Windows is easy?

In linux, if you need to schedule a particular ethernet interface to enable and disable at a certain time, you set a cron job to start the interface when desired, and another to stop it. That's just the solution tha I know about from my experiance with Linux. the fact is, Linux actually has a command that enables and disables your ethernet connection, among other things.

Windows is quite a different story. For a client whose backups we just picked up, we need to enable a second network card during the night, and disable before work starts in the morning. Not so easy. Sure you have ipconfig....a very powerful command on the windows platform...as long as want to know about your interface configuration. If you search really hard, you find netsh. From what I can see, it's main use is with command line firewall rules. It does have a place that looks like it'd help. You can export the configuration of your interface, reset the configuration, clearing it out, and then later import the configuration back in. Sounds like it might work, not exactly elegant or anything, but it might work. In practice...it does a fine job of exporting out your config, a fine job of resetting your confi...oh wait...I still have internet...oh look at that, ipconfig says i have an ip address...but then again, netsh and the GUI network connections says i have nothing...What exactly is this reset command for then!!!

Now you have to realize, that feeling of utter accomplishment was starting to cover me as I thought I'd found the solution to this, and then everything came crashing down around me like the little pig's brick house after the wolf discovered TNT.

The One About Work

When I started working here at SnowTECH Group a year ago I figured I would be working on business workstations and servers. I wouldn't shouldn't I think that? That's what he said the company did... Since then I've had my fair share of having to take apart laptops to fix internal issues and even a brother laser printer internal laser printer replacement, but that's still close to what I originally thought I'd be facing.

XBOX repair though? That I never forsaw, and yet I've already had to replace the power supply on one XBOX. There is another in the shop now with a bad hard drive, and yet another that will donate the contents of it's hard drive.

I felt the need to post this after I realized I was on XBOX modding web sites trying to figure out how to hack an XBOX hard drive and the thought "Who does this at work!?" went through my head.

Christmas Day in NC

I can't imagine what road trips must have been like years ago before electronics. Imagine have to sit in the car and pick out different license plates and look at the scenery....trees....trees...town....trees....river... Okay so I remember those days too....Every road trip we took when I was young was like that. But this weekend we are driving up to Rockingham, NC to see our relatives for the Christmas holiday. It's a four hour drive from Greenville, SC where we live. There are three laptops packed into the car, three digital cameras, one Sony PSP, and at least two cell phones...I think one or two of us forgot one. I listened to music on the old Gateway Pentium laptop until the battery died (about 2 hours). Popped out the disc, pulled out the Hewlett Packard Celeron from work, popped in the disc, started it up, and was back to the music. Daniel played the PSP for the first two hours and it's been quiet most of the trip...except for that part in Charolotte where i pulled out the headphone plug and we all listened to some bluegrass and selected other music. I realize that for the most part, we are missing the scenery and the car plates from other parts of the country, but part of me is saying that I've seen so many small towns, trees, and car plates that it's rather old by now. Those trips usually wind up in people poking other people and getting bored as well. Where as on this technology ridden trip I am able to share the music connection with daniel and type up this blog post, glancing out the window every now and then to check the scenery.

So here I am in the hotel at rockingham. There is one wireless network nearby but it's encrypted. I just figured out that the old phones are on a phone system and you have to dial 9. Now if only I had remembered to get an access number to bellsouth from this area. So I called a friend back home, he went on bellsouth's site and got the number. So here I am, connected at 31.2Kbps....and of all things...posting a blog post :-/ Technology! pfft...

Ice

Greer, South Carolina iced over today. They canceled school, public works put salt and dirt on some intersections and glanced at that brand new snow blower that's gotta be 2 years old now, and many people simply assumed that ice makes your car go in a straight line faster....their attempts to test this theory were met with sirens...many sirens...Another fun side effect of ice was the many tree limbs that couldn't stand the pressure. Power went out all over the place. The office power went soon after I showed up for work, parent's house lost power early on. My house wasn't affected, and my UPS took care of any occasional slips that the power company experienced. The beetle took the whole situation rather well and became rather skilled at dodging fallen branches. Especially the two big ones that are rather close to each other at the other end of my street.

July 11, 2005 4:11AM At Work

Going through my files today at work, I found this: (enjoy)

From July 11, 2005

It's 4:11 in the morning. I'm on a Hewlett Packard ze5300 laptop. It's riddled with spyware, but I don't have a power cord to actually get down and dirty and clean it up. I'll pick that up tomor...erm today. I'm still up becuase of a Dell Dimension 4550, it's also riddled with spyware (isn't windows fun?) I've been running adaware scans on it most of the night (HP's laptop keyboard rather sucks!) and still no signs of slowing up. It found 1024 critical to begin with under safe mode, the other users came back with around 100 each, except for the third user (the spacebar is awful) who decided to up and freeze, that's when I bumped the video cable while installing a new motherboard into a Hewlett Packard Media Center PC (notice a trend here? don't buy hp/compaq and dell :) ) Okay, so the video cable was bumped, the picture went out (that backspace is too far away) and I noticed the AGP card scoot back some from it's slot (case closed) So I shut it down, and open up the case...the little plastic thingy that is supposed to hold the cards in came out, insert long screw through plastic and agp card here...problem solved and luckily it booted again...so now i'm suffering through more scans under normal mode with that problem user...(uggh i want to be on my mac...or even better..in bed) Tomorrow I have to deliver ink, to like every local client we have...(having tap to select on the mousepad turned off sucks too!) then I have to go miles out to a trucking company and pick up the power supply for this computer and if I finish it (which I won't) drop off the home workstation build. (Nice i shut off wireless and battery went from 56minutes to 1:08 minutes in the course of typing this) So anyway, here I sit, bored, listening to the vocal trance radio station on itunes and surfing the internet during scans. Yes, this is probably a crap post, but I'm tired and had a sudden urge to type a bunch of random words in notepad on a Hewlett Packard laptop...urge fulfilled (bleh, "Your Computer is infected" just popped up, I hate this operating system)