Sunday Monday Tuesday Wednesday Thursday Friday Saturday
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Sunday /2000
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Still have to install Mandrake 7.2 at home. RSN... I intend to procrastinate about that as soon as I get around to it.
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Monday /2001
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We have a small business client that I set up to use Road Runner to link their two offices. You would not believe the amount of trouble this simple setup has given us. Yeah, OK, you would. They run a compiled-FoxPro database app for billing and so on, and they wanted to be able to run the billing for either office from either office. So I installed Symantec pcAnywhere at both ends, installed AnalogX Proxy so the other peer-to-peer PCs in the offices could see the internet, and installed Sygate Personal Firewall(which has changed names three times since
last November — is that a Good Thing?) at each end and told each one which IP addresses to trust. When it works, it's great. Simple, straightforward, low-cost. Easy to set up, transparent to use.
Except when it's not. I guess I'd have to split the blame about evenly between Time Warner for their appallingly slipshod service (though their support is pretty good — I bet they get plenty of practice), and the habit that I mentioned before of my employer procuring the cheapest PCs money can buy. Bad enough to put one of them in your home, but to resell them to customers, and then have to support them indefinitely... this is a Bad Thing.
Time Warner has had an incredibly hard time understanding and implementing the customer's modest requirements: one static IP at each end so pcAnywhere could talk back and forth at, to put it in its simplest terms. We had dynamic IPs, we had bad cable modems (from both Motorola and Cisco, of all people), we had insufficiently clueful TW reps... And we had cheap PCs on top of it all. We originally quoted a reasonable (we thought) eight hours for the job. I'm thinking it's more like about eighty by this time, and it looks like I may be heading out there again today. Yippee-yi-o. Does all this sound familiar to anybody?
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Tuesday /2001
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Symantec pcAnywhere is kicking my behind. Unless it's simply something somewhere in that plate of electro-optical IP-driven spaghetti between point A and point B. Simply put, my customer can control system A from system B, but can't control system B from system A, even though this all worked last week, and they wouldn't dare change anything (unlike some clients I've known). Of course, it's possible that it might be something as simple as one pcAnywhere host program crashing, and ignoring any connection attempts thereafter. I'll check that. But here's how it went yesterday — I disabled the firewall at each end to eliminate that as a potential issue (trusted IPs and whatever). Then I tried to ping B from A. Pinged fine. OK, can I actually map to a shared volume on B? Yep. Slow, but I could
browse the whole C: drive, as long as there was no firewall blocking NetBIOS. So with a successful ping, and an open drive mapping, I fired up the remote control session again. Unable to connect. I've gotta say, when pcAnywhere works, it's a great thing. But my experience with it so far has been decidedly mixed. Re-enabled the firewalls and went home.
Today I downloaded the latest incremental update from Symantec's website, and I'll install it on each station, as well as making sure that the host is running properly at both ends. Then we'll see. Remind me, why was it that I chose this particular field of endeavor? Oh yeah — working in a factory was way worse. Way worse. And it wasn't even a bad factory.
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Wednesday /2001
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Well, it turns out that the remote control problem was due to the pcAnywhere host applet disappearing without a trace. The only two ways I know to make it go away are by right-clicking on the system tray icon for an active host session, and selecting "Cancel host"; or killing it from the [Ctrl+Alt+Del] Close Program dialog box. I'd be willing to bet money that neither of those things happened, but still the host evaporated. But all's well that ends well — it's working now. Of course, I'd be kidding myself if I thought that this will be the end of the story.
I was just going to fire up Mandrake again, when I started thinking about the version of Netscape that comes with it — the latest available for Linux, I believe. That is, I don't recall whether or not they've ported 6.0 to Linux yet. But isn't there a Linux version of Opera 5? I'd better go look. Back later.
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Well, well... whaddya know? Netscape 6 and Opera 4 for Linux. Gotta go play.
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Thursday /2001
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Well, I got Netscape 6 and Opera 4 installed under Mandrake 7.2 today. Due to a bad case of clueless-newbie-itis, it took me quite a bit longer than it should've. My years in Windows have conditioned me to expect that when you double-click (or whatever) on an executable file, it should launch; and I assumed that script files were similar enough to DOS batch files that it should work the same way. But of course it didn't. So I navigated my way via console prompt to the proper directory, and executed the script by typing its name at the console. BTW, case-sensitive directory and file names are for the birds. Or penguins. But I eventually muddled through. Opera put an icon in the menu tree, but Netscape didn't; so I had to navigate to the proper folder again and create a link on the desktop.
But when I was done, they both worked perfectly. Newbie 2, Evil Empire 0. And to my surprise, my web page, which doesn't render properly in Navigator 4.08 for Windows or 4.75 for Linux, renders fine in Netscape 6 for either platform. And to my greater surprise, Opera 4 (still the old shareware version, phooey) also renders the page perfectly. I'm impressed.
So now I have to see if a (free) way exists to access my Exchange server for office email from Linux. Somebody's got to have solved this one by now. I can see it's going to be quite a while before I can cut all ties to the Borg, but I keep hoping, and plugging away. I don't know if there's anything as decent (I refuse to say excellent) as Front Page 2000 in penguin land, but I intend to find out.
Actually, speaking of HTML editors, I tried AceHTML 4 Freeware for Win9x. I kind of like it. I'm not quite good enough yet with basic HTML to use it exclusively, but it found and fixed a couple of syntax errors that FP2K had let slide. I guess the thing I like best about FP2K is the basic interface, where you have Normal/HTML/Preview all right there all the time via the tabbed interface. I turn on the Reveal Tags option, which was the only thing I ever liked about the old WordPerfect for Windows, and tweak the HTML on the next tab, and preview instantly on the third. Hard to beat the convenience. Though it comes with typical MS overhead. But I guess it's probably the one to beat. I hope somebody does.
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Friday /2001
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I've added a couple of pages. Under computer stuf I put a little page about basic PC maintenance. Comments, corrections, additions, revisions, and so on are all welcome. Then I put another page under serious stuf about a dream I had. Comments welcome there as well; I'd be interested in your experiences.
Anti-virus software. As has been observed before, the biggest problem with it is that people don't use it; or perhaps even worse, they use it but don't keep it up to date. Case in point, the client I spent most of today with. Two PCs in an office, peer-to-peer network, Road Runner internet with one PC running proxy and firewall software. McAfee anti-virus software that hadn't been updated since it was released in the OEM package, dated 10/98. A lot of water's flowed under the bridge since then...
I LOVE YOU. Yeah, somebody loved 'em. Eleven files on one and fourteen on the other. It took me a while to find that out, though. I downloaded the McAfee update file and installed it on the first PC, and then McAfee crashed. OK, enough of that then. I downloaded InoculateIT Personal Edition from Computer Associates (see my "free stuf" page), because every network admin is familiar with it, and because it's freely available on their website. The ftp-based download would only work over the PC directly connected to Road Runner, though. Web browsing works fine. I suspect there's some little glitch with the AnalogX proxy server; I'll have to check into that. But once I got the software installed, and got the latest data file, it ran perfectly, cleaning up their little infestation
handily.
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Saturday /2001
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No entry.