Upgrade Hell

July 30, 2008 at 6:11 pm (Rants, Work)

There is a white board in my cubicle upon which I keep a list of major projects that need doing; one of those items on the list is “Upgrade Websense” with a little sad face drawn next to it. The reason for this designation is that it is an upgrade that just never goes well. Ever. It always results in several long phone calls to San Diego where they are almost as mystified as I am.

You would not think this would be so difficult; I always dutifully print out the upgrade instructions and follow them to the letter, making certain that the event viewer is not open and that the Enterprise Manager is not running. The install manages to stop all the services properly, the file copy goes well and then bang! An Error:128 appears and I know I’m done; stick a fork in me, it’s time to call tech support.

Websense tech support is variable; sometimes you get someone phenomenal, and sometimes you get a dud. The tech I got was okay, but you would think the error messages I was kicking out would have been enough to go on, or documented somewhere. Instead he had me trying all kinds of things like reinstalling the old version and then upgrading to an incremental build, etc.  My gut tells me that the root of the evil is a config.xml file that has been through too many upgrades and ip address changes.

I suppose I could just do a clean install of the latest version, but the problem with that plan is that I would lose all the policies I have created along with my massive white list. When asked if it was possible to send them my config.xml file and have them convert it, they told me that they don’t do that; the only time they will convert a config file is if a customer migrates from Windows to Linux (this is very tempting since I have always felt that having “workhorse” services running on Windoze is a really dumb idea).

Anyway, after hours of being glued to the phone, the tech asked me if I had a spare server laying around so that I could set up a secondary policy server and migrate the xml file to it. The idea was that the secondary server would do the conversion, I could update the original and plunk the converted config file back in. I have been down that road before and got licensing issues and other mayhem, so I decided that for all the support money we pay those nice folks each year they could do it for me.

A couple of hours later the updated config file arrived and it worked fairly well after a bit of search-and-replace; all that pain for an .xml file that’s been around the block a few too many times!

I still wish I had gone with Linux.

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Confession

July 25, 2008 at 2:30 pm (Life, Rants)

I hate my teapot. So why the confession? Because I always wanted a leCreuset teapot, and now that I have one I absolutely detest it.

Anyone who is a cookware aficionado knows that le Creuset is considered pretty good stuff, and it’s fairly expensive. So you can imagine how happy I was to get one from my daughter for Christmas. She had seen me ogling the red whistler in Different Drummer’s Kitchen, tucked it into the back of her head, and bought it for me last year. It promptly took up residence on my stove where it looked just beautiful.

Its beauty was really only skin deep, however; the leCreuset has turned out to be the most unhandy teapot on the face of the earth. For one thing, after heating the water you must pour excruciatingly slowly into the cup or the water will sputter all over you when it hits the hot sides of the teapot. The fill lid is very snug and a nuisance to remove; you must leverage your palm on the handle and pull the lid straight up with your index and middle finger. Any attempt to simply grasp the knob on the lid and pull will result in bashed knuckles. And the handle is extremely stiff, requiring a lot of force to fold it to the side for filling.

I’m going to keep the teapot until I find something more functional.  Maybe I’ll find something I like better right before Christmas.

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Pea Season

July 16, 2008 at 6:55 am (Life)

The month of July is a nice time to be a gardener because most of the real heavy work is done, but there is still some anticipation of things to come. The first flush of roses has come and gone, but the dahlia blossoms are fat little buds of promise waiting for the heat of summer. The asiatic lilies liberally sprinkled throughout the garden are displaying their gigantic waxy blooms, and vegetables are starting to arrive signaling the start of what must surely be the origin of “salad days”.  (I can’t take credit for the vegetable bounty; that is the sole domain of the Professor who has two small vegetable gardens which keep us supplied all summer.)

July is also a good month to take stock of how well things are working (or not working) in the garden.  My first notes about things that need to be changed are made this month, scribbled in my gardening notebook for later reference.  One of my worst gardening habits is that I always plant things too closely together, so by July it’s quite apparent what things need to be moved.  It’s also a good time to take notes about what things just aren’t doing well and make a decision about whether or not the plant should be moved or deaccessioned.

My garden is constantly undergoing this kind of editing, and an awful lot of the time it’s due to some force I have no control over.  For example, my neighbor removed a very large oak tree from his front yard last fall which completely changed the sunlight patterns on the west side of my yard, necessitating the move of several plants which could not tolerate this sudden onslaught of sunlight.  Conversely, I now have areas of shade in my yard that I didn’t have during the preceding three years because of the massive worm damage which partially defoliated several of my trees.

It’s always something in the garden world; I like to call this “hobby security”.

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Summer School

July 4, 2008 at 7:34 am (Rants, Work)

Whenever someone finds out I work for a school district they invariably ask me if I have the summer off; people just naturally think that anyone who works in a school has a nice long lazy summer. But anyone who has darkened the door of a school building in July or August will find out that it is abuzz with activity.

While most people are kicking back and enjoying the slower pace, school techs are in a frenzy of upgrading, deploying and planning for the year ahead. If you are lucky enough to work for a district that is not undergoing some sort of construction project, life is good.  If you are like me, and working through the fourth year of a 92 million dollar construction project, life can get pretty crazy. Nothing adds interest to a network administrator’s job quite like asbestos abatement in your primary data facility. Or having a backhoe slice through the main fiber feed that services every building in the district…that’s fun. And there’s nothing like checking your email in the evening to discover that an entire data rack (the one housing the phone system) has lost power because an electrician hit the wrong breaker before leaving for the night. During construction every day is an adventure.

Compared to the corporate sector I suppose we are pretty lucky to get such a big chunk of time to work our magic. The down side to this, of course, is that the staff always returns in the fall refreshed and full of demands, while the tech staff has just emerged from eight weeks of exhausting work. If we seem little cranky try to remember that not everyone gets the summer off.

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