"One of the great uses of Twitter and Facebook will be to prove at the Last Day that prayerlessness was not from lack of time." John Piper

With that quote, I'm announcing I'm signing off of Facebook, Google+ and Twitter in 24 hours. I will not be back. No offense to any of you but I find it's value to be highly over-rated. Best wishes to all of you. Look for me off The Grid in the realm of the living.

Faber est suae quisque fortunae

My son Nick

Even though I don't update this blog anymore, I thought I'd drop a link to my son's Trails-End Cub Scout Popcorn sale. He is making some silly videos to increase the fun quotient.

ALTools

My new favorite tool that has made me happy.Our Senior Programmer kept complaining that his AD account was continuing to be locked out even though he wasn't entering it in incorrectly past the limit. After pulling my own hair out looking for the offending computer in AD, I downloaded ALTools and had my problem solved in two minutes. I selected the DC, pulled up the saved search for locked accounts and ran the query. Oh, look Mr. Senior Programmer. What's that other machine doing there that's perpetually logged in with your account?
-PC

New Toys

I received two new Juniper SRX240s to replace our venerable Netscreen 50s. We ran them to the very end but ultimately, support for ScreenOS is ending and we wanted to move with the tide. I'll update everyone (currently a flock of albatross in New Zealand) on how my progress is going. I'm pretty sure my game plan will be.
1. Re-route all traffic out through our Irvine site, freeing up our Valley connection.
2. Learn JUNOS
3. Setup basic connectivity. I'll be assisted by my new best friend.
4. Setup VPN tunnels. We are using site to site at several home offices as well as the Netscreen & NCP IPSec client.
5. Attempt to integrate our Websense installation (I never checked if this was a compatible feature like it was with ScreenOS, whoops)
6. Repeat process in Irvine

Wish me luck.
-PC

Symantec Tech. Support Purgatory

So I never intended this site to be a Symantec bashing site(That's for you, my visitor from Ireland's Symantec site), it's just I use Backup Exec so frequently that I find myself calling and interacting with Tech. Support on a regular basis. On Friday, I called in to ask why I couldn't backup my Domino 6.5 on my newly upgraded version of Backup Exec 2010. After 40 minutes of listening to music and never receiving any notification that I would be here indefinitely, I hung up to place myself back in the queue thinking I 'd been transferred to the tech support equivalent of Mongolia. After an additional hour of waiting to the same thing, and really needing to go to the bathroom at this point, I was finally connected to Paresh my Symantec Engineer. Apparently it wasn't Mongolia but India I was transferred to. After about 10 minutes, he explained to me the Domino 6.5 isn't supported by BE 2010. Now I've lost all my backup policies and settings and must rebuild from scratch my backup server. I hate Backup Exec!
-PC

T-3 line

So wouldn't you know it....as soon as I implement our new DS3 circuit, we get a hardware fault on one of the new Cisco 3845 routers. Darn thing just kept rebooting. We figured it out when the president of the company called us to inform us that mail was down. Figures! Cisco came through for us though. A quick call to TAC and the replacement part was shipped, installed and we were back on-line. I had to run the following command on the refurbished board they sent out (erase nvram:), but after that all was groovy.
-PC

Backup Exec with Domino

This has the been the bane of my existence since I first started working here all those many years ago. Hyperbole aside, this is not a mature product. I'm not sure if it's the Domino install, since I'm pretty much locked out of any Domino administration, or if it's the general suckyness of Symantec's product but it's been a nonstop hassle for about 3 years now. I would be lucky to have 100% of my jobs completed on a daily basis to say nothing about an entire week. Now I can keep jobs running without crashing the Backup Exec Agent on my Windows boxes and it just required a little hackery. I still need to massage the installation on a regular basis, but it no longer consumes me with great abandon. Here is what I did. It's really simple but since I haven't seen it documented anywhere on the web I give you.....
1. Create batch file and save it to c:\bin or whatever.
netstop "BackupExecAgentAccelerator"
del "c:\program files\symantec\Backup Exec\RAWS\logs\*.lbd"
del "c:\program files\symantec\Backup Exec\RAWS\logs\*.ucj"
net start "BackupExecAgentAccelerator"
2. Schedule batch file to run via Scheduled Tasks at whatever time is convenient for you once per day.

Problem solved.
-PC