sitzmar! do what now?

progress update

With the end of the quarter quickly approaching, not to mention graduation and the end of my employment with ResTek, I've been trying to finish up BITS (basic inventory tracking system) along with documenting anything I had my grubby little hands on, which is quite a bit.

BITS is conceptually complete, meaning that the framework for everything that it needs to do is in place. However the frontend still needs work to improve the its useability. Then testing, and more testing. I got a lot of useful feed back from the Kulshan meeting today, so I'm looking to get a lot of this done in the next few days.
20 days till graduation. yikes!

Windows WMF vulnerability

There's been a lot of news about this latest windows exploit, and Websense Labs has this video of what happens when a machine becomes infected. It's really quite surprising how much happens once the vulerability is exploited. Not only that, but the lengths the worm goes to to look like legitimate software.

SANS Article
Websense Labs Video

ropes course photos

I finally got a data cable for my cellphone, and was able to pull off the photos that I took way back when we did the ropes course.

Check them out over at Flickr

new registration feature

At kulshan meeting today, Leo suggested that it would be very helpful for students as well as the consultant staff if there was a way to view which windows updates a student was missing according to the security detector on one of the registration pages. That way, we could enable students to be proactive and solve their own problems, as well as make it easier for consultants to troubleshoot while on room visits.

Since I forgot that the bus schedule changes a after 6:00, I found myself with an extra 45 minutes to burn, so I went and implemented it. When requested it will spit out a list of microsoft kb numbers that correspond to the missing updates and link into the microsoft search.

I still need to do more testing before making it live, but I think it's functionally complete.

fall opening

Fall Opening - Day 3:
Mood: Ugh... X-|

Spent the better part of the day setting up the various labs for the obstacle course tomorrow morning. With the help of nad, Daniel, Josh and Annie, we were able to get everything set and ready to rock in a reasonable amount of time. All the DVD's for phase 2 are burned and ready. My fingers are crossed that everything goes smoothly tomorrow. Once its over, I will be very relieved and grateful to be able to get back to my programming duties.

new toys!

So like nick mentioned, we got our new servers today. I took a bunch of pictures of this joyous occasion. Here's the highlights.

Nick and Pat unpacking the boxes

PowerEdge super stack

The guts

Look at them itty-bitty fans

Can't remember if anybody has already posted the specs, but here they are again:
- 2.8GHz/1MB Cache, Xeon 800MHz FSB
- 1GB DDR2 400MHz (2X512MB) Single Ranked DIMMs
- 80GB 7.2K RPM SATA HDD
- 24X, Internal, SAMSUNG CD

I'm really looking forward to getting these up and running, particularly the redundant hall server. Those two boxes will also be getting bumped up to 2GB of memory and have a secondary hard drive installed. (WD Raptor)

work work work

It didn't seem like it before, but a lot happened today. We got a feature request for the conference services app to allow editing of the start and end dates of a conference. The request was one of those "why didn't we do this in the first place" things. I set to work on that early this afternoon, and have most of it done, all that's left is to do some error checking and a bit of testing. 24 hour turnaround time on a feature request is pretty darn good if you ask me.

Over the past few days, Nick and I have been researching different vendor solutions for migrating our current servers over to 1U rackmount boxes. Dell, HP and NW Computers were all able to offer ideal solutions that fit what we were looking for, however Dell's pricing was much more easier on the wallet. We'll know in a few days how many of the little guy's we'll be able to get. Then comes the fun part of planning out the deployment, and deciding on an OS. The focus right now is on whether to go with a bsd like we did on our filter boxes, or some flavor of linux, likely suse or gentoo.

Nick, being a hippy linux nerd favors gentoo. While I, an elitest cs major, favor the bsd's. To be fair, we both have good reasons supporting our decisions, but since it's my blog, I get to be right.

Oh, and as a late afternoon surprise, we got to test out iPrint on our lab printers. Thanks Greg!
Students have commented in the past on how nice it would be if they could print to a lab printer from their own computer. We've looked into providing this in the past, but could never find away to do so without the hassle of installing the novell client on the students' machine. With iPrint, the user only has to install the novell internet print agent, and select the printer they want to print to from the list. The agent automates downloading the drivers, adding the printer, and best of all, it handles all of the user authentication.

While this is still a long ways off from being production ready, it's awesome to see it in action.

productivity++

Yesterday the dualhead video cards we ordered for our office machines arrived. They're nothing fancy, 64Meg Geforce MX4000, but still much better than the integraded intel chipset.

Gnome 2.10 with Twinview enabled is a beautiful thing.

thats a lotta downloads

congrats guys!

something is wrong here

no clue how that one happened. It just showed up.
Can't get rid of the little bugger either.

edit: After a reboot, windows decided that it really wasn't a critical system folder, and let me delete it. But there goes my 20 days of up time...