Been a While - Update Part 1

Well it certainly has been a while. What a summer. This has to have been one of the most hectic summers I've had in a very very long time.

First off there is work. From about August until about mid-September I barely got home earlier than 7pm on any given night. I've been really burning the midnight oil trying to get all the upgrades done for the labs. The funny thing is, the OS conversion from Windows 2000 to Windows XP was actually the easiest part of the whole process. What really held me up was waiting for last minute updates to several key pieces of software that had to be installed on the images themselves. This made it very difficult to create the foundation image that I use to build all the lab images for all of the 14 labs on campus.

The other thing that was hellish was waiting for the STUDENT domain to be created and set up. This really wasn't anyone's fault, as its creation was vital to future progress of the Windows infrastructure at WPI, but it still made a lot of things come down to the last minute. Also there were several glitches that weren't able to be worked out due to the lack of time in production mode for the new domain prior to student arrivals.

When the students came we (the windows team) had thought that the account creation page was fully operational but unfortunately that wasn't entirely the case. It ended up that we sat in a room on the other side of Higgins Lab doing the account creations manually for a portion of the process. After about an hour Jon got the script operational again and things have been mostly smooth on that avenue ever since.

Add to everythign else the fact that we got hit with two different viruses when students got on campus. It took a better part of the first three weeks to erradicate the majority of the virus. It still pops up now and again but we're pretty much covered at this point. I won't even get into the fact that it was propogating from a vulnerablity that was patched MONTHS ago. Hmm.... this seems VERY similar to my rant from last year.

Well at this point things are finally calming down and I look forward to some time after B term when I can take some time off and relax. :-D That's all for now. More about the summer later....