en Passant not letting life just pass on by

Today I had the honor of working with a company after a catastrophic failure of their Exchange server. One day their hardware was working just fine, the next the server will no longer boot and Exchange is down.

Due to a DHCP failure, a client had to go through and set all their workstations to static IP addresses. This is approximately 75 workstations throughout their environment. This week, I am tasked with fixing their DHCP issues, and resetting all the workstations back to using DHCP.

This broad-stroke VBScript searches for all workstations in an environment, and queries their DHCP settings for all of them. By removing a single comment, the same script can be used to set all the same workstations to use DHCP (which can be dangerous).

When running through the latest version of the Exchange calendar update process, it has you assign permissions to all mailboxes on the server. To modify all the mailboxes, you need to provide a list of distinguished names (DN) for each mailbox. Unfortunately this is not simply the DistiguishedName field that you would query from AD, but the LegacyDN entry. You need to query the Exchange environment to get this information.

One thing every corporate employee has to deal with is email. Go on vacation, and you get tons of it. Stay home with a sick kid, and you get a ton more. The work does not stop, even if you can't go. In turn, we either don't take time off, even when needed, or we read our email all the time (Curse you Blackberry!).

One of the Scripting Guys contacted me last week asking for my bio. Evidently as one of the 55, 100% entrants from the 2006 Scripting Games, they want to do a spotlight piece on each of us. As part of my bio, I thought I'd include some exasperated picture (pulling out my hair?) and some tips to other contestants about programming contests. This reminded me of an article I posted here last year, that didn't make the cut after the hardware crash in September. So, from the archives, I present that original article.

Today on CNET, I read an article about what they are dubbing "Google Earth Killer". Google Earth is a viewer to see the USGS satelite photography in a nice handy display. Google's viewer allows you to see some objects 3 dimensionally (building in downtown San Francisco, several large mountains, etc.).