Monday, March 06, 2006

I’m Like an Abused Spouse

Like so many things in life, my saga begins with the highest of hopes.

Late in January I order ten PowerMac G5 computers, two iMacs (Intel duo core, w00t!), one iBook, and one big ol’ Xserve. Oh and ten 23” Cinema Displays. I also got a couple extra 500 GB hard drives, and 2 gig of RAM for each G5.

In short, I have my company plunk down thousands and thousands of dollars for new stuff. Granted, we didn’t really just pull out the big corporate wallet; we are leasing all of this equipment. Turns out we got a great rate on the machines directly from Apple (AKA, Apple Financial, which happens to be run by the fine folks at GE capital, which is neither here nor there, but I just thought you might be interested).

We decide in the beginning to get refurbished G5s and Cinema Displays. These are machines that for whatever reason, have been returned as unsatisfactory to Apple. Knowing Apple’s core user base of people like me, the color of the enclosure was just exactly the wrong shade of steel and it clashed with the rest of our desktop, so it had to go back. Apple takes these wayward souls in, gives ‘em some TLC, slaps on a new label (and a brand spanking new serial number, this becomes important in Part 2 of the story!) and then trots them out for sale. I’ve had quite good luck with Apple hardware in general and have used their refurb equipment before and never had a lick of trouble. So I have no trepidations about getting essentially “used” computers.

I’m particularly excited to get a new machine as mine has been a bit wonky of late and I’m also pee-in-my-panties excited to get a new Xserve. It would come with Tiger Server (10.4) and there are some nice features that I’ve been wanting to use for a while, but haven’t wanted to upgrade any of our present servers. I always find starting fresh (especially with servers) is a Good Thing.™

My boss signs the lease agreements in blood, we fax off the papers to Apple Financial HQ and the orders are submitted. All is well.

Sort of. Because these are refurb machines, availability can’t be guaranteed, especially for a “large” quantity. But we luck out with the G5s and they ship in early Feb. But the displays are on evil Back Order Status and won’t ship until late Feb.

This is a Bad Thing™ for two reasons. Three really. First, everyone at the studio is actually more excited to have shiny new LARGE displays than they are to have kick booty machines. But that’s designers for you. They don’t always have their priorities straight like us geeks. Shiny flat panels are all well and good, but a dual G5 with over two GB of RAM is better, in my opinion, but I’m a dork, so what do I know? Second, the displays are on the same order as the Xserve, iBook, and iMacs, so though those are ready to be shipped, they can’t ship until the order is complete. And we can’t just separate and ship stuff as it’s ready, because the terms of the lease are written in such a way that such a logical course of action CAN NOT be taken. Which brings us to problema numero tre: I have a deadline to meet. The new server (on lease) is replacing an old server (also on lease) and the old server has to go back home at the end of Feb. So if I have to wait to get the server until the end of Feb. I’m pretty much doomed. I’m a decent geek, but I can’t really turn a server around (including zero-ing out and writing random data to the old hard drives (all 750 Gbs worth)) in a day.

So I call our Apple sales droid back and we work out canceling the Cinema Displays so the order could go through and then re-issue an order for ten displays. Cool and clever. (Thanks, Rich!)

I patiently await the arrival of the server and in the meantime, the G5s arrive. I set up my new machine (rank hath its privileges), but I’m really waiting to set up the rest of the machines until I can get the server installed and configured. This is so I can do kerberos authentication, common preferences for the workstations that are stored on the server, all kinds of little things like that. It’s easier to do what I want to have happen in the end if the new Xserve is happily purring in the corner. Plus, I have the rest of my “real” work to do and my family would probably be happy to see me, at least occasionally. So I bide my time until our blessed FedEx guy shows up.

The happy day arrives and the Xserve comes. I spend the entire weekend at work, rasslin’ with it. I do the set up wrong twice and each time decide to start over. Open Directory (upon which all my plans of centralized bliss rest) is a tricky beast for one such as I, unencumbered with comprehension about such things as DNS and Open Directory Masters. Basically the key to kerberos on OS X Server is getting DNS working properly and if you don’t get DNS working properly it seems to me that it’s nigh unto impossible to wrench things into place. A deep knowledge of “how things work” on the system and all kinds of geek/nerd UNIX-y knowledge would be required to fix it. I don’t have enough mad skillz to do that sort of thing, so every time I boo-booed, I just wiped the system drive and started over. I’m not proud—doesn’t matter to me if I have to start over a million times, as long as I get it right at least once. Get it configured properly, back it up, and NEVER TOUCH IT AGAIN is one way to do SysAdmin-ing that works well for me. I was only home that weekend for about 8 hours total, starting on Friday morning. And I ate a ton of really bad food. Ugh. Gained about fifteen pounds.

But I got it done and Open Directory is chugging along and DNS is DNS-ing like it’s supposed to. So I begin to set up workstations. Which is when the wheels begin to come off my wagon. Or rather, Apple pulls the wheels off my wagon and then, while I’ve fallen to the ground (because my wagon doesn’t have any wheels!), Apple starts to beat the crap out of me with my own wheels. And then proceeds to shove those wheels into various very private orifices on my body. While I’m still clothed. Ouch.

But that’s tomorrow’s story. Stay tuned. Same Bat Time, same Bat Channel. And it’s good stuff! My head asplodes about four times. Who’d want to miss that? Whee!

Jon scribbled this mess on 03/06/06 at 11:43 PM, best we can tell it fits in the category of Regular Post. This many folks had something to say about that, The permanent home of this entry is here: Link

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