Category: Technology

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Breaking into the PIX… again.

Once again I’m off to reset the password on a Cisco PIX for Dillon Supply. This was done a few months ago by a contractor at the Inflow data center while I walked him through it on the phone (I was in St. Louis) but alas he did not use the write mem command when he was done.

So this Friday I was trying to perform a certificate request for the PIX that failed and in order to save the existing certificates I had to run a reload without writing to memory. Once that was done the password reverted to the old one that no one at Dillon Supply knows. How’s that for project management. Mr. Sylvain Fournier, now residing in France, didn’t even bother to take the responsibility of knowing the password for the companies firewall. And they praised the guy.

Don’t worry though folks, I’ve acquired a $15 USB to Serial converter to use on the laptop you provided that does not have a serial port and I’ve installed the Solarwinds TFTP server and Hyperterminal Private Edition (to send break commands) and I will now once again break into the PIX and reset the password to the factory default. This time I will write mem and put this issue to rest.

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Polls, Polls, Polls

electoral-vote.com has been a hot site this year. Andrew Tanenbaum (author of the Minix Operating System) put together this information using the top national daily polls every day.

Here are the top three points of deception that I feel could win or lose today’s election for Bush:

1. Voting against the incumbent unpatriotic.
2. A vote for Dubya is a vote for God.
3. The terrorists don’t want Dubya so you should.

If enough people buy this garbage, Bush is in again. If enough people think clearly and for themselves, Kerry’s our next President. We’ll know by this time tomorrow.

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.asp mail handlers

imageLately I’ve been working on the Dillon Supply Corporate Intranet. I spent all day writing a custom .asp form mailer and configuring a virtual SMTP server on the IIS host. The hardest part was getting the SMTP routing correct. I learned the hard way that you have to add a remote domain under the default virtual server and then route the form mail to this new domains “Smart Host” (a.k.a. the Exchange Server). After six hours, and many entries in the /mailroot/badmail folder, I finally got it working.

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Microsoft dot what?

imageToday I looked real hard into the possibility of using Visual Basic dot Net for the new Dillon Supply intranet, primarily because we utilize MS SQL so heavily. I was thinking it would be nice to just create and maintain a new MS SQL database on an existing server. Then I quickly saw how much Microsoft really sucks at conforming to web development standards.

I’m not too bad with MS SQL Enterprise Manager so how weird could it be? Could the Visual Studio interface get any more cumbersome? For someone like me coming from a background of Perl and PHP edited mostly in Dreamweaver – it’s no less than a freakin’ nightmare. I felt quite stupid – It looks like KDeveloper (or vice-versa)??? I couldn’t even figure out how to connect the stupid Visual Studio project to an IIS server without using “Frontpage Server Extensions”. ugh! choke! gasp… your killin’ me here.

Not for me. I will load MySQL for Windows and head down the path of simplicity and conformity. Now I know why these dot net guys come interviewing with their guns loaded for Visual Studio. You really have to be a “Microsoft Guy” to get into VS.

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Thunderbird and Exchange

imageAfter work I have to pick Connor up from my sister-in-laws church. Amy’s had a headache for two days, so tonight I’m on full blown daddy duty. That’s no problem because my little guy is way cool enough to keep me entertained all night. Besides, I need to stay away from all computers for a while.

Tech sector: Suse loaded okay on the old Inspiron 2500 but I couldn’t find the display files to save my life. Apparently Suse doesn’t have them pre-installed for xFree86 and I can’t find the monitor model to use anywhere. I might work on it later or try another flavor of Linux (like Mandrake) but only when time allows.

Instead I settled for configuring IMAP on the Dillon Exchange server and put Thunderbird on an Inspiron 2600 running XP Pro. It’s a pretty cool old laptop running nothing but open source apps. Everyone was screaming that I’d lose my Exchange functionality without a MAPI client. What functionality? The personal folders and calendar I don’t use? Any time I can relieve myself of a stale ol’ MS Office app I’m gonna do it.

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Summer’s gone for good.

imageI can feel it in the air…literally. It’s gettin’ cold, we’ve had our last trip to the beach and the State Fair starts this weekend. Amy already got our tickets at a good discount otherwise I probably wouldn’t be going. It’s $9.00 a person to get in this year. And the state has the power to label someone a criminal?

In the technology sector: Today I put Suse Linux 9.1 on an old Dell Latitude 2500. We’ll see how that finishes up tomorrow. Hopefully I can find the video and network drivers easy enough. There’s no real point to the project, just something to do with a spare PC. I think Mike’s going to take it home from work when it’s done. To my knowledge he has zero experience with any OS outside of AS400 and Windoze.

I’ve got some major stuff coming up at work including the deployment of an SMS 2003 server and the design of an SQL cluster environment. I’m also looking into SQL transaction replication but I’ve heard real time replication is not advised for MS SQL. I can see that. Microsoft products couldn’t suck up more resources if they made vacuum cleaners.