Gecko Bloggle

Thanks to Beetnik, I’m reading this little blurble in the New York Times by Dave Eggers, who wrote two books I can honestly say I’m not really sure I understood, but enjoyed the hell out of anyway. The blurb is Sixteen Tons Of Fun, and is all about Eric Idle taking the Holy Grail to Broadway.

No, really. He is. There’s a movie coming about Graham Chapman’s life, too.

Some neat history about the first season of Monty Python’s Flying Circus, which I saw for the first time EVER when I was about eight, and was sitting in Erin Fernstrom’s TV room, eating icecream and giggling my fool head off (I’d just got back from a VERY dull week away at the lake, where they ate, seemingly, nothing but salads with sunflower seeds in ’em, and MPFC combined with the icecream was a true godsend).

But yeah, David Eggers is the guy what cobbled together A Heartbreaking Work of Staggering Genius, complete with the “Rules and Suggestions for Enjoyment of This Book” section, which is a fun read in of itself, complete with the illustration of a stapler, just in case you forgot what they looked like.

You Shall Know Our Velocity is also great, about two guys setting off with a schwack of money all over the globe to commemorate their recently deceased friend (brother? can’t remember), and is the one that I had the most trouble following. Not because it’s badly written, but because I kept tripping on the excellent writing, and not paying enough attention to what was going on…

But yeah, so…

What was my point? Oh yeah, go read the NYT thing here.

Okay, so I’m following Hugh’s lead, and I’ve added a skill-testing question to my comment thingie. I’ve also added something that directs anything with more than five urls in it to a place that’ll ask you to donate $5 (go ahead, try it!) and then throw ya into the moderation queue.

That oughtta do it (famous last words).

Made it further than I have before (after rebooting the 2k3 box, ’cause any time I tried to log into it with the GeckoTemple domain account it was complaining that the RPC was unavailable). If this works, I’m a happy man.
Oop. Wait.

Getting the ADPrep thing, ’cause I didn’t do that (and I’m a bad man).

So from my w2k box, I map to the cdrom for Win2k3, and in the i386 directory run adprep /forestprep and then (after the second try) I hit “c” and then Enter instead of just enter (which cancels) Read the freakin’ screen, man.

Now it says: “Adprep successfully updated the forest-wide information.”

This is equally wonderful and frightening. I guess that’s why I got into this crazy biz.

Okay, so it’s all finished, and asked me to reboot. I think we are, in the words of Jodie Foster, “okay to go“

Okay, so I thought I’d try to get all smartulent and set up a new Windows 2003 server, with Exchange 2003 on it. There’s a few things I have to watch out for while doing this, because I’ve got Liz & Emma on here in the Exchnage server, as well as it being my primary email address.

SO…

I get the server installed, and I’m like “Okay I’ll just drop Exchange in there, and away we go.”

Hold on, sparky, it’s not that simple.

In order to install Exchange 2003, you’ve gotta have a Domain Controller to install on. Fair enough. So I start the Win2k3 wizard to upgrade to the AD. I’ve already joined the GeckoTemple domain, so far so good. I need a DNS server running on the box in order to get the…. thing… with the-

Hang on, I remember seeing some weirdness in my Event logs on my WinXPPro box, something about not being able to determine the name of the server/workstation, ’cause the RPC isn’t available or something. I can always log in, and open Outlook without logging in again, and I can browse the DFS tree I’ve created and everything seems cool. Funny about the, uh errors though. Oh well, I’ll just pound on through and…

I run the wizard to add Active Directory to the new server, and that’s cool. I get past the first two steps where they warn you that WinNT pre SP3, Win95 and two cans tied together will no longer be able to authenticate on the server. Fair enough, I think. It asks for authentication to make sure I’m allowed to pull this paritcular stunt, and then it asks for the name of the domain I’m going to become a secondary on. Geckotemple.com, I’m thinking, and then I get this error that I can’t do that because the new server can’t find a DNS record for the Active Directory. Hmm…

Start fiddling around with the DNS on the old server, and reading lots of archaic writings on the dos and don’ts of DNS, and how not to configure things, and talking about DCDiag. Okay, I drop the DCDiag tool into the old server, and run that, but right off the bat, it complains that it can’t find the GUID {super long Object name here} but it can ping the name of the server, and pings are being ponged. It’s “half-working” this tells me, but some stuff is wrong. I’m thinking Man in the Middle attacks and all kindsa weirdness, but then I run across a thread that talks about someone having the very same problem, and some of the folks replying are talking about making sure that the _MSDC links and a couple of other things are in the DNS entries, and if not I should run NetDiag /fix

But I also find at the end of that thread the original guy saying that uninstalling DNS completely, and then reinstalling it did the trick (after running the NetDiag /fix line).

I rip it out, put it back in, run the netdiag line. BOOM. Buncha stuff saying that it’s fixed/added/corrected a BUNCH of things.

DCDiag is coming up all happy now, too.

Just rebooted, we’ll see what happens(ed).

Can’t wait to move from my current box to the new one.

Wish me luck.

NetJak has an interview with the EA_Spouse poster…

So, I’ve been largely ignoring the Firefox is Better folks, ’cause many of them were the same folks who were telling me to get a Mac, or that they prefer Win98 to WinXP, or to stop eating wheat and dairy in order to feel better about the world. All of that aside, I actually found something in Firefox that I will USE. RSS Feeds as bookmark groupings…

Click here to read more.. »

Good god, this is awesome.

I was digging through the archives at Songs to Wear Pants To, and found this gem:

I AM THE FIRST FIFTY DIGITS OF PI 0:36

Please compose and record a song extolling the virtues of your Web site in which the lengths of the words can also be used as a mnemonic for at least the first 50 digits of pi. In other words, the first word has three letters, the second word one letter, the third word four letters, and so on.

[For your convenience, STWPT provides the first fifty digits of pi:

3.
1415926
5358979
3238462
6433832
7950288
4197169
3993751]

-Fuldu