I wanted to add a pair of hard drives to a server. I had the drives, but
I needed a few of Dell's custom mounting trays to use them. My sales
rep sent me a quote for the parts (not available through the website
without a hard drive it seems). The trays would be $10.95 each. There
was another item with on the quote; 8 "SCR,6-32X1/4,FLH,MS,ZPS,CTSK" at
$.05 each. I asked the sales rep about it, and he said they were screws.
I can't believe Dell is going to bother to charge me for 20 cents worth
of screws. Why didn't they just add another buck to the cost of the
drive tray and call it done. Heck, they could charge $20 per tray and I
wouldn't think much of it.
Amusing Tangent 1: The quote came with a from
address "@del.com". I can understand them owning that domain, which they do, it
should be a silent redirect, and it looks quite unprofessional to use it
for email.
Amusing Tangent 2: I placed the order and recieved a confirmation
email a few minutes later. This confirmation showed that I had ordered
2 hard drive carriers, 8 screws, and 5 of my salesrep. I sure hope he
can share with himself as the only space I have for him at work is a
small paper closet.
On one end is a parallel port connection. The other has a an rj45 ethernet jack and a barrel plug connecting to an inline ps2 style connector. Yep, this is indeed a parallel port ethernet adapter. The ps2 plug provides power from the keyboard port to the adapter. A particularly nice touch, is that the red stripe is a rubber belt with notches on it that when spun around the body turns the screws that lock the adapter to the port.
I last used this in college on a Windows ME laptop with a dead pcmcia slot. It wasn't particularly fast, it chewed up the processor, but it provided enough of a network connection to transfer all the data off of the machine. It's a neat device, but considering USB has basically been standard since Pentium IIs, and USB flash disks and ethernet adapters are so cheap, this has been relegated to my shelf of cool old stuff.
Intel (who purchased Xircom in 2001) has a support site (including drivers) up for the product.
The majority of cds that come into my office get ripped to an iso,
stored on the file server, and put into a an ugly cd storage box,
hopefully not to be touched again. Unfortunately, not all of my cds can
be put away, I had nearly 20 cds that I still needed use to for
installation and troubleshooting.
With the Ultimate Boot CD, I
reduced the number of cds on my desk to 6 (that includes 4 OS install
discs). Before customizing it is
simply a collection of free bootable disk images with a menu system to
select between them (note, I recommend that ALL people who work with
computers have this cd). After my additions, it eliminates nearly all of
the cds I used to have to keep around by putting them all on one.
I created the ISO of Disk Director with LC ISO Creator. The
Altiris Deployment Solution created those ISOs. The bios flashers were
made from the boot floppy creators provided by Dell and saved using a Virtual floppy
Drive. After making my changes, I created a new iso with Nero and tested the changes under VMWare.
Note on Making Your Custom Disc Bootable: To make the disc
bootable has different settings under different burning packages. Under
Nero, you need to change a few things in the boot tab of the disc
properties; The image file is in "UBCDdir\boot\loader.bin\". Under the
expert settings; kind of emulation should be set to "no emulation", Load
segment of sectors is "07C0", and number of loaded sectors is 4.
I have been looking for a way to easily (and cheaply) acquire
statistics on users of my lab. I want to know things like; How many
unique users use the lab get each day/week/month/semester? How often does
the average student stay logged in? Do all of our users login in a given
month/semester?
A bit of searching by a coworker found that events were logged to the
primary domain controller's security log with event id 680 whenever
someone attempts to login. He was further able to work out from an export
of the log answers to some of the questions we sought answers to.
My coworker was on vacation last week, and he tasked me with exporting
the logs on Monday; I forgot. So this morning (when I was reminded a week
late (user error put it on the wrong date) by my Palm of the task), I sought a way to make
a scheduled task of it. With the program ELDump, I was able to
construct a command line to perform the export. It was then trivial to
wrap it in a batch file and set it up as a scheduled task.
The batch file: SET TODAY=%DATE%
SET YEAR=%TODAY:~-4%
SET DAY=%TODAY:~-7,-5%
SET MONTH=%TODAY:~-10,-8%
That batch file spits out a csv file that tells the who (what user),
where (from what machine), and when that we care about for each login.
With some appropriate crunching, my coworker can now tell us when the lab
is most used, how many unique people use the lab in a span of time,
what the average number of users per day we see, and answers to other
similar questions. While none of the results were a real surprise to us,
it is nice to know that we can now provide actual numbers to the powers
above and grant submissions.
Each month I receive dozens of magazines (the picture below shows the pile created by one months worth of magazines that arrived in my mailbox), the vast majority of them are free advertising paid for drivel (my predcessor had a thing for free tech rags). I actually pay for and read regularly just four technical magazines.
Windows IT Pro: I first read this magazine in college when it was called Windows NT Magazine (since 1999 it has gone through the names Windows 2000 Magazine and Windows and .NET Magazine before settling on the current name). Previews of new Microsoft software, reviews of all sorts of enterprise software, and indepth how-to articles continue to make this a must read for all Windows administrators.
SysAdmin: A magazine geared toward the professional unix adminstrator (with details for Solaris and Linux most frequently). Each month is obstensibly filled with articles centering around a theme. While the articles don't always relate too closely to the theme, they are always filled with serious technical know how and real world experiences from the authors.
2600: The Hacker Quarterly: Not a magazine that has much immediately applicable knowledge for my job, but one that continues to encourage me to be paranoid and think cynically about businesses and the world.
Computer Power User:
This magazine aims for the gaming, modder, and obsessive tweaker
audiences. While they do focus a good deal on the latest and greatest
videocards and processors, there are plenty of articles on useful
utilities and troubleshooting tips that make it a worthwhile read. If I
weren't interested in the rest of the articles for my non-work life it
probably wouldn't be worth the subscription though.
