"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

In Memoriam

I haven't posted anything in months. Today felt like the proper time to get back in. Never forget and make them pay!
-PC

rogue cables

So awhile back I started this mini project that turned into a beast of a project. For some reason the company, before I was hired, terminated all of the data cabling into this APC four post rack. Two 48 port panels in the front and two in the back. I was then asked to bring all of these connections up as live to the core switch that was mounted in the same rack. Needless to say this made for some interesting cable management.

Fast forward to my mini-project where I bought an APC 2 post rack with appropriate cable management troughs. My goal was to move all of the cables from the 4 to the 2. The only problem was the cables were too short to re-terminate them in the 2 post. Introduce a 110 block mounted in the ceiling as a middle man and you can rightly say, WTH was I thinking.

My problem is this. Halfway through this little project, I'm informed that our sales and accounting staff are moving to our new corporate office. Most likely we will give up this office space when the lease is due this summer. Having never experienced this phenomenon I don't know what to do with the abandoned cable. Assuming the building mgmt. re-leases the space, I'm pretty sure I want to rip out the cables to the offices in question. I don't want by accident one of those connections being plugged into our core switch. Or am I over thinking it.
-PC

Rocketry Camping Trip

        Our camping trip to Lucerne Lake was not as bad as I thought it was going to be.  The launch event put on by the ROC was outstanding.  The boys got to launch their little Estes kits with the A and B motors we provided and then starting getting some Cs from the concession trailer.  The Discovery Channel's TimeWarp program was there filming a water rocket demo, a really frigging big model rocket (2 story) with I believe a M rocket motor and then a recreation of a famous V2 rocket explosion where the rocket tips over and explodes.  I'll update with some video we took as soon as I get it.  Some of our boys got on some b-roll footage for the show, so I'll have to check out the show in April to see if they made it on.
        The water rockets we made for launch on the next were not as big of a hit.  Can't blame them after the big boom and very testosterone pumping spectacle the day before.  We got some 2-liter bottles to launch 150'.  This was our first attempt at rocketry with this troop so we were pretty pleased with the results.
        Weather was great.  Saturday was a clear day without a cloud in the sky.  Sunday was a nice day as well with no rain clouds in the sky.  It was cold, don't get me wrong.  It dropped down in the high 20s but it was manageable for all except our newest scouts.  Pain is a great teacher however and I'm sure they will come to the next campout more prepared.  We decided to skip out Sunday night to beat the snow.  It turns out we made the right decision because they closed the 15 due to snow for awhile.
-PC

Camping

So I love to camp.  I go every chance I can get and it usually is with the boy scout troop my sons are a part of.  That being said, the campout this weekend that we are doing will probably rank as my least favorite of all time.  I'm hearing talk that the storm about to hit So. California will be the biggest we've had all year.  Wet, muddy and a long drive to boot.  Bring it on.
-PC

PS. The only saving grace to this event, aside from the quality time with my boys...yeah right, will be rockets, rockets and more rockets.
-PC

Inland Empire office

So, the new So. Calif office that we integrated into our network last summer that I last blogged about in September is finally moving.  We are racking the server in a 4' Dell rack and removing the Enterasys C2G124-24 switch (total overkill) from their office and replacing it with a Enterasys D2G124-12 switch.  This is Enterasys' workgroup switch which will be fine for this downsized office (5 people).  It's also friggin quiet.  I've got it right next to me and I don't hear a thing.  The only negative that I have is the power supply is external so I've got this fairly large supply that I'll have to find a home in the rack somewhere.  Maybe the rack mount kit for the switch will have something for it.  
We are also supplying a rackmount APC UPS that has been hanging around the storeroom since we replaced it with our mongo 5 hour battery backup.  The C2G switch that is currently there will be moved back to our Orange County office and made part of the stack.
-PC

VNC

I've been using UltraVNC for awhile now to remote control my machines.  It's fast, easy to install and I like the added security of using my windows usernames for authentication.  I went to install the new version (1.0.5) however and was pretty disappointed.  It wouldn't save my password or my ms logon groups and wouldn't let me close down the admin properties if I hit cancel.  I'm not sure what the problem is but I'm going to install a older version I know works for the time being.
-PC

Backup Exec and Domino Agent

OK, so here it the update from Symantec regarding my issue with backing up a domino agent.  Just for review, on a couple domino machines out of about 10 I would experience my domino agent crashing,  My Domino admin console would give out a c:\program files\symantec\backup exec\raws\belnapi.exe <2224/ox8B0> error about every minute and all backup jobs (obviously) would cease.  I have to reboot my machine (not just restart service) to every get the domino agent to even think about functioning as planned.  Anyway, the Symantec engineer has basically said......don't run your domino backup jobs through a policy-based job.  You must run a non-policy based job to get the functionality that I want.  So now I have to rebuild all of my jobs (for all 10 servers). I hate Backup Exec.
-PC

WSUS clients not reporting status 0x80190194

Had a bear of a time with WSUS.  I noticed that my machines were no longer reporting back to the server with any kind of status.  I uninstalled, reinstalled to no avail.  My windows update log was giving me a http://server/selfupdate/wuident.cab: error 0x80190194 which lead me to The WSUS Support Team Blog.  Their article here summed up the problem nicely, but I still don't know what happened to break it in the first place.
-PC

WTH

Another in my series of mind-blowing musicians that make me wet my pants.
-PC




This is going to be a day of music apparantly. From my friend Mike, I give you the 12 days of christmas

blogroll

My new favorite blog.  Chock full of good stuff for your humble network administrator. This one is going on the blogroll and my rss reader.
-PC

Cisco devices authenticated back to AD

So for awhile now I've known that I need to setup up authentication for command line access for our routers and switches.  I hadn't bothered because, 1. We are a smallish shop, 2. I can easily memorize a 24 digit hexadecimal password, 3. I'm lazy.  I finally got around to it and used this article by David Davis to help me out quite a bit.  When you used this crib sheet however, you never were able to get to privileged mode with your supplied credentials.  I then found this article that layed it out nicely.  
-PC

Basic IOS commands

David Davis has covered most of the basics but I would add the "do" command under config mode.  My most basic use of this command is "do sh run" while I'm inside an interface.
-PC

security policies

One of my major frustrations has been the implementation of meaningful security policies at my work.  I am in the unenviable position of having not enough pull in the company to own/implement a restrictive policy and my boss, a couple years from retirement, I don't think sees the need to write down everything.  I guess he figures we are a small enough operation that policy can be made up on the spot and communicated verbally.  This doesn't help me however when I'm trying to be pro-active in locking down the network and have nothing to measure against.  Frustrating.
-PC