Bodega boys

We became bodega (warehouse) boys for the day. The company was up for a surveillance audit on its ISO 14001:1996 environmental management system, and a clean-up of the IT store room was long overdue.

The clean-up was exhausting, but fun. We had to wade through old computers and peripherals, sort out cables and cabling components, and
inventory stock parts and equipment. It was also a pleasant surprise to see old -- and I mean, *really* old -- user manuals for IBM PS/2s, RS600s (which, by the way, has recently been recommissioned to serve as a Lotus Domino proxy connected to the VSAT network of the DA NIN project), and even a TRS-80. Also gathering dust were docs for Harvard Graphics, Windows 3.11, and DOS 3.3! Now, *that's* really old.

I remembered DOS back in high school: the all-too-familiar phosphorescent green C:> prompt flashing on a black background. No BSDs back then, and Wordstar was the workhorse of many writer-wannabes. I thought I was high tech because I used Wordstar to turn in term papers -- I used to brandished them, with their neat full-justified text printed out double-spaced in fixed-width font. For scientific formulas and mathematical expressions, nothing beats Chi Writer. I wonder were all those great apps has gone?

God I missed the MS-DOS command line. Not.

DOS did help in my transition to Unix and Linux. It made comfortable with the CLI, but that's about all it did for me.

Anyway, back to the present: the IT guy from another agency came over to look at our AD setup and help us with our network config problems. He said something about making the IP subnets closer to each other.

I don't know, but I don't think IP or subnetting are the issue why Win98 hosts have difficulty authenticating against the AD. After all, both subnets have the same gateway so traffic between them are routed, and AD works on subnets so no problems there. The hosts can get DHCP leases from the server, but they have a hard time resolving hosts on the other subnet.

I'm not sure that the problem is as basic as that, though, since in the lab setup we did, all went okay. It's when we started rolling out that problems started to appear. I am now more determined as ever to try out the pGINA route. I have yet to find support for Win98 hosts, however.

Jeez, it's a new month already, and I'm still tied up with the network config. Gotta get out of it real quick so I can focus on the web redesign, intranet design and online services for the Open Academy.