scadblog

2 Entries, 1 MAC Address… now that’s a feat. Wonder if someone’s getting charged twice.

Name: gen-6w4m711
DNS Domain: Princeton.EDU
Entry Type: HOST
Interface[1] Type: Ethernet
Interface[1] Subnet: castanet
Interface[1] IPAddress: 128.112.116.182
Interface[1] MACaddress: 0:6:5b:2:c2:c2

Name: snapper
DNS Domain: CS.Princeton.EDU
Administrative Domain: CompSci
Entry Type: HOST
Interface[1] Type: Ethernet
Interface[1] Subnet: cs-office
Interface[1] IPAddress: 128.112.92.166
Interface[1] MACaddress: 0:6:5b:2:c2:c2

March 18th’s entry “You’ve Got to Start Somewhere” has evolved into a plan that I’ve dubbed SCAD/DCS Improvement. The second entry in this series is a rework of “Structuring an Effective SECOM Meeting” from March 13th that pertains to all committee meetings. I haven’t posted it yet in its new form because it basically says the same thing. I’ll be doing a followup next week anyway because SECOM will be meeting.

I thought integrating these ideas into an overall plan would give me a little bit of direction and focus, and start to make sure I’m being fundamentally consistent throughout all of my proposals. I met with Evelyne about numero uno “You’ve Got to Start” and it went over really well. She’s willing to give me a spot on next month’s SCAD/DCS Meeting agenda to pitch the idea to the masses.

Anyway, here is entry three, which from my understanding isn’t a new idea at all. Its a proposal to start a SCAD/DCS community-supported message board. I have heard rumors that it has been attempted before but either failed or was killed by mysterious, unknown forces. Realizing it takes two to tango, I’ve been pitching it to fellow SCAD/DCS people to see if there are any takers. I envision the project a joint venture eventually opening up to the greater SCAD/DCS community for command and control. I don’t usually do things that way, but I also like to mix it up a bit from time to time. A little top-down organization never hurt now and again.
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Taken from Oxford’s Computing Services documentation (for configuring TSM backup):

“On many machines the only crucial items needing to be backed-up are the user data, with the rest of the software restorable / re-installable from local CDs. In such cases , or similar, where you have all your valuable data under one or two directories and only require these to be backed-up, edit the Include/Exclude directives in the configuration file (for the location of which see the table in the previous question) and add to the bottom of the list of default Include/Exclude directives, two lines similar to below …

Windows:
Exclude *:…*
Include “C:My Data…*”

Netware:
Exclude *:/…/*
Include “USR:/My data/…/*”

Mac:
Exclude …:*
Include …:MyData:…:*

Unix:
Exclude /…/*
Include /home/user/mydata/…/*

… which will backup every file in the mydata/MyData/My data/My Data directory and in any subdirectories under that directory and exclude all other files on the system. Note that the order is important; any Include directive(s) must come after the Exclude directive.”

[addendum]

The unix statements belong in the file incl.excl rather than dsm.opt. You may also use Domain statements in the dsm.opt file to designate the filesystems to be backed up, i.e.:

Domain / /usr /home/myname

I should write about important things, like how the training idea that I presented at the SCAD/DCS breakfast meeting has Evelyne interested and wanting to meet about its implementation, or how the rest of that meeting or the last CARD meeting went down.

Unfortunately I’ve been swamped lately with user support and upgrade issues, so a lot of what’s here will probably fall into the tech tip category. Along that line, I was upgrading the ORFE webserver this morning. I moved it to a fresh kernel using up2date of all things, but LILO was having none of it. So at 9:30 I was staring at a machine that should have been back online by 8:30 struggling with a rock-solid bootloader that I unfortunately know nothing about.
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Today I was handed a Sony Vaio laptop running Windows 98 that wasn’t booting properly. The Operating System was reported missing upon boot, and the system restore software included with the machine reported that there was an unrecoverable hard drive error. The machine had long since been off warranty so I ripped the hard drive out and used my IDE-to-Mini adapter to hook it up to a desktop machine. There I attempted to mount the drive with Linux but it only spit back input/output errors. Fdisk couldn’t read the partition table and a disk dump of raw data spit back the same errors as the attempts at mounting.
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Hostmaster can be so weird sometimes. I registered a new FCP laptop for a user of mine, waited for the request to be processed, and then plugged the machine into the network. It couldn’t receive its IP when I did an ipconfig /renew and it just reported an unhelpful network error. So I tried to assign the IP address manually for testing purposes which finally generated an error message that helped. Apparently the IP was already in use on the network. I sent a ping over to that machine and found that the thief was alive and well. A quick OS fingerprint indicated that it was a Windows 2000 machine. Hot on the trail, I noticed that it had some open shares. I was surprised to find a familiar share established just last week on one of my professor’s machines. This thief wasn’t just any old machine, it was the desktop belonging to the professor for whom I was configuring the laptop! Without any changes to Hostmaster I rebooted the desktop machine and it was magically assigned the proper IP, freeing the stolen one for the laptop to use. The only conceivable way Hostmaster could have connected the two would have either been by user’s email contact or account number. Beyond that I’m stumped.

I got a call from Alan Donenfeld the other day. If you’re scratching your head asking “Who’s Alan Donenfeld?” you’re in good company. I had no idea either. But when he told me he was calling from M-Tech the connection was clear. After the SCAD/DCS meeting regarding P-Synch’s introduction I visited the P-Synch website. There they had a version of P-Synch Lite. I downloaded it to check it out but not before filling in my contact information.

So Alan calls me up to inform me that Princeton already has a license for 20,000 users. We are limited to certain types of platforms and authentication, but Alan mentioned specifically that NT, UNIX, LDAP and Kerberos as being covered under our license. I have no idea how much we paid for the license initially and didn’t think it appropriate to ask, but there’s an annual maintenance fee that’s 20% of the initial license. The maintenance includes telephone and email support which Alan said Chris Krantz had already been using effectively. I told him that I was interested at P-Synch from the backend because even though I was part of IT support here at Princeton, I wasn’t involved in deployment of the software. He noted that Chris is probably my best contact for any information.

Can’t fault him for wanting a single point of contact even though he called me:) He left me his contact information and told me not to hesitate to call. Nice guy.