What did you do Friday at work?

[fibroptikl]

Ok, well in attempt to cure my boredom I thought I'd post a thread asking what you IT/computer people did on Friday at work (provided you worked); if not post the last day.

I occasionally do work for a small electronics rep firm, they sell Intel, LSI Logic, Zilog, IR, Legacy Electronics, Aromat, Bourns, NKK Switches, are only a small sampling. My dad works in the same office as the company does so I went in with him.

They had just ordered brand new Dell Latitude D500 laptop's, and since the use the craptastic Lotus Notes, it takes awhile to set it up, in addition to some other stuff to install and configure. I got there at 7:30, and talked to the guy who's in charge - he's an electronical engineer and he is in charge of the companies computers. He told me about what he wanted to do, and such and told me to start moving the computers over to an empty office room. So, I started moving the laptop boxes over to the conference room and then he had some instructions ready for me telling me what to do "map these drives, install this software, etc, etc" - and so I did that. I pulled one out of the box, started setting it up - when it got to the point of where it was doing something, I pulled out another laptop and started to configure that one. At one point I had 5 laptops being setup. I ran into a few problems here and there, but I managed to get 2 all setup with Notes; 2 had problems and one I did as much as I could (had different settings - going to a different location as well). Well it was about lunch time. Just before we left, the consultant my dad's company uses was in to fix the mail server, but we then left. Earlier that day I saw my dad's boss walking back and forth trying to get something straightened out.

So, I went with the Engineer to lunch nearby; we ate and talked mostly about computers and technology. Told me lots of good Intel info, and such.

I got back, and then I started to notice some problems. Before we had left we had joined one computer into the domain; but that just screwed up the installation - well I did that to all the other computers before realizing that. I talked to the consultant about what he was doing upstairs in the server room; realized that he was taking the old Pentium 133 mail server, and replacing it with a Windows 98 - HP box. It's just a mail server, that's all - but I asked why he used such craptacular software (Office Logic), and I went back to see what was up - this is when I started running into problems.

Well, at that point the day was just getting over with and I tried to solve the problems, and I left to go home with my dad. Before I left, the engineer asked me what I had finished, and he said that I could finish it next week on Wednesday (have tests Monday and Tuesday), and Thursday and Friday if I need to. We talked about what he wanted to do with a few servers, and that was it.

I came home.

What did you do on Friday at work?

 

[TrueBuckeye]

Sounds like a fun day.

For me it was the normal get to work an hour early, work through lunch, go home at my normal time just to try and keep afloat.

Worked on a continuing issue we have had with Win2k SP4 systems having a very slow time (30+ seconds) access win2k servers if they have the Novell client installed. I finally got that fixed.

Worked on some login drive mapping issues we have been having for a Citrix application.

Did a series of administratives things on user accounts.

Checked up on people's surfing using our monitoring software...Big Brother IS watching.

Worked on getting a CAD program to print to this crap-tastic Toshiba digital copier/scanner/printer.

Built a WinXP pro system for a co-worker.

Did other standard network admin stuff like working on the backup tape rotation, etc.

Worked on trying to organize one of our division office moves which more and more is looking like a total clusterfuck.

Did some small admin stuff for a company I consult for on the side. File permission errors, a Word doc won't open, that kind of stuff.

About 30 other small, boring tasks.

 

[fibroptikl]

Sounds fun.

 

[Blitzrommel]

My last day at work...

Somewhere in early june of 2003, I was on the way to work (left my house about 5 minutes ago, about to get on I-90) and I got a phone call from work. It was one of the guys I work with, and he was like "You don't need to come into work today" and I was like, alrighty then -- and then he added "ever". I was like, what the hell? I'm getting laid off over the phone?

Turns out the company was folding and no one notified me. I was one pissed off guy. I went in anyway to get my stuff at my desk (a few pens, CDs..., anything else I can loot from the office).

 

[XOR != OR]

Setup my jabber server with some new gateway ( icq, aim and muc mainly ), which was a bit of a task itself, as I run jabber2 and the gateways need jabber1.

Also continued working on an issue with my work box. Running fedora core 1, but I can't seem to get mplayer to play MOV or AVI files. Which is odd, to say the least.

Let's see, then I made some minor modifications to the group policy for the domain, replaced a dead harddrive, fiddled with a scanner to make it work, and ordered a couple new systems.

Then I went to lunch. Afterwards, being as low maintence as this network is, I had little enough to do. But, they want me here in case anything goes wrong ( even tho I setup the systems to be self healing in case of servers blowing up or something ), so I played with the email system and my digital camera for the rest of the day.

I love my job sometimes.

 

[knucklebusted]

Let's see. In order:

1) Finished setup of Voice over IP to a site, tuned it a bit and called it done. I was in late last night to do the prelim.

2) Fine tuned a few rules on the WebSense server, tweaked a rule on the Mimesweeper, blocked a few more spam words and banned any email with the word "nigeria*" so no more Ogumbo or Umbago or anybody from the Royal/National/Federal Bank/Trust/Corp of Nigeria. Fired off emails to people that owe me replies asking WTF?

3) Worked with tech support on a product we bought that the manual is fraught with error and ommissions. Turns out the path needed another directory added to it. Guy at support says I should have known. I argued that it is there product, why did it take him a week to figure it out. Blah blah, Don't ask.

4) Went to lunch at a new place. Stuffed myself and didn't go back to work until 2:30pm. I was in till 10:30pm the night before.

5) Sat through a demo on Cisco's Secure Network stuff. The one with the little girl that downloaded the virus. They brough two CCIE's in to help explain when we started asking non-marketing questions.

6) Discussed with boss what to do about email, Exchange, Domino, Oracle, Linux/Pop/Imap.

That's a semi normal day.

 

[Zlash]

Fine tuned a few rules on the WebSense server,

Oh no websense...I hate that damn thing. Costs too much and unfortunely we have it at work too!

 

[mutiger]

My Friday was like every other day this week--sucky. A handful of downed/hacked mail/web servers and lots (and I mean lots) of very PO'd customers to deal with. Change controls locking me out of the servers...worthless management who can't help to correct the access problems....

I swear, if what happened to "Blitzrommel" happens to me, I might thank the person on the other end of the phone for finally bringing an end to this nightmarishly bad decision to move down here and take this wretched job.

 

[IceWindus]

1 Woke up, sicker then I was all week, Ate some mega man pills, water and some cereal and drove to work

2. Took phone and support calls

3. Finished up preparing new computer for a rich clients son.

4. Went to a large petroluem company founders house who's company we provide business solutions with. The founder is also my fathers boss. Arrived at his million dollar ranch way outside of town were he breeds, races and sells thoughrbred horses and his wife decorates the house all day. *their retired*

Almost tripped over the several chickens they have running around and petted the baby goat. Got inside his house and got attacked by his little shit annoying mini snauzer dog and licked by his huge Siberian Husky. Went to his work room to fix his email problem which turned out his email account was so full of spam that the server couldn't send it to his remote slow dial up connection and ended up having to call and have them empty it out. Talked to him why he couldn't get wireless internet due to it being line of sight and that satellite is a total joke.

5. Came back to work and started to feel the antihistomeans kicking in and tried to drive home but stopped at mall parking lot and slept and at some chicken and rice for lunch

6. Came back to work, loaded up the petroleum companys founders fathers sons new computer and drove to his million dollar mansion up on the hill area of my town.

7. Spent the rest of the day taking down his old HP computer, setting up the new one and installing a crappy Lexmark printer that refused to install correctly on Windowx XP and I had to end up doing the reverse process of what the instructions told me to do. Only to end up having the printer not print color correctly and spent an hour trying to clean the cartridges, alighn them and every other trick to no avail.

Tried to find his wife by wandering around the mansion and found her in the large living room watching in their 50" plasma screen feeding the baby. Asked her were I could get some paper towel and water to clean the ink tanks with. She said in the kitchen. Walked into this kitchen thats like half the size of my house and had to figure out how to get this gold plated faucet work and took me a few mins to get it to turn on.

Cleaned up the wiring behind the desk which was a total disaster *im a neat freak when it comes to wiring*

Had to be REAL careful not to scratch his new cherry oakwood desk or trip into the grand piano behind his desk.

8. Then spent a good portion of time explaining to him why Lexmarks printers just plain suck and told him to return it and get an HP which actually work outa the damn box. For the record, Epson printers suck too.

9. Moved the old HP computer downstairs and removed 3 year old MaCafee Antivirus *what is with with people and thinking their protected with 3 year old out of date antivirus software?* and setting up their MSN accounts upstairs and down, and then had to give a tutorial on proper usage of the photo printer and using the our CITRIX client software so he could remotely access his email from companys server. Had to move oak desk to get wires in and out in the HUGE laundry room, complete with TV.

Tried not to gawk to much at the bar area downstairs complete with another projection screen TV, pool table, leather chairs and sofas, air hockey table *Must be nice to be rich*

10. Told them that they could get DSL now after FINALLY getting the coverage expanded and how we could hook them up both up and downstairs and what Qwest will do to their phone lines. Told them the desighners of the house were really stupid not to put in ethernet cabling and jacks in major room of the house which will make it alot easier for their daughters to have internet access.

11.Explained the need to have an Antivirus with always online connection like DSL, expecially with 4 teenage daughters that arn't what we call "smart" with the internet.

12. Got to see his 4 teenager girls from his second wifes marriage come home from school which proceeded to giggle and laugh at me everytime I went up the huge staircase to the upper floor of the mansion. Then got to hold his new baby girl they had this week. Then he wanted to make a joke with my father so I held the baby girl and his wifes sister stood next to me and he took a picture with his new sony digital camcorder and was going to send it to my father *very very weird*

7 Finally left near six o'clock. Drove to Wal-Mart to get some supplies. Drove home, ordered a nice large Pizza Hut pepporoni pizza and took a nice long bubble bath and played Far Cry into the night

 

[grethor]

took the transmission out of a land rover

 

[Blitzrommel]

You guys got it easy.

 

[draconius]

hmmmm
i will have some interesting days coming up....
got a call from a place that went and bought exchange pro so that they could have a shared calendar between 10 employees and same # of computers....but they have no server, and most of the boxes running win98.....

I have to do some reading on CAL's for exchange and such now....

OR

I am going to tell them they wasted thier money, go to http://freshmeat.net and find an open source product that does what they want , set up a nice little bsd box and away they go.


grrrrr
im REALLY lookin forward to it

 

[Morpheus256]

got an order from our usual business client who orders everything at the last minute....had to build 10 workstations, install windows, compleatly configure, all for the next day...

came back from lunch at micky d's where i got 2 big macs, 3 single cheese burgers, 1 large fry and a large coke (i work fast and ghost is a god)
had to deal with repairs where people cant understand how they get virus's when norton is installed yet it keeps telling them to update their service.

sold a few brand new systems, delt with more bitchy customers, burned a few dvd's containing some new data to take home, got in my truck, drove home, "unloaded" and played farcry.

anyone have any tips for them monkeys? they seem to enjoy beating my ass into the ground

 

[animeguru]

Lets see here...

Showed up at 8am

Finished touching up pics of naked women in preparation for the weekly updates.

Surfed the [H]

Wrote a couple of pages of HTML by hand.

Updated the website with the new pics.

Grabbed some lunch.

Surfed the [H]

Answered questions for the others in the office about why their computers are always locking up. Made general fixes and told them to tell the boss to stop making the comptuer decisions without asking me first.

Answered the same questions for everyone else in the office.

Show people how to make extremely basic changes to HTML and JavaScripts that I've answered a thousand times before.

Surfed the [H]

Got a call from the boss that PC Anywhere locked up the server again and can I reboot it. Mumbled something about PC Anywhere sucking, but saved my breath on someone who just won't listen.

Surfed the [H]

Left at 4pm for the weekend.

 

[Nybbles]

How come you guys get to do all the cool stuff??

I get to work and check on the servers. Then I sat and surfed the net. Then I took a break and walked around a little. I sat and surfed some more, posted a couple things to [H], the surfed some more. I answered a couple easy user questions, then I took lunch (company bought us all pizza).

After lunch, I changed out the backup tapes, removing last nights to take home with me, and re-inserting the previous nights tapes. Then I surfed some more.

My days arent ALWAYS list this. Until about a week ago, I had been SLAMMED with work for the last couple months. And soon, we will start on a network upgrade project. (We as in "I", cuz I'm the only IT guy, along with a guy from this company we contract with.) That project will be kinda cool.

The guys that designed and implemented this network a few years ago did a damn good job. I NEVER have any major issues with it. The whole thing practically runs itself.

 

[Zepher]

I had to go to North Carolina to a Sign Printing Shop to finish setting up the network they are using.

They have 2 PC's that they use for the Sign programs and 3 Printers and 2 Vinyl Cutters.

The local guy screwed up the setup when he installed a new PC and couldn't get the stuff to work right. It worked better with the older PC's they had before the local guy "fixed" it all up.

So we built another machine to replace thier older one so that they would have 2 up to date machines and we set off to NC to install it.

We got there, installed the new machine and moved all the files from the old to the new and I proceeded to fix everything up so that they could work in a much more streamlined manner.

The first thing was getting the 3 printers to print from the HP Jetdirect Print server they had there. Apparently the local guy didn't know how to setup the print server so the sign guys had to keep swapping the printer cables to the PC that they wanted to print from and not using the print server at all.

I hooked up the 3 printers to the server, set the printers to print to the correct ports on the server. Did the same to the new PC we installed and now both PC's could print to any of the 3 printers without having to touch any cables.

Another issue they had was that 3 of the programs used hardware keys, one USB and 2 Parallel port ones.
The easy solution to the Parallel port ones were to use an A/B switch box hooked to each PC's parallel ports and have the 2 keys attached together inline and hooked to the switch box. Now they could choose which computer could run the software without phsyically moving those parallel keys around.
The USB key still needs to move around but since there are USB ports on the front of the machines it is not a big deal since it is so easy to plug in and remove. I have no idea if you can use a USB hub and hook both PC's to it and the USB Key. I'll look into that and see what I can find.

The final portion was getting the 2 PC's to access the 2 Cutters which are serial Printer devices and hook up to the Com Ports.
Since most new PC's only have one Com Port, we added a Dual Com port card to the New PC we installed and hooked up the Cutters to it. (Originally, he had to swap the cables to choose the cutter he wanted to use).
The problem with these cutters is that they aren't isntalled into Windows, the programs themselves access them internally and just send the data to the Com Port. Since I am kind of a newbie to networking, I couldn't figure out how to get the 2nd PC to access the Com Ports on the First PC through the network and use the cutters. So the solution was to add another 2 Com Port card to the 2nd machine and use 2 A/B switch boxes for the 2 cutters.

So we get there Friday with the 2 switch boxes and all the cabling, hook everything up and now the PC's aren't talking to the cutters.
So we start to troubleshoot and figure out what the problem is.
Come to find out that those cutters use Serial Printer cables, which I wasn't aware of and all the cabling we bought was straight 25 to 25 from the cutters to the switch boxes and 25 to 9 from the boxes to the PC's. Went online and found the pinouts for a serial printer cable and I was debating on hacking up a cable to repin it or hacking up the switch boxes. I decided to modify the switch boxes and repin them internally. finished modifying the first box, tested it out and it worked so I proceeded to mod the second box.

When I was finished, both PC's can access the 3 printers and the 2 cutters without touching a cable, all they need to do is turn a knob.

The client was so happy when we were done and his wife was amazed that we had no formal training in what we were doing and how smoothly we got everything running. We just learned on our own working on our own PC's at the house over the years.
Oh, and I got really lucky with the HP print server since I just recently bought one a few weeks earlier. Prior to getting one, I had no knowledge on how they worked.

 

[knucklebusted]

Originally posted by animeguru
Lets see here...

Showed up at 8am

...

Surfed the [H]

...

Grabbed some lunch.

Surfed the [H]

...

Surfed the [H]

...

Surfed the [H]

Left at 4pm for the weekend.

Dang! Just to show you how honest I am, I have control of the rules in WebSense and "I" can't surf hardforums at work! Oh, before you say anything, I also have the logger/reporter in my office and I "STILL" don't surf the hardforums at work. <sigh>