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.

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.