IT Humor, RAIDing USB Drives, Windows 7 Deployment

No posts for a while, been keeping busy at work, haven't been motivated to come home and spend more time tinkering on my computers after spending 8 hours on my workstation... I guess sometimes even a geek needs a break. In lieu of actually working on my computers, I've been watching a lot of the British sitcom IT Crowd on Netflix, combining British humor with a little esoteric IT humor thrown in.



As I spend more time in my full time position here in our IT Office, not only am I gaining a lot of enterprise-level IT technical experience, I'm also learning a lot of the ins and outs of dealing with our clientele. Its been an eye opening experience to say the least, dealing with all different sorts of characters with different technical competencies. I hope to post more on this subject later, as it has sometimes provided good humor here in the office, as well as some definite frustrations.

I've recently stumbled across a potential need to RAID USB drives for mirroring (RAID 1). My roommate uses an external USB harddrive to store photos taken for her work. Unfortunately, it seems that only after using the drive for a month, it has already bitten the dust (although I still have yet to take a look at it). It occurred to me that a USB RAID array could be very useful, particularly in this situation, but according to Jason Khors of Big Bruin, this can't be done using Windows. Not surprisingly it can be done using Linux, using the LVM (oh what can't you do, Linux?).

But there still may be hope, seeing as my roommate uses OS X (which I've grown to dislike more and more since working with it in an LDAP enterprise environment). Apparently OSX can use external drives for RAID arrays, at least according to this article. Assuming my roommate doesn't mind me hacking away at her MacBook, maybe I can set this up for her, and learn something in the process.

On an unrelated note, here in the office we've gotten our copies of Windows 7 RTM, so we're mired in documents and manuals dealing with Windows 7 deployment tools- WAIK tools, Sysprep, WinPE, imageX, and SCCM just to name a few. While SCCM is a beast in-of-itself, a good resource for general 7 deployment can be found here. We're hoping to start using Windows 7's VHD capabilities for deployment as well.

OSX can't follow symlinks in Samba

Yet another reason Apple offers an inferior product, apparently OS X's Finder cannot follow symlinks in Samba (although Windows and any *nix GUI has no problem). I have yet to test this, but I'm almost positive that using the OS X terminal (essentially bash for BSD), one can follow symlinks, just not through Apple's GUI.

Found this out last night trying to get my roommate/coworker's site up on my server. I ended up just creating a separate Samba share to the symlinked directory.

But hey, OS X is so pretty, who needs it to actually work like any other OS should :-p

X is still dead...

I've emerged the following from the x11 overlay:

media-libs/mesa-9999
x11-libs/libdrm-9999
x11-drivers/xf86-video-intel-9999
x11-base/xorg-server-1.6.2

I enabled tiling (it was manually disabled before, as specified in this
gentoo-wiki article)

X is definitely more stable than before, I am able to log in to gnome and use
as normal, although sooner or later the GPU locks up again and I am just left
with a pointer and no keyboard.

Fortunately, this box's main purpose is as a server (primarily development :-),
so running X is not critical. For now, I am going to sit tight and just make
sure to continually run updates. I am going to wait a bit longer before I
upgrade to 2.6.31, simply because I need the kernel to be stable (beyond r2)
and do not want to sacrifice that just to get X running a bit smoother.

To see a more documented recap of what all I did with X, check out this gentoo bugzilla page

I started a couple of small projects this weekend. The first was getting SAMBA/cifs working again in the new network environment. I couldn't figure out why I couldn't see/access my SAMBA share on my gentoo box: nothing had really changed within the local network, other than a slightly different routing prefix... Why would that matter?

Then I remembered setting up my stateful firewall and documenting it on this very blog. Of course SAMBA isn't working, as I explicitly allow traffic over one particular Class C subnet, and since that change, all traffic is blocked. So after a quick few edits to my firewall configuration script and to smb.conf, I was again all set up.

The other small project was deploying some of the past sites I have completed on my web server, to act as a mini portfolio. I haven't decided whether I want to get the sites up and running as they do/did in production, or if I should just take screenshots. Right now I'm leaning towards screenshots, as I don't want to have to reconstruct each site's respective database and data.

This week I hope to get the chance to play around with Windows 7 a bit more and try and figure out why Gnome is running so slowly on my FreeBSD VM. I also plan on finally updating my Dell C610 laptop from Ubuntu 7.04 Feisty Fawn to 9.04 Jaunty Jackalope. This will mark the 5th release of Ubuntu I have used, as I started with the first release, 4.10 Warty Warthog, back in '04. I should take this opportunity to note that without Ubuntu, I would be nowhere near where I am today in terms of experience with Linux. I've always been a fan of Ubuntu's cheesy credo of "Linux for human beings," as it aims to simplify many of the complexities that are typically associated with Linux. Although I had used a few other distros prior to Ubuntu, namely RedHat, SuSE, and Mandrake, it was not until Ubuntu that I felt comfortable with the Linux kernel and using bash. So thank you Canonical for Ubuntu, and thank you to the Debian team for apt-get!

Lastly, this week, I think I'm going to give OSX on a VM another shot.

X is Dead

Just a quick update:

After being away from my systems for a week because I'm in the process of moving, I set up my workstations in the new house, along with two new toys. I had the opportunity to throw Windows 7 up on a VM, but haven't had much time to play with it. So far, I'm more impressed with Win7 than I was with Vista, in terms of usability, notification handling, and its more enterprise-friendly configuration options.

For the past week I've been working on getting my system back up and running- since upgrading to kernel 2.6.29 and a newer intel driver, X no longer starts correctly- basically everything I've experienced is documented in this gentoo bug report. I now have an intimate understanding on configuring Xorg-server, using masked packages, and installing X11-drivers on gentoo. I'm still struggling to get X to work properly, but so far am still having issues with it starting then freezing. As of right now, I have recompiled x11-drivers as well as followed the steps in this Gentoo how-to.

At work, I've finally been granted some Active Directory privileges, so I'm trying to take a crash course in AD group policy. I have learned basic AD administration, such as user and computer creation, managing organizational units, and user privileges. Right now, I'm working on creating group policy to implement auto logoff and something along the lines of Windows SteadyState. I'm also in the process of configuring Mac OSX to authenticate users using the University's LDAP tree. I've also had the opportunity to toy a bit with SmartDeploy, but have yet to actually start deploying workstations with it.

That's it for now, hopefully I'll be able to post a bit more frequently now that my move is almost complete.