At any rate, reading sites like slashdot and OS news, I’ve realized that most people who troll against various software and operating systems don’t have to deal with it on an everyday basis. Just because Windows is terrible at one thing, doesn’t mean it doesn’t have a place doing something else well. The same with Linux. Ok, that’s my holier than thou message for the month.

Just printed out an AppNote on setting up a basic iSCSI cluster with NetWare 6.5. I’m looking forward to playing with this when things calm down with some extra hardware I have around.
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I tried creating an app to force run the ZFD 7 install. It broke my test machine in a terrible way. It is running an older Novell Client, so I’m hoping an update to that will sort out the issues.

I replaced the phpbb board with SMF. It took my 20 minutes to install, run the conversion script, and tweak a few things. ]]>

I found a work around finally this morning. I’m not sure why this works and why the other way doesn’t. When I install the printer in windows, I do a network printer and let the network list populate so I can browse. I was used to opening up the Netware Network group, selecting netware servers, opening the specific server where the queue physically sits, and selecting that queue. The port on the printer object in windows would point to \\server_name\print_q. On the 6.5 box, when I try to select the queue that way, there are no queues to select. What I ended up doing was selecting Novell Directory Services instead, working my way down the tree to the print queue object. That seemed to work, which is a load off for now, even though we need to reconfig 200 PCs. The port on the printer object in windows points to \\tree_name\print_q.

I have a SLES 9 box running our website. It’s also running MySQL services for a message board. I did a ton of updates on it, and apparently, knocked out mysql. Nobody knew about it and I didn’t find out about it until yesterday, so I googled a fix. Unrelated, or so I think, I need to find the time to get rid of phpbb on that server. From all accounts, it’s a security nightmare. I’ll spend an afternoon moving it to SMF(http://www.simplemachines.org/). I’ve read good things about it. ]]>

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I just ordered a new PowerEdge 2850 to replace the 5 year old high school server. I should get that next week and try my first server migration. It should be interesting. It’s also going to be my main zenworks 7 server, so that project is being held up until I finish the migration. After that, all my “drop dead, need to finish before school starts” projects as far as Novell related software and new hardware for the software will be done. There is plenty I can still do, but it will all be gravy at that point. I also convinced the boss to let me buy an HP MSA20 hard drive array for direct to disk backups. I’m starting out with 5 SATA drives in a RAID 5, but slowly adding more to the mix to cover myself for more days per month with hot backups reducing the amount of duplicate jobs I have to put onto tape. Nice for the lazy in me.

I stuck bordermanager 3.8 on the first NetWare 6.5 box I added, and got it mostly configured. I’m now the sole user going through it. I’ll cut it over to be the main proxy/firewall server when I get motivated to come in on a saturday or stay late one night. I don’t look forward to adding the filters back in. I’m reluctant to delete the filters for my BM 3.7 server which is in use to be able to migrate the filters back into eDir. The whole process is overly complicated and I’m very reluctant of blowing up my old filters in the event I need to fire up bordermanager on the old box. I’ve got all my web servers NATing through it, so those filters are required.

I also got SLED 10 downloaded. I played with a BETA and liked it, although it had some issues which I hope were ironed out for this release. I’ll spend some time tomorrow fooling around with it. I hope it works with my wireless card in the laptop. I’ll just keep using windows at home if it doesn’t. You’re not going to get me to waste the time getting it to work using NDIS wrapper!]]>