arsedout.net/idogg

SMTP notification configured to be sent from Backup Exec for Windows Servers, requiring authentication to the SMTP server, fails to be sent:

http://seer.entsupport.symantec.com/docs/290886.htm

Basically, it says, “we’re not fixing it”.  Why the hell do you put an option into a program, that doesn’t work and you acknowledge doesn’t work, and don’t plan on fixing it?

Sure, that phone will ring, but too bad if you want to dial with it as there are no numbers and we don’t plan on adding any numbers to it.  Why do we put up with this crap?

My wife and I have phones on Verizon wireless.  She pays roughly 80 and I pay about 65.  We don’t have data plans.  I started looking at upgrading our phones and maybe even going towards data plans.  A family plan would work fine for us since she uses more minutes than I do.  I don’t even need what I have(my $39.99 plan with over 50% extra in horse shit surcharges).  All together with a two year contract, two droids, and a data plan, we’re looking at $200.  That’s even before the aforementioned surcharges and other hidden fees appear on the bill.

I understand why they cost so much.  Basically, it’s what the people will pay.  Same goes for cell phones.  I’m surprised that modern smart phones such as the Droid, Nexus, and iPhone cost over $500 considering you can get a less than terrible laptop for the same price.  For political reasons at work, they won’t pay for a data plan.  I’m probably the only admin left that doesn’t get email on my phone. 

At any rate, do you have a smart phone with a data plan?  Does your job pay for it or do you foot the bill yourself?  Is it even worth having a data plan when you get past the novelty and wow factor?

The worst documented piece of technology we have at our organization is the phone system, or rather, the analog piece of it.  In our older buildings, there is miles of twisted pair copper, numerous 66 and 110 blocks, and sparse documentation or labeling on anything.  Thankfully, the bulk of it is dead, the remainder of multiple phone systems of the past.

Now, 99.9% of our handsets are cisco VoIP phones.  We still have POTS lines dedicated to fire, burglar, fax, and who knows what else. The “who knows what else” is the problem I have.  There’s spotty documentation on what each POTS line is for, and due to many interconnected blocks spread out throughout every building, it’s difficult to determine where these lines go to from the demarc.  The most frustrating part is, out facilities department can’t tell me what equipment they even use that pulls dial tone.

At least with email systems and directory services you can sort of put a complete picture together of your servers, or using your routing tables and cisco network assistant (if you’re on cisco gear) you can put together a map of your network starting with no documentation.  Old twisted pair phone cabling is like the wild west.

Any other system or network admins out there have to deal with spaghetti soup legacy phone systems?

The old wordpress theme was getting a bit stale.  I’m mucking around with some other looks.

If you’re a Cisco IPSec VPN client user and recently switched to 64bit Windows 7, you probably noticed that the combination doesn’t fly.  Cisco’s IPSec client won’t run on a 64bit OS.  One option is to use XP mode to run the VPN software, but unfortunately, every remote tool you may use has to be run from the XP VM.

Reading through serverfault, I saw a post about shrew’s vpn client.  I have installed it and it seems to be working great, in native 64bit Windows 7.  The best part is, the software is free(outside of the twinge of guilt for not donating of course!(edit:  I will be)).  I’ll report back if I run into any issues.

One large issue I have run into with installing Windows 7 on my laptop was that my USB to Serial adapter that I need to use a cisco console cable and that no longer worked.  Apparently, from a little bit I have read on the web, most of the manufacturers of these devices use a chipset from Prolific.  I pulled the driver from this site:

http://www.prolific.com.tw/eng/downloads.asp?ID=31

Once I got that installed, all was well again and I was able to connect to switches and routers via the console cable.  Yay

We have a lot of what you might consider, legacy systems.  Primarily, most of our NetWare servers.  For us, they’re still highly used production machines.

One such server is a NetWare 6.5 box running iScsi target services.  That server is the shared storage for our Novell cluster.  I’m working on getting a base Zenoss install configured for some sort of host monitoring.  I couldn’t get the Netware server to talk back to the zenoss server.  I realized that the default gateway was wrong.  It was set to some bogus gateway from when we had a flat network and gateways were irrelevant.  The best part is, the reinitialize command doesn’t seem to work when I change any setting in inetcfg.  There is some goofy step when you first run inetcfg where it has to transfer from autoexec.ncf and requires a server reboot.  So basically, I have to drag the entire cluster offline to change the default gateway of the target server.

And people complained about having to restart windows 95/98 when you changed your IP!

Apparently Zenoss changed their listserv and http forums recently.  However, they got rid of the old software and messages/posts.  Almost every google hit that has anything to do with zenoss goes back to those old pages that don’t exist anymore.  Why the hell would you eliminate those old pages or not import and redirect to the new resources?

We recently purchased 100+ Lenovo Thinkpad SL500 units.  We ran into a major issue with a large chunk of them having issues connecting to our LAN via the wired Realtek NIC.  It turns out there are a couple of fixes, none of which include a driver or BIOS update.  Either the IO card has to be completely replaced, or a capacitor has to be soldered onto the IO card.

The symptoms are that when you are on AC power, the NIC will connect at 10/mbps and half duplex.  If you force the switchport to 100 full and the computer to 100 full, the unit simply won’t connect at all.  The funny part is, if you run the laptop on battery, there are no issues.

Dealing with the tier 1 techs was a bit of a headache.  The high level techs at Lenovo have identified the issue but I guess it hasn’t worked its way down to the front line support.  Tier 1 support actually wanted me to return all of the laptops because we didn’t purchase on site support.  This was the first time I’ve ever yelled at any support person on the phone, which I generally don’t do because most of the issues I have aren’t their fault at all, but I lost it this time.  Finally after about 5 business days of constant badgering and being slowly pushed up the support tree, I finally got on the phone with someone who could make things happen.  And they did make things happen, FAST.  I was up against the wall to deploy these units and they flew a tech out that night to start working on the issue.

The issue was completely over the tier 1 support and I can’t really blame them as they probably don’t often have someone call with more than a 100 busted laptops.  I can blame them for not moving up the tree quick enough, but in the end, the issue was resolved.  I’m impressed that Lenovo didn’t leave me in the rain and are sticking by their product and their mistake.  Too bad software companies don’t follow suit when they release shit software and charge hundreds of dollars to even talk to an engineer.