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Building-Tux.com
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DAVE'S LOG O' STUFF 11/03/03 - 11/09/03 Monday * Tuesday * Wednesday * Thursday * Friday * Saturday * Sunday After that I headed to Norristown. I walked through an Alcatel upgrade with another tech. Unfortunately, we ran into problems. Although I followed our procedure, I was unable to get the brand-spankin-new MPM-III to retain our password. Rather, it kept going back to Alcatel's default. I then tried the same upgrade on another MPM-III and it worked OK. So, it looks like we have a bad card, which is going to put a crimp in our upgrade schedule. Speaking of which, I finally got approval for the upgrade I requested to do tonight starting at five after midnight. It's for our Omni3 at Wayne Avenue. Aside from upgrading the box's code, I'm also going to install a couple T1 surge suppressors and put the box on a UPS. The genius that installed it just plugged it into the wall. Since I need to be down in the 'hood at midnight, I best be getting something to eat and be off to get some rest.
The upgrade last night went smoothly, except for a glitch with
my access card. I had to go back outside to my van after the
upgrade itself was done, to get my bag of rack screws so that I could
attach the ground wires from the two T1 surge suppressors to the
rack. My card got me inside the building but no longer worked to
open the door to the equipment room. After some choice
profanities, I found a cable tech who let me back in. But I need
to go back Thursday or Friday to get that straightened out.
#@#$%^! PITA. After I got up I ran down to Lower Merion to get the last of
our MPM-III cards, so that I could do a test upgrade on it.
Thankfully, it worked ok. Later, I took the apparently bad card
over to Moorestown for our resident Alcatel engineer to run some diags
on, and get us a replacement if necessary. Alexandra is going tomorrow to get the tubes put in here ears,
which should take care of the problem she's been having with fluid build
up. We need to have her at the CHOP outpatient facility in
Chalfont at 0635. So, we're getting up at 0500. Ugh. Alexandra got the tubes in her ears this morning and the
procedure went well. And another Alcatel upgrade goes into the history books. It went very smoothly -- I arrived at about 0450 and was out of the customer site by 0525. Aside from upgrading the box, I installed an APC PNET Ethernet surge suppressor between the customer's router and the Omni5, and cleaned the fibers on the OC3 uplink, which needs to be done every so often at this site. It's an indoor sports arena, and when they hold events like motocross inside, dust gets into everything. Last Sunday I ordered a single-hook AK G2 fire control group
from Tapco, along with a couple of "used" Hungarian AMD-65
magazines. I put used in quotes because my order came today and
the mags look like they were made yesterday, with just a couple scuffs
from handling and storage. Not bad for $5.99 each. The
attraction of the AMD-65 mags is that unlike most AK magazines, they
hold 20 rounds instead of 30. This makes them shorter, lighter,
and handier. Twenty rounds should be enough to handle any
situation I'd run into as a civilian, and they're also less likely to
monopod when shooting from a bench or prone. The G2 FCG is to replace the POS components that Hesse used
when they modified my Saiga Sporter into an AK-103 look-alike. The
reason that it started malfunctioning on me when I had it out the last
time is that the hammer peened where it's hit by the bolt, which formed
a lip. This lip got caught on the disconnector, preventing the
rifle from firing. I filed the lip off but I wouldn't be
surprised if the peening recurred. So, I figured I'd order one of
Tapco's G2 FCGs, which were formerly made by Gordon Tech. They
have a good reputation so I'm hoping it's money well spent. I'll
install the FCG this week and hopefully get the rifle and new mags up to
the range on Sunday. No post. I spent a good part of Friday over in Moorestown for user acceptance testing for the new release of our Clarify CRM system. It's still a POS but it's getting better. Yesterday morning I went to a new client, one of my neighbor's brother. He has a Dell purchased within the last four months that he was having problems doing anything on. Sometimes he couldn't access the CD-RW or DVD drives, other times he had problems getting online. Aside from the Dell he also has an old Micron P-II and needed to move his Quicken data over to the new box. He also got a new Netgear wireles broadband router and USB 802.11b NIC for his Dell Inspiron running Windows ME (barf). Both desktops were running when I got there but his priority was to get the Dell into usable shape. I'd warned him ahead of time that by the way he described things I might have to blow away the hard disk and restore everything using Dell's restore CD. Thankfully, that turned out to not be necessary. The first thing I did was to bring up XP's Task Manager, which elicited a "Holy cow!" from me. The system was full of more spyware that any other box I've seen. I manually killed a bunch of process trees and the system showed immediate improvement. I then loaded Spybot Search & Destroy from my homebrewed PC Toolkit CD, updated it, and let it run. The full search took about 10 minutes after which I had Spybot remove a ton of crap. After getting the spyware taken care of I ran Windows Update to apply a pile of critical and security updates. The spyware was largely due to his kids downloading anything and everything onto the box. One step I took to partially reduce this in the future was to set their accounts up as "Limited Users," rather than admins. After cleaning the Dell up I installed Mozilla 1.5 as his default browser. To my surprise, he'd not only heard of Mozilla, his IT people at work setup his PC at his office with it. So he was very amenable to using Moz, especially after I explained that it's less vulnerable to spyware and has a built-in popup blocker. The Micron is running Windows 98 and no longer properly shuts down, which is no surprise. I changed the RAM setting to "Network server," which helps a little, cleaned up the C:\Windows\Temp directory, and ran MS Regclean three or four times until it stopped finding errors. I Scandisked the drive which found and fixed some errors. Then, I rebooted it into Safe Mode and tried to defrag the hard disk. The first time I ran defrag it crashed about 49% of the way through. I rebooted the box into Safe Mode again, and re-ran defrag. This time it made it to 79% and sat there for about 10 minutes. At that point I gave up on it and rebooted into normal mode so I could backup and transfer his Quicken data files. I've never used Quicken before* but it was easy to transfer the data. In the new Quicken 2004 package there's a flyer describing how to move data from one PC to another. All you need to do is open Quicken on the old box, go to File > Backup and follow the prompts. Then move the backup thus created to the new PC. Open Quicken on the new box and go to File > Restore Backup File, and select the backup file. The program then imports the data and if it's from an older version, changes it to Quicken 2004 format. Both desktops were sharing his Comcast cable modem connection via a Siemens router, which simplified data transfer. I setup Microsoft Networking on the Dell and Micron so it was just a matter of drag and drop. The next thing to take care of was his new Netgear MR814 wireless broadband router. He wanted to leave the Siemens router in place and just hookup the Netgear as a WAP. No problem. Before doing so I looged into the Netgear to configure it, though. I had to turn off the DHCP server and change the LAN IP to fit in with his current IP scheme. I also changed the SSID and setup 128 bit WEP encryption. (I know, WEP sucks but it's better than nothing.) I then hooked it up to the Siemens router, using one of the Netgear's LAN ports. With the Netgear router configured, we turned our attention to his laptop. While I was working on the other PCs he'd booted it into Safe Mode to defrag the disk. We now installed his Netgear MA111 USB 802.11b NIC. It installed easily and placed an icon for the config utility in the system tray. Once I changed the SSID and WEP on the laptop to match the router, it was immediately online. I know it's based on limited experience, but my first impression of the Netgear wireless stuff is very favorable. The router in particular has a very nice Web UI and appears to offer a lot of good features. I'm tempted to get one myself. My client mentioned to me that before calling his brother to see if he knew anyone who could take care of his machines, he'd looked in the yellow pages for in-home computer support. He didn't find anyone. As more people get online and start having more than one PC, methinks there's a business opportunity here. * Believe it or not, while I do pay
many of my bills online, I still maintain a paper checkbook.
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