On Saturday I went to a buddy of mine’s client to fix her wireless networking problem. It seemed she had a Toshiba Tecra with Win95 on it and the D-Link wireless card stopped connecting to the AP. I got there and was informed that her company had reimaged the machine with Windows 2000. I stuck the card in and the OS saw the card loaded the drivers and rebooted. When the laptop came back up it connected to the Ap with out a problem and was able to get out onto the Internet. So after proving that she could get o n the internet from any where in her house she proceeded to tell me that she also couldn’t connect to her companies VPN. She tried it and it still didn’t work so while I was there she called the company’s help desk. We were told by the helpdesk dweb after we explained the whole setup to him. That they didn’t support the software through a home firewall and that we should connect the computer directly into the users cable modem. I then pointed out that that would put the company’s laptop out there for all the little script kiddies to attack. The best was he gave us a web site with suggestions on getting things working, but the site was on the company’s internal network…it just makes me cry on the caliber of today’s helpdesk personnel.

Rant
If you are a company that is going to put out a VPN solution to your users so they can work at home you need to design your software so it will work through home firewalls like the ones found in today’s cable/dsl/wirelessrouters.
/Rant

Finally got Red Hat 9 downloaded and installed on the laptop. The install is getting much easier and much more professional looking. The nice thing was I didn’t need to load the linux-wlan drivers for my wireless card. They finally got the hermer/orinoco_cs working with my card right out of the box. The other nice thing is Red Hat finally seems to have started using a better set of fonts so looking at the screen is much better and surfing the web so far has been a lot less painful to look at. I hope to write a quick review of RH 9 soon so check back soon

Other then that not much going on today. Just doing allot of little things on the servers that I have been putting off.

Going to try and get the XP roll out figured out for work today and try and get a list of software I will need to upgrade for the roll out. I already know that I am going to have to upgrade the Norton Anti virus to the newest version but that won’t be to bad. I think that will be it for right now.

I will also be putting in about 512 meg of ram and a nice Nvidia Gforce4 card and 2 40 gig drives in each. I am hoping to get these machines done after I get the office done.

Spending the day today working on the office and figuring out the positions of the new electric boxes and Cat 5 drops. Then I hope to get the room ready for a little strucktalight and then wall board in the next week or so.

Right now watching the 2nd Harry Potter movie that Del and Nat let Avery borrow while they are on vacation.

Got my cousin Ira set up with a little spot on the INTERNET. Stop by and say hi. His spot is at www.bilancio.net/~iratech.

I just got this link e-mailed to me. I think work some of these people. Give Computer Stupidities a read and get a good laugh.

One of the guys picked up the server for Harrisburg last night. I broke down and wiped Linux off and put NT 4.0 on because I just didn’t have the time to keep beating on the samba server part of it. I hope to have it all done before lunch today and have the 2 users in that office running off of that server.

Bosses laptop came in yesterday. Nice piece of equipment, a Dell Inspirion 8500. Light, big screen and fast. It has everything from firewire to USB 2.0. Wish I could get one just to test with Linux. From what I found on the web all stuff is supported right down to the onboard wireless card.

Got Avery’s parent teacher conference today. I hope all goes well and that she brought her grades up from last marking period. So I won’t be around much this afternoon.