Month: April 2004

So some people don’t think I’m dead (**cough**yoleen**cough**), I just wanted to post a note to let you know I’m at work, have turned off online bookings on our server, and once the office shuts down in about 20 minutes, I’ll be dismantling things as much as humanly possible (per my previous post). My goal is to be out of here by midnight, but looking at my long to-do list for the evening, I might be here until about 2 or 3 in the morning. We’ll just see how it goes…

Update at 9:47: Random thought: I don’t think I’ve ever seen this many progress bars going at one time on three different screens. I’ve got one system doing a Ghost disk image in case something goes bonkers in those whole process, I’ve got one that’s downloading Windows 2000 SP4, and then the other one’s going crazy: about 50 windows open and 6 copy-file progress bars, backing stuff up to another machine, as well as a couple Winzip sessions. Meanwhile, I’m going across the street to get more caffeine.

Update at 12:02 AM: OK, it’s really frickin’ late, I’m still here, and really starting to hate the jackass that set this place up to begin with. He’s hard-coded FAR too much stuff and it’s hard for me to work around. I’m in the process of resetting up all the various profiles and policies. I’ve got the accounting software moved and setup, OS fully installed and Active Directory running on domain controller, so I just need to reconfigure all my thin terminals, profiles and policies at this point. The store across the street just closed for the night, and hopefully my caffeine supply will last me through the next couple hours.

It’s 1:30 AM…I’m tired, haven’t accomplished nearly as much as I would’ve liked, the profiles from before are apparently stored in pieces on several different servers. Why? I haven’t a f**kin’ clue. I did get my domain controller upgraded to Windows 2000, but a fat lot of good that did me — because the profiles and settings are stored all over the place on my old Citrix/Terminal Services server, I’m not able to get them stored in the right place on the new server to make everything function happy. To top it all off, somewhere in this frickin’ mess there are group policies that are conflicting with one another, basically locking down stuff that shouldn’t be locked down as well as opening up stuff that shouldn’t be open.

F**k it. I’m going home. The terminals have been reset to log into the old server, new server taken off line. Damn it.

Blogging might be fairly light over the next few days because I’m doing a major overhaul of our company’s servers over the next four days or so. I’ll blog now and again when I can, but I’ll more than likely be pretty busy.

Here’s what I’m doing these next few days (of course, during the late hours so that nobody gets put offline that):

• Backup everything a few times over
• Upgrading NT 4 Domain Controller to Windows 2000.
• Replace NT 4 Citrix Metaframe server with Windows 2000 Metaframe Server that I’ve built (much faster than the POS we have in there), pull the other one offline
• Patch to SP4, etc…
• Setting up group policies, settings, etc…
• Migrate accounting’s data to new server
• Move hardware between a couple servers, pulling it from offline server
• Re-wiring the mess in our network closet
• Put it all back together
• Test and pray to everything that’s holy that it all works.

Then the next project will be to take that old Citrix server, upgrade it to Small Business Server 2003, getting a new switch in the server room (the one we have is crap — anybody have a nice 12-port or larger switch to get rid of?), recut some of the network cables in the wiring closet (as we have some some 30-foot cables that are going about 3 feet) — among about 400 other project that need to get done. Ugh…