« April 16, 2004 | Main | April 21, 2004 »

April 19, 2004

Windows 2003 and a very long weekend

I've just finished the longest weekend project to date at the station this past Saturday and Sunday. I was there from 10am till 1:30am on Saturday and 10am till 12:30am on Sunday. Grand total of 30 hours for the two days. What really amazes me is that I put almost an entire weeks work of work into two days.

Anyhow, the reason for the long weekend was our changeover to Windows 2003. I'm happy to say that the move was a smashing success, with only minor issues that needed to be resolved today. The biggest headache throughout the day were the people that came up to me expecting help when they didn't bother to follow the instructions that I sent out on Thursday. I would ask people "did you print out the instructions that I sent you?" and when they replied no, I told them to find someone that had them and have them help.

It sounds mean, but this is how you have to treat these people.

If I spent all my time showing people how to log into the system, when they should've had the proper instructions in the first place, it would've taken away from more important things like making sure that directories had proper permissions, printers were mapped properly, and keeping a close eye on the new file server to see how it was handling the load. I told Neal that I was going to make people who followed instructions the top priority, and make my way down from there. What was really nice was that he stepped in when necessary, getting people off my back when they weren't following directions.

I have great bosses.

We encountered a weird issue towards the end of the day with the NAS. It locked out of Explorer and it was physically impossible to log into the system. I'm not quite sure why, but it definately caused a few problems for me. So, we setup something that I've never tried before ... using a scheduled task to run a script that reboots a remote machine. I'm having one of our domain controllers reboot the NAS remotely, using the new shutdown.exe that comes with Win2k3. What's really interesting about the new shutdown.exe is that it reports why a machine is shutting down, keeping track of everything in a log. So, we had to setup a script that had the following flags:

/r - reboots the machine
/m \\server - reboots a remote server
/f - forces the shutdown in case if there's anything running
/d p:00:00 - logs the shutdown and the reason behind it

Anyhow, our NAS is now scheduled to reboot tomorrow morning at 12:30am. If everything goes correctly, the machine will be booted within roughly 5-10 minutes and no one will even notice that the system was even down. I choose the specific time as there's really no one at the station around that time, and the people that are don't really need much access to files or printing, nor will they be logging in and out of the system.

Well, I'm tired now so I think I will retire for the night.

Posted by ed at 08:07 PM | Comments (0)