3 posts tagged “work”
This is the PC I use at work. I hate it.
You are looking at an Elonex ProSentia with an underwhelming 1.2 GHz Celeron processor and a pant-wetting 256 MB in RAM. The hard disk seems to run at 4K - I don't care what it says on the goddamned label.
Earlier today I decided I needed to look something up on Google. From the moment of making this momentous decision to getting the results page took THREE MINUTES!!!!
Don't go looking for an Elonex PC in the shops. Because they've gone bankrupt.
Recently I thought I'd see if I could run my PC at work without NetBIOS. In the bad old days NetBIOS was the only way to see your network, and it's a chatty little fella. Here we are in the 21st century and we have Active Directory, DNS and no need of WINS so you'd think everything would be rocking in the free world. Not quite.
While I can do everything else I'd expect, I can't browse. For me this is not a great hardship but if I was going to implement this change across my network I'd expect a small number of users to be quite upset about this.
[Sidenote: Those of you who work in tech support know that, whatever you do, there's always a small number of users who are upset about whatever change you make no matter how beneficial. If I turned all the Cat5 cable into gold, making everyone an instant millionaire, they'd still complain that they prefered 'em when they were lighter.]
So what are my options. Well the most obvious solution is to switch NetBIOS on for them and have it switched off by default for everyone else who (most likely) won't notice. Sounds fine but it offends my purest sensibilities. I mean, c'mon, are we switching off NetB or aren't we?!?!
I came across a promising solution here where dsfolder.dll is copied from a Win2k server to my XP workstation and registered. This allows me to browse all the computers via Active Directory. Problem solved, right? Nope. It just doesn't behave the way any user would expect because as soon as you double-click on a machine name all it does is show a property sheet and right-clicking provides no useful options. Drat!
So it looks on this occasion that the non-purist approach is going to be the way to go. I guess it's called pragmatism.
In moments when I've had a little spare time at work I've been writing Ruby scripts that could make my life a bit easier. Mostly I've been looking at automation. The other day it occured to me that it should be a fairly simple process to create a webpage with which users can request user accounts and for someone in the support team to just press a button and "make it so". It'd stop lots of needless repetition and it'd also mean I can delegate rights to users on my team by using the webpage as a kind of proxy.
So I came across the first hurdle today: how do I get Ruby to deal with authentication?
Well LDAP seems just the man for the job but unfortunately the library is a bit of a pig to install. There are these instructions here which require about half a GB of downloads before you even get started. On my elderly PC at work this took about four hours to run. Stupid computer.
Then I scroll down that page and see that some awfully nice chap has pre-compiled one right here. Praise be!
So now I have ldap working I can use this nifty activedirectory library and authentication is as easy as falling off an ice floe into the mouth of an enormous penguin. Never before has icy death been so convenient.
