Well... I can say I've been here, now... Think I'll go home, now.

Offroads, Servers, and Forever-long Tech Calls

Adminisk8or

07/31/2023

For those hoping I was being honest about my comment last week about this one being just as exciting if not more, I say unto you: I deliver.

It started with me helping run sound for a float in a big local parade. The float was pirate themed (including a whole mast and crow's nest) and was for a barbershop singing group. It went reasonably well, although us nearly taking out some phone lines as we pulled off the parade route's end and followed the side roads was a little too exciting.

I spent a call with a tech company we partner with called Sophos, regarding an issue I was facing. The problem: SNAT didn't seem to be working on a firewall. The solution? The best answer I got was it was probably a licensing issue. Now, laugh if you will at how ridiculous that may be, that SNAT would be a paid feature, where it's a very common and simple networking concept (if you are familiar at all with firewall architecture in general)- but ah, you haven't asked me how long I spent on this call. Go ahead, I'll let you guess. You're probably thinking oh, it must've been like a few hours, or several hours. Ha. HAHAHA. No. It was a good, long TEN HOURS. And not only was it ten hours, but it took three and a half technicians and engineers to tell me the issues was (and I repeat) PROBABLY licensing. I... I just... I just can't with you, Sophos.

I built or replaced not one but three different servers this past week. One is for a new charter school we're onboarding; one is for a charter school that finally upgraded their old equipment; and the other was for a client hundreds of miles away whose physical server kept being an absolute devil to us. In fact, it was this last project that led me to go out to Southern Utah to accomplish this task. And of course, once I arrived, Murphy's Law took a good swing at me and made sure the process was as inconvenient as possible- but thankfully, I did see it through, and now they are running better and sweller than ever.

And since I was down in the area, I decided to take advantage of the situation, and my brother and brother-in-laws came out (after I finished the project) and we did some fun offroading! Funny enough, though, it seemed to me that a basic offroad connecting two remote towns near where I live, when I took it halfway by accident earlier this past week, was almost a good deal more challenging than most of the trails we hit up in or near Moab. In any case, I was lucky that I took that lesser-traveled trail in the direction I did and had gravity on my side going downhill, because had I come the other way, I don't think my poor Xterra could've handled it. And last of all, besides playing the ever-fun game of catch-up at work, on a side project, I went to record a local combined choir, like I did last summer. This time around, things were both better and worse for me. They were better, because last time, I had to record like a third of my channels with live mixing, and had only one performance to do so. This year, I had a digital mixer that would let me record those channels and mix them in post, instead- but stupid old Murphy showed up again and declared the law, and to my horror, I found that on the first of three performances, I had effectively recorded nothing. Upon starting the second performance, I ran into a very annoying software bug with Audacity on Mac, and only recorded about 90 percent or less of that show. It was finally this night when I miraculously managed to record a whole session, and was I ever thankful it worked. Of course, now come the days following of having to go through and mix, cut and patch everything to make it sound good. Wish me luck.

And that is the best I can do in terms of summarizing. There are many ventures yet ahead of me at work, in my personal life, and otherwise, and as the old saying goes, I have miles to go before I sleep. Until next time, see ya!