This guy’s crimes were nasty, but he’s one hot dude.
Month: August 2008
Microsoft Product Activation Can Kiss My Pastey-White Hiney
So last night I was at the office migrating servers between hardware. Nothing really exciting about it. One of the servers I was migrating was an older Citrix Metaframe 1.8 server. That migration was going from basically like-hardware to like-hardware. The only difference between the two machines was the larger RAID array, more RAM, and slightly different processor in the new machine. They were otherwise the same model of server, but I didn’t envision major problems, should they arise.
The clone took forwever, but it got done, I booted up the server, made sure the thin terminals could connect fine, and called it a night around 11:00PM last night. This morning at the crack of dawn, got a phone call that nobody could get into Outlook, Word, or any of the other Office XP programs running on the server. The error? Product activation due to significant hardware changes. I thought to myself “OK, easy fix, will just reactivate it.” I come to the office, attempted to reactivate on the terminals, and the activation window went away — never gave me a confirmation that it was activated. When I checked the product activation on the server itself, it told me it was activated, but it was spitting out errors on the client terminals. Tried repairing Office, still gave me fits.
I was spending too much time dealing with this when I had other places to be (as I split my time between a couple offices), so I said “Screw it.” A 30 second search found an Office XP activation crack (Anti-MSOPA.exe — google it) that cracked the mso.dll file, and errors went away. We’re a fully legal user of Office XP, have plenty of licenses, but I just didn’t want to deal with the activation crap that was causing us wasted time and potentially lost money. It’s sad I had to download hacker software to do it. While I still plan on finding out what was wrong, I didn’t want to waste company productivity to do it.
The Life Of A Late-Night Sysadmin: Staring At Progress Bars
When somebody asks what I do when I’m at the office after-hours, I generally tell them “I stare a progress bars.” Generally, if I’m at the office after hours, it’s because I need to install patches, do system maintenance, copy a bunch of data, clone a hard drive, or something that requires it to be done when nobody else is using the server. And any geek who has done any of that type of stuff knows that it’s a lot of progress bars.
Right now, I’m at the office performing a server migration from old hardware to slightly-less-old hardware. I have Clonezilla running on the one server that supports it (Clonezilla is having issues with it’s RAID controller (which is why I’ve opened this thread), and I have Ghost running on another server (I prefer Clonezilla as it makes much faster clones). So here I am, staring at progress bars. An hour to go on the Ghosting machine.
Meanwhile, I can sit here. Waiting.
While I’m waiting, I tend to go through my RSS feeds, and read interesting stuff like like where to find gas that doesn’t have Ethanol, the A11 football offense, the Wired FOUND archives (I miss that section of the magazine), a well-written librarian’s response to a complaint about “Uncle Bobby’s Wedding”, and the plastic coffee on a local news show. I’ll probably also kill some time playing multiplayer minesweeper, a fun little album memory game, Totem Destroyer, and Monster’s Den. I also found it interesting all the cameras that were rolling during the L.A. earthquake last week, including Judge Judy, Big Brother, KNBC, KABC, City Hall and Judge Penny.
Back to check on those progress bars …