Inner Drive Software

I spent more than 8½ hours yesterday reconfiguring the Inner Drive network. I think other guys might have taken no more than an hour to do this. I do software; routers and DNS and DHCP and DSL are all hardware problems. I really don't enjoy doing hardware stuff but I'm glad I did it. Because now I know how.

The changes vastly improve our network topology, and will help when we install our new web/app server later this week. In the past, we used a Windows Server 2003 machine to bridge between our public interface and our private network. The server ran BlackIce Defender as a firewall, which means, as astute readers will notice right away, evil packets got all the way to the server before the firewall could have at them. The same server also ran our Websites, Exchange, and was the Active Directory catalog master.

Having all of these services (did I mention DNS as well?) on the public box is asking for trouble, as I found out.

I am not happy today.

Our Exchange server crashed in a maddening fashion. The Exchange Information Store can't log in, nor can our admins get to the Active Directory snap-ins on the affected server. Apparently the security database got damaged when the server rebooted after a critical update. It's going to take us probably three days to fix the problem, partially because we've got client work to deliver before we can really care about the email outage.

In related news, I'm reading a new book:

I got into a conversation with a colleague about project management. I have sometimes found myself on a badly-managed project; so has he. As a matter of fact, he's just left one. He sent me this post-mortem, as an object lesson in using caution and listening to your gut when taking over a project already underway.

The continuing saga of the absent-vendor clean-up took a slight turn today that makes a lot of sense to me. The customer decided that, instead of spending 3 or 4 days re-writing a complex feature that doesn't work very well, I should spend 2 days getting rid of the feature entirely and replacing it with an editable list.

I had an interesting time today convincing a client that I had, indeed, fixed a defect, because the client kept getting an error message even though I wasn't. Once I got the client to send me a screen shot of the error message, I was able to fix it within two minutes. Any guesses why he got the message and I didn't?

Despite having programmed computers since before many graduate computer science students were born, no one ever actually taught me how to program. Being self-taught, I missed some of the fundamentals. Actually, I missed a lot of them, and every so often one of two things will happen: most commonly, I simply won't know how to do something that a first-year CompSci kid born during the administration of a President I voted against (or worse, voted for) picked up in her first class; less commonly, I will feel bad about this.

Continuing the sad trek through my client's abandoned application, today I have to figure out what this procedure does.

CNet raises an interesting problem: what happens if you die without telling anyone your passwords? It could be a real problem for your heirs:

"He did not keep a hard copy address book. I think everything was online," said [San Francisco poet William] Talcott's daughter, Julie Talcott-Fuller. "There were people he knew that I haven't been able to contact. It's been very hard."

"Yahoo (his e-mail provider) said it wouldn't give out the information due to privacy laws, but my dad is dead so I don't understand that," she said.

One solution is to use a secure password storage facility, like Bruce Schneier's Password Safe, and then put the master password in trusted escrow like a safe-deposit box or your attorney's office. Of course, you'll have to keep up with this, because you'll change your master password at least every three months, right?