JRRZZ blog

Keeps flickering. I’ve got so much to do lately.

First, there’s school. That’s a funny one. At school most of the people are bribed easily. I won’t accuse anybody but that’s how it seems. We had to do this assignment in which we have to realize a scaled down model of the entire school network with all it’s functionality. I thought this was the ideal moment to show these people who dare to call themselves operators what a real BOFH can do with proper equipment. With that I mean real software, Open Source software. The hardware we had to use was absolute rubbish, we had to backup the entire disk of every machine we used to make sure we could continue our work the next day. Yeah, swappable hard disks just have been on the market for like the last decade. All the machines look the same from the outside but they all have their own problems and glitches to make it even more fun to work with. NIC’s that can’t handle incoming connections, cd trays that won’t open, BIOS passwords, the works. Oh, all of the boxes have a lock on the case to keep us from tinkering with the hardware. And I haven’t started yet about the network. We can use one rack mounted el-cheapo 10/100 dumb switch, one tittle workgroup switch and a bunch of broken CAT-5E. The link to the Internet is the only thing I won’t complain about. We’ve got a full class C IP range we can use, hard ones. A full 100Mbit/s uplink to the router and a very low latency to the AMS-IX. So, we had to build this network. We didn’t exactly now what was going on or what we had to do. After a lot of conversation with some teachers things became clear. We thought we would get permission to start building what we’ve been painstakingly documenting for the past few weeks. But no, somehow the teachers stayed sceptic about this whole Open Source idea. One teacher even had the guts to name all of the features of the Microsoft equivalent of one of our services and telling us those features were required. Oh, at this point you should know this teacher should be playing the manager who wants this network to be built, not a Microsoft infected (bribed) weak excuse for an IT professional. Anyway, we decided that it was time to move on to realisation of our assignment instead of trying to fight against the Microsoft oriented educational system. Soon after we made this decision one teacher said to much. He said Fontys would receive quite a lot of money for every Microsoft product we’d use. This was the last drop, I’m in no way going to participate in a scheme to basically buy out the educational system. They can all go screw themselves while we install real software on our machines. Now I know why Fontys uses these weird things like Sharepoint and Outlook Web Access. It’s bad, it crashes, it doesn’t work in FireFox and Konqueror, and it costs a massive amount of money. I’ve got a collection of screenshots showing Sharepoint crash in a various number of ways. I’m gonna report them soon, let’s see what they have got to say. Anyway, the morale of the story is that this relatively simple task of building a network with the usual servers has taken me at least twice as long as I expected. The course of events is in no way realistic. There is not a single company that would ask IT consultants a full report of their in-house research even if the knowledge is already present. I can’t tell these so-called experts their’e wrong just because they have to be always right. The fact that I have had more hours in the field then they ever will doesn’t seem to matter.

Second, I’ve got a lot of work to do for both of my employers. I’m building a plugin for zjop for mobile phones. You can select your network, monthly fee, extras and your mobile phone and it’ll calculate what you have to pay. You can even get a free TV or something if the bonus is high enough. Because there are a lot of variables database setup has been very difficult and the system itself is even worse. With another plugin I’m about to make we’ll be able to automatically send order requests to our suppliers when an order comes in from a customer. I’ve been able to cooperate with Vendit very well to make it all work with our existing IT infrastructure. I’ve also done a lot for my second employer. We’ve just finished installing a second server to our Wasda.nl network where their IT applications are going to run on. Yesterday we had to do an emergency search and rescue operation on their old host, computrade.nl, to salvage what was left of their database after it had crashed on us. Luckily we have been able to secure all the data to our new server. Now we are converting mail to our new host and setting up the website. This was a just-in-time scenario to the minute exact. I hope we’ve done all of this quick enough, because a lot of employees are sitting at home jobless at the moment, they can’t do jack without this system up and running.

Third, I’ve had the unpleasant news that my grandfather, my only grandfather, has been diagnosed with cancer. He’s also dementing due to Alzheimer. These two combined with his age made the doctors believe that any medication or treatment would destroy more than it could heal. So now we just have to make the best of it I guess. I really feel sad, because my grandfather has always been a person who has inspired me. He has sparked my interest in electro technics. Basically, thanks to him, I’m getting my degree in technical information technology. It’s not a nice sight seeing him degrade that rapidly. I’m going to his birthday today, which might just as well be his last.

Oh, have you noticed my new website is online?

Tags: Stuff, Tech //