moderate was turning sour. Had a user complaining of a “heavy security bug” with the Nuke version of Gallery. Well there isn’t a Nuke version; the standalone just plugs into some CMS web apps. “I do understand your concern Prokurist, but you’re sounding as if this was [is] some commercial software at the mercy of it’s paying customers (copyright). This is the gnu generation (copyleft).” I thought that was kind of a classic response