what did you learn today?

[Danger Mouse]

And to do otherwise would risk application conflicts. Who knew?

Well, it does *risk* conflicts. Especially in 1997.

The version of APL+ used by that app mentioned in my post dates to 1995? The developer doesn't want to update to the newer version to pay WTF the licensing cost is, even though he's pulling in a solid $50k to $100k a year on the app built on top of the old version.

Then again, this is the same dude that a manual install process for the pseudo Windows app that was built. Lots of hilarity involved.

 

[Barmaglot]

You guys reminded me of this post on ithappens.ru. Loose translation follows:

Attention! It is recommended to retain a professional programmer to implement all the installation and configuration operations.

1. The system is installed on Windows XP only.
2. OS language - any (English or German).
3. Windows folder - must be CWINNT.
4. Automatic updates must be turned off.
5. Prior to installation, all power management features and logon screen must be turned off.
6. Hard drive must be partitioned in a specific way. C: - 10GB, - 100MB, E: - 20GB, F: - 30GB; in addition, at least 6GB of unpartitioned space is required.
7. Partitions must be labeled as follows: ...
8: To initiate installation, run the setup.bat file. If it causes the computer to immediately reboot, do not be alarmed, just run it again.
9. Installation must be performed only under a user account named "%brandname%".
10. Installation program may reset account password to "password".
11. Utmost care must be exercised when choosing the program language - you will not be able to change it afterward.
12. During the installation, Windows may indicate several replacements of system files by unknown versions. This is normal.
13. After the installation, the PC will be rebooted.
14. It is possible that after the reboot, you will not be able to launch Windows Explorer, nor open any folders. In the case, terminate the process %processName% using task manager, then execute the xxx.reg file, and everything will work.

So far, we haven't been able to get this running.

 

[the maddman]

Only a 3rd more? We were at 200% OVER max rated capacity of our campus mains, which were installed somewhere in the 1950s and never inspected as they built out the campus.

A few years ago, a large section of it detonated/destroyed itself with a nice bang. That was a 3 day emergency install.

Until that time, it wasn't too unusual to see only 50 to 75 volts coming out of the wall in some locations. What I'm amazed by, is the fact that most of the equipment actually worked under those conditions.

Here we're doing it in STYLE. 3 phase service, 3 phase UPS (in the leaky basement for extra points), only two output phases connected to anything and 80% of the load of the building is on one phase. You should hear the poor thing buzz, it's painful to even be in the room.

We don't even own an electrician either, so when we started popping the breakers under load, they just magically got replaced with higher rated breakers. I hope we don't end up with an emergency here, since on the other side of the wall is the 3" gas main.

 

[Danger Mouse]

Only a 3rd more? We were at 200% OVER max rated capacity of our campus mains, which were installed somewhere in the 1950s and never inspected as they built out the campus.

A few years ago, a large section of it detonated/destroyed itself with a nice bang. That was a 3 day emergency install.

Until that time, it wasn't too unusual to see only 50 to 75 volts coming out of the wall in some locations. What I'm amazed by, is the fact that most of the equipment actually worked under those conditions.

Here we're doing it in STYLE. 3 phase service, 3 phase UPS (in the leaky basement for extra points), only two output phases connected to anything and 80% of the load of the building is on one phase. You should hear the poor thing buzz, it's painful to even be in the room.

We don't even own an electrician either, so when we started popping the breakers under load, they just magically got replaced with higher rated breakers. I hope we don't end up with an emergency here, since on the other side of the wall is the 3" gas main.

We had a sub-sub basement that was built in the early 1900s that noone knew about. It was filled with oil (from the early 1900s) and garbage. It's kind of amazing that the whole place didn't go up in a big explosion. The EPA was out here and did a clean up in full hazmat gear.

There was another sub sub basement that was filled with sewage and water from a backed up sewer main, that noone knew about for at least 10 years. That one also had a mains that ran through the room.

 

[Mik]

Just out of curiosity, what are you using on a server where the difference would matter? The only time I've cared was when using a Lacie bigdisk to take a backup before sending a newly acquired server (business 'merger') cross country and in that case we just hooked the disk to a laptop with a gig connection.

We are using USB drives to back up the VDR datastores for a small ESX farm. This is a remote site and there is a requirement to store the backups offsite.

 

[Danger Mouse]

I am currently in week 9 of "a very small straightforward MFD pilot and implementation" at a higher education establishment. It would seem Danger Mouse is correct; these printer people are from a completely different Universe. They say "Yes!" to everything and then fail superbly in making what they said yes to work. Doesn't help when you have HE management's total lack of, um, 'management' to do anything about these failings.

This morning, we're "nearly there" again.

FYI, if it's the same stuff we have, the low end model won't fax properly at the default resolution. We forced the vendor to do a workaround in the firmware to default to the higher resolution for faxing, because they're never going to fix the problem where the scans are not imaged at the correct size (according to the standard).

And it turns out that after just a week or so in testing, the manufacturer has decided to deploy the firmware across our organization WITHOUT TELLING US ABOUT IT. And of course, the firmware seems to have compatibility problems with the drivers they have available on their webpage. Good going, megacorp. Their drivers are hit and miss. 1 good driver followed by 2 bad drivers then another good one afterwards.

---

And what I thought was going to be an Exchange 2007 system rebuild/reconfigure has turned out instead to be a check against our AD to see if the schema is screwed up somehow, because certain critical objects do not appear to be replicating across all of the domain controllers.

It makes me think the schema extension failed or partially failed somehow.

Magic 8-ball says metadata cleanup in the near future or emergency jump to Windows 2008 domain controllers/schema.

EDIT: I could include some comedy about one of our consultants attempted to put in 2 business days worth billable hours on a project, when they already knew the cause of the issue and was easily solvable. They had the wrong freaking LDAP server and wrong freaking query string AND they knew the LDAP server in question was dead. Literally 5 minutes worth of work that they wanted to try to work out as 2 days worth.

 

[Danger Mouse]

I am currently in week 9 of "a very small straightforward MFD pilot and implementation" at a higher education establishment. It would seem Danger Mouse is correct; these printer people are from a completely different Universe. They say "Yes!" to everything and then fail superbly in making what they said yes to work. Doesn't help when you have HE management's total lack of, um, 'management' to do anything about these failings.

This morning, we're "nearly there" again.

FYI, if it's the same stuff we have, the low end model won't fax properly at the default resolution. We forced the vendor to do a workaround in the firmware to default to the higher resolution for faxing, because they're never going to fix the problem where the scans are not imaged at the correct size (according to the standard).

And it turns out that after just a week or so in testing, the manufacturer has decided to deploy the firmware across our organization WITHOUT TELLING US ABOUT IT. And of course, the firmware seems to have compatibility problems with the drivers they have available on their webpage. Good going, megacorp. Their drivers are hit and miss. 1 good driver followed by 2 bad drivers then another good one afterwards.

---

And what I thought was going to be an Exchange 2007 system rebuild/reconfigure has turned out instead to be a check against our AD to see if the schema is screwed up somehow, because certain critical objects do not appear to be replicating across all of the domain controllers.

It makes me think the schema extension failed or partially failed somehow.

Magic 8-ball says metadata cleanup in the near future or emergency jump to Windows 2008 domain controllers/schema.

EDIT: I could include some comedy about one of our consultants attempted to put in 2 business days worth billable hours on a project, when they already knew the cause of the issue and was easily solvable. They had the wrong freaking LDAP server and wrong freaking query string AND they knew the LDAP server in question was dead. Literally 5 minutes worth of work that they wanted to try to work out as 2 days worth.

....that inevitably, someone would go behind your back and enable "automatic updates" to download/install/reboot automatically, on one of the main domain controllers. And noone wants to fess up.

You know in that book "Practice of Network & Systems Administration" as well as in the red and yellow ITIL book pair where they talk about change management? And how without proper change management, you can feel like you're swimming molasses on a daily basis and all of the fixes you make feel like uneasy?

Yup, that's about it.

Every day is a face-palm day, Picard style.

 

[Danger Mouse]

I am currently in week 9 of "a very small straightforward MFD pilot and implementation" at a higher education establishment. It would seem Danger Mouse is correct; these printer people are from a completely different Universe. They say "Yes!" to everything and then fail superbly in making what they said yes to work. Doesn't help when you have HE management's total lack of, um, 'management' to do anything about these failings.

This morning, we're "nearly there" again.

FYI, if it's the same stuff we have, the low end model won't fax properly at the default resolution. We forced the vendor to do a workaround in the firmware to default to the higher resolution for faxing, because they're never going to fix the problem where the scans are not imaged at the correct size (according to the standard).

And it turns out that after just a week or so in testing, the manufacturer has decided to deploy the firmware across our organization WITHOUT TELLING US ABOUT IT. And of course, the firmware seems to have compatibility problems with the drivers they have available on their webpage. Good going, megacorp. Their drivers are hit and miss. 1 good driver followed by 2 bad drivers then another good one afterwards.

---

And what I thought was going to be an Exchange 2007 system rebuild/reconfigure has turned out instead to be a check against our AD to see if the schema is screwed up somehow, because certain critical objects do not appear to be replicating across all of the domain controllers.

It makes me think the schema extension failed or partially failed somehow.

Magic 8-ball says metadata cleanup in the near future or emergency jump to Windows 2008 domain controllers/schema.

EDIT: I could include some comedy about one of our consultants attempted to put in 2 business days worth billable hours on a project, when they already knew the cause of the issue and was easily solvable. They had the wrong freaking LDAP server and wrong freaking query string AND they knew the LDAP server in question was dead. Literally 5 minutes worth of work that they wanted to try to work out as 2 days worth.

....that inevitably, someone would go behind your back and enable "automatic updates" to download/install/reboot automatically, on one of the main domain controllers. And noone wants to fess up.

You know in that book "Practice of Network & Systems Administration" as well as in the red and yellow ITIL book pair where they talk about change management? And how without proper change management, you can feel like you're swimming molasses on a daily basis and all of the fixes you make feel like uneasy?

Yup, that's about it.

Every day is a face-palm day, Picard style.

And now it's starting to look like sysvol corruption.

WTF.

I want to go home now.

EDIT: okay, well at least replication was okay and has been okay (event logs).

 

[hawkbox]

I wish I had my notebook pages from the day I learned that you should _NEVER_ use port based zoning when WWN based zoning is available, unless you absolutely have to (like goddamn infosec requirements).

My preferred method is wwn-alias zoning. Figure out the WWNs once, alias them, and then your zones get to be stuff like "ServerX_HBA1_to_SAN_port_A0". Easy

My first FC experience was gained about 1.5 years ago; our fc switches had no aliases defined--and some but not all zoning was done with ports. I had to setup some new stuff and it seemed obvious that pokrface's method is the only logical one.

I think that's a good option, and I will now look into this obviously better method of control. My only concern appears that these low end SAN switches may not do WWN zoning. I may just be blind though.

http://www-03.ibm.com/systems/storage/s ... /san16b-2/

 

[Danger Mouse]

I wish I had my notebook pages from the day I learned that you should _NEVER_ use port based zoning when WWN based zoning is available, unless you absolutely have to (like goddamn infosec requirements).

My preferred method is wwn-alias zoning. Figure out the WWNs once, alias them, and then your zones get to be stuff like "ServerX_HBA1_to_SAN_port_A0". Easy

My first FC experience was gained about 1.5 years ago; our fc switches had no aliases defined--and some but not all zoning was done with ports. I had to setup some new stuff and it seemed obvious that pokrface's method is the only logical one.

I think that's a good option, and I will now look into this obviously better method of control. My only concern appears that these low end SAN switches may not do WWN zoning. I may just be blind though.

http://www-03.ibm.com/systems/storage/s ... /san16b-2/

The IBM redpaper on the switch specifically mentions WWN zoning on page 16.

http://www.redbooks.ibm.com/redpapers/pdfs/redp4177.pdf

 

[pokrface]

Definitely do it with aliases--it'll save your sanity. A (very) quick glance through the redbook seems to show that the switch supports wwn-alias zoning. Once all of your wwns are aliased, it really is just a quick matter of making zones that connect "Server-HBA0-Port0" to "SAN-Port-0"--everything is descriptive and your reliance on an Excel workbook or Visio diagram as the sole means of tracking your configuration is gone!

(Still keep the workbook or diagram for your formal documentation, but now you have a means of very quickly verifying that your live environment matches the documentation.)

 

[hawkbox]

Well the servers are already aliased and the machine has a grid display of what is theoretically connected to what although it's always wrong. Hmm, time to do some reading.

Ah hah! Found it! Since I need to move one of the switches tomorrow to install a new tape library I will be able to test these new configs then. Man you guys are awesome. Learned something new today.

 

[Pangenitor]

DM, I think we've prolly got different suppliers but they're all as bad as each other. And, yep, driver hell is the norm too.

Scanning broke following the upgrade but that was McAfee as usual interfering where it's not wanted. Yay for security officers who think an AV console and idiotic policies are the win.

Now to try and get the default admin passwords changed and, perhaps, it may be an idea to enable SSL on that web administration interface for each device!

 

[Danger Mouse]

Well the servers are already aliased and the machine has a grid display of what is theoretically connected to what although it's always wrong. Hmm, time to do some reading.

Ah hah! Found it! Since I need to move one of the switches tomorrow to install a new tape library I will be able to test these new configs then. Man you guys are awesome. Learned something new today.

With the mess that I found elsewhere, I shudder in horror to think of what awaits me on the FC switches for our SAN(s).

Comedy Update: So, it looks like the AD replication is okay, and the schema looks okay, as does the forest. Our legacy DC appears to have other issues.

Oh and our Exchange 2007 server system does not appear to have been set up correctly. GGARRAGGHGHARARGGHHH

Time to down the PDC emulator (after transferring FSMO roles) for a nice bit of patching.

 

[hawkbox]

Well the servers are already aliased and the machine has a grid display of what is theoretically connected to what although it's always wrong. Hmm, time to do some reading.

Ah hah! Found it! Since I need to move one of the switches tomorrow to install a new tape library I will be able to test these new configs then. Man you guys are awesome. Learned something new today.

With the mess that I found elsewhere, I shudder in horror to think of what awaits me on the FC switches for our SAN(s).

Comedy Update: So, it looks like the AD replication is okay, and the schema looks okay, as does the forest. Our legacy DC appears to have other issues.

Oh and our Exchange 2007 server system does not appear to have been set up correctly. GGARRAGGHGHARARGGHHH

Time to down the PDC emulator (after transferring FSMO roles) for a nice bit of patching.

I have the fun of wearing about 8 different hats and really only having the time to get any one thing "Working" before I have to go do something else. So everything runs but most of it is stuff only I know anything about and I'm not that into job security that I like that. I'm slowly getting things standardized and running properly but it's bloody time consuming to retrofit in proper shit after the fact.

 

[Danger Mouse]

Well the servers are already aliased and the machine has a grid display of what is theoretically connected to what although it's always wrong. Hmm, time to do some reading.

Ah hah! Found it! Since I need to move one of the switches tomorrow to install a new tape library I will be able to test these new configs then. Man you guys are awesome. Learned something new today.

With the mess that I found elsewhere, I shudder in horror to think of what awaits me on the FC switches for our SAN(s).

Comedy Update: So, it looks like the AD replication is okay, and the schema looks okay, as does the forest. Our legacy DC appears to have other issues.

Oh and our Exchange 2007 server system does not appear to have been set up correctly. GGARRAGGHGHARARGGHHH

Time to down the PDC emulator (after transferring FSMO roles) for a nice bit of patching.

I have the fun of wearing about 8 different hats and really only having the time to get any one thing "Working" before I have to go do something else. So everything runs but most of it is stuff only I know anything about and I'm not that into job security that I like that. I'm slowly getting things standardized and running properly but it's bloody time consuming to retrofit in proper shit after the fact.

Only 8? That's not so bad. I was up to 20+ at one point. I'm down to about 12 now.

--

Turns out that Pangenitor and I do have different suppliers after all, but they both sound like equal bags of fail wrapped up in dollar signs.

 

[Incarnate]

....that inevitably, someone would go behind your back and enable "automatic updates" to download/install/reboot automatically, on one of the main domain controllers. And noone wants to fess up.

Thats what the default domain controller group policy is for.

...although in our case, if someone changed it, I guess all the DCs would have patched and rebooted themselves. Luckily, I don't think anyone on our team would make that mistake.

 

[Danger Mouse]

....that inevitably, someone would go behind your back and enable "automatic updates" to download/install/reboot automatically, on one of the main domain controllers. And noone wants to fess up.

Thats what the default domain controller group policy is for.

Well, you see, I also found a bunch of what appear to be test GPOs that are linked to anything or contain nothing. I'm not amused.

Don't get me started about default domain controller group policy.

In other news, my promotion came through. It only took 10 years.

 

[PaveHawk-]

In other news, my promotion came through. It only took 10 years.

Congrats, but I think you need another one

 

[iBooks]

In other news, my promotion came through. It only took 10 years.

Congrats! This calls for a beer. Or a 24, judging from your daily posts

 

[sryan2k1]

Depends on the promotion, I recently received one after getting a new boss and psudo-switching departments (small company, long story) and I went from "Almost being let go" to a ~24% raise in about 2 months. I've been here for about 3.5 years.

 

[Metzen]

....that inevitably, someone would go behind your back and enable "automatic updates" to download/install/reboot automatically, on one of the main domain controllers. And noone wants to fess up.

You know in that book "Practice of Network & Systems Administration" as well as in the red and yellow ITIL book pair where they talk about change management? And how without proper change management, you can feel like you're swimming molasses on a daily basis and all of the fixes you make feel like uneasy?

Yup, that's about it.

Every day is a face-palm day, Picard style.

Or it's now 300+ days of uptime on the DC's without a reboot. Yup. That means all security patches within the last 300 days have not been applied.

Is that better?

 

[Danger Mouse]

....that inevitably, someone would go behind your back and enable "automatic updates" to download/install/reboot automatically, on one of the main domain controllers. And noone wants to fess up.

You know in that book "Practice of Network & Systems Administration" as well as in the red and yellow ITIL book pair where they talk about change management? And how without proper change management, you can feel like you're swimming molasses on a daily basis and all of the fixes you make feel like uneasy?

Yup, that's about it.

Every day is a face-palm day, Picard style.

Or it's now 300+ days of uptime on the DC's without a reboot. Yup. That means all security patches within the last 300 days have not been applied.

Is that better?

I could just up the ante by posting photos of the "network wire management" work that the contractor did.

5 meter cables for a half meter span at most. 200 of them. All nicely piled and jumbled together with no labeling. And that's just the one IDF cabinet. We're at 200+ similarly screwed up from originally having been nicely done up.

---

And thanks for the kind words, everyone. I've already been digging into the "giving myself a bigger ulcer to match my measily raise" allowance this week.

I'm hoping tomorrow is better.

 

[tinyMan]

I could just up the ante by posting photos of the "network wire management" work that the contractor did.

5 meter cables for a half meter span at most. 200 of them. All nicely piled and jumbled together with no labeling. And that's just the one IDF cabinet. We're at 200+ similarly screwed up from originally having been nicely done up.

This reminded my of another thing I learned one day that I forgot the share.

Always make sure your sales people know how far your tape libraries are going to be from your fiber channel switches. We ordered two StorageTek SL8500 libraries with 64 tape drives each from Sun, and of course it was like 10 days before the end of the quarter and everyone was in a goddamn hurry to get the thing physically delivered.

Unfortunately the sales tech did not know how much fiber we needed for the tape drives, so he just included the longest possible part number that was available for instant delivery. We ended up with 128 pairs of fiber that were each 75 METERS long.

The tape drive farthest from its assigned switch port was less than 25 feet.

How did I find out? The facilities manager called us after Sun had been in the DC all day assembling the robots. From 250 feet away, all the way across the data center floor you could see the gigantic pile of nicely spooled up bright orange fiber piled on top of each library.

Sun installed and tested every pair and configured the thing up and delivered it like that. Since everything was perpetually behind schedule, we needed to start using the drives right away, so since 2007 those 75m fiber pairs have been installed and working.

 

[ronelson]

In other news: did you guys know that you can only run one service per host? Apparently that's the motto of the Windows team here. It must be correct though, because that's the way they've always done it. And to do otherwise would risk application conflicts. Who knew?

Make sure they are going into services.msc and only leaving one service in Automatic startup mode. Make sure to videotape their faces during the reboot!

We had a sub-sub basement that was built in the early 1900s that noone knew about. It was filled with oil (from the early 1900s) and garbage. It's kind of amazing that the whole place didn't go up in a big explosion. The EPA was out here and did a clean up in full hazmat gear.

There was another sub sub basement that was filled with sewage and water from a backed up sewer main, that noone knew about for at least 10 years. That one also had a mains that ran through the room.

Is it a requirement that all your employees have a non-functional nose? The smell from the drain when I was replacing a single toilet seal was unbearable to me. A sewage mdain backing up? Good God, that was undoubtedly toxic just to be around.

 

[access]

If you run out of rack screws and nuts when installing some new servers… check the datacenter's electronics dumpster, some people apparently throw away several bags with nuts and screws because they can't differentiate between M6, M5 and "some fraction of an inch" sizes. Saved my day though.

 

[jaericho]

The 256GB file size limit on vmfs is very annoying and I believe it is preventing my snapshot ability.

 

[Barmaglot]

The 256GB file size limit on vmfs is very annoying and I believe it is preventing my snapshot ability.

You can migrate the VMs off the datastore, delete it, and remake it with a larger block size. 8MB block size will give you 2TB max file size.

 

[Digitlman]

I had to do just that today, in fact.

 

[Gandalf007]

If you run out of rack screws and nuts when installing some new servers… check the datacenter's electronics dumpster, some people apparently throw away several bags with nuts and screws because they can't differentiate between M6, M5 and "some fraction of an inch" sizes. Saved my day though.

Or they just have way too many extra screws and cage nuts already and don't feel like sorting the grab bag that came with the new kit.

 

[hutch85]

That's why I love The Server Room, I learned something new and useful today!

In other news: did you guys know that you can only run one service per host? Apparently that's the motto of the Windows team here. It must be correct though, because that's the way they've always done it. And to do otherwise would risk application conflicts. Who knew?

With VMs (and plenty of money), there is a good argument to be made for doing things that way. You duplicate the OS overheads, but you gain isolation.

Oh, totally. Except, they aren't doing that, they're building new physical servers instead. VMs are scary or something, apparently.

Especially scary when you can replace non-critical test/dev servers with a decently-powered host & VMs - something my last employer didn't (wouldn't) understand, no matter how much you pointed out benefits vs cost. Granted, the state of virtualization wasn't as advanced as it is now, but ESX 3.0 server was out (among others) and it would have satisfied the need. Oh well, one of many reasons why I moved on.

 

[Danger Mouse]

And today's lesson is, that no matter how much the contractor swears up and down that the problem is not the configuration of the Cisco Wireless NAC, the problem is the configuration.

incorrect info:

-wrong ldap server (that's legacy, you know, the one that you guys helped replace, how about not referring to it anymore and then pretending that you never knew it was going to be replaced)

-wrong ldap search string (hello, McFly, you jerks are the ones who scrambled to get the correct LDAP string for the Cisco Call Manager, how about using the same one for the wireless NAC? And that was comedy, pretending it was set for daily LDAP queries to cache, when it was set for weekly.)

-wrong DNS servers (pointed to DNS servers that long ago died/dead/gone/etc)

I could go on to include the fact that they may have made a nice network loop with their BS while at the same time claiming that spanning-tree was not needed and should be turned off on the entire network. WHUT?

 

[Danger Mouse]

I forgot to mention this one. A LONG time ago, they were going to change our department's name to stop being "M.I.S." and move on to "I.T."

There's a problem though, as my local org's name has a set of Ts in it. In other words, we'd be T.I.T.s or T.I.T.S Since we also do adminstrative support services, we would have become

T.I.T.S. & A.S.S. (I'm leaving the periods in, on purpose.)

Really. I kid you not.

Why do I write about this? 10 years from the last time this came up, they've decided again to change our name to have I.T. in it. That's right. We're going to be "T.I.T."s and the rest of our org's name could be the spanish or french for the word "The". So, we'll be "The T.I.T.S." department. No Administrative Support Services this time, though. So sad.

----

On a lighter note, I found out today that olive oil + frozen fish without skin, can actually catch on fire and make a nice 4 foot high flame. On your stove. In your kitchen. And scorch your range hood. I think the emergency response skills I've learned at my job helped me to put it out pretty quickly, after the intial 3 stooges-like/Homer Simpson-esque response that I was doing ("wooop, woooop, wooop wooo woo woo, aagn angg angg").

My wife was about 5 seconds from taking the kids outside when I got the fire out. We had Cajun style seared/scorched fish for dinner.

EDIT: I need a blog.

 

[ronelson]

We had Cajun style seared/scorched fish for dinner.

I bet it was tasty though. I had a similar experience trying to grill salmon on cedar planks (wood burns, who knew?), ended up scorching the deck rail and needing a new grill afterward. But that was the best damn salmon ever, and in three years hasn't been beat.

 

[Das Schwartz]

We had Cajun style seared/scorched fish for dinner.

My Coonass pager went off. Someone need something blackened, deep fried, shot, or anything involving bourbon?

 

[finni]

We had Cajun style seared/scorched fish for dinner.

My Coonass pager went off. Someone need something blackened, deep fried, shot, or anything involving bourbon?

A shot of blackened, deep-fried bourbon. Please. And thank you.

 

[Sunner]

I forgot to mention this one. A LONG time ago, they were going to change our department's name to stop being "M.I.S." and move on to "I.T."

There's a problem though, as my local org's name has a set of Ts in it. In other words, we'd be T.I.T.s or T.I.T.S Since we also do adminstrative support services, we would have become

T.I.T.S. & A.S.S. (I'm leaving the periods in, on purpose.)

Really. I kid you not.

Why do I write about this? 10 years from the last time this came up, they've decided again to change our name to have I.T. in it. That's right. We're going to be "T.I.T."s and the rest of our org's name could be the spanish or french for the word "The". So, we'll be "The T.I.T.S." department. No Administrative Support Services this time, though. So sad.

Please tell me the department head is named "Dick"? That would be the most awesomest way to introduce yourself ever. "Dick, head of T.I.T.S & A.S.S". Ok, sans the A.S.S then, but one can dream, right?

 

[Danger Mouse]

I forgot to mention this one. A LONG time ago, they were going to change our department's name to stop being "M.I.S." and move on to "I.T."

There's a problem though, as my local org's name has a set of Ts in it. In other words, we'd be T.I.T.s or T.I.T.S Since we also do adminstrative support services, we would have become

T.I.T.S. & A.S.S. (I'm leaving the periods in, on purpose.)

Really. I kid you not.

Why do I write about this? 10 years from the last time this came up, they've decided again to change our name to have I.T. in it. That's right. We're going to be "T.I.T."s and the rest of our org's name could be the spanish or french for the word "The". So, we'll be "The T.I.T.S." department. No Administrative Support Services this time, though. So sad.

No, but we do have an "Alex", which could be pronounced " ah-LICKS of T.I.T.S. and A.S.S.".
Please tell me the department head is named "Dick"? That would be the most awesomest way to introduce yourself ever. "Dick, head of T.I.T.S & A.S.S". Ok, sans the A.S.S then, but one can dream, right?

--------

....And this morning, that following Symantec's knowledgebase articles on how to coax the old Brightmail Gateway 5.x to keep working, will inevitably cause it to fail. So, reverting the regedit back to the original thankfully fixed it, without resolving the initial issue that was supposed to be fixed (LDAP sync broken, old cached entries in use).

 

[Das Schwartz]

Half of our department (2/4) are leaving within the next month.

This is gonna suck.

Knowledge transfer time. Anyone want a job?

 

[Punkbob]

Half of our department (2/4) are leaving within the next month.

This is gonna suck.

Knowledge transfer time. Anyone want a job?

My first response was "Where?"

Then I realized that I am stuck in this hell hole till May.