random geekery from the past week

Sometimes you really just have to be able to laugh and enjoy yourself in this field. Often we can get frustrated (especially as we get more experienced!) when we do new things and they don’t work on the first or second try. Or maybe something you just don’t do all that often. Part of being jaded by users and management, I think…? Failure (i.e. troubleshooting!) becomes less tolerated.

Two things have been giving me grief all week, but thankfully I really enjoy my personal time when working on stuff. Put on some music or pop in a movie on a laptop nearby, grab a beer or tea and have some fun. (Just to inject more personality in here, I watched The Crow, one of my favorite movies ever.)

The first thing I’ve been working on is getting OpenVPN working on an Ubuntu Fiesty VM. None of the pre-fab tutorials online seem to be complete. I think every one leaves out some important steps or makes detrimental assumptions. Either way, the progress has been slow, but I’m getting there. I’m familiar with the client end, so that shouldn’t be a problem. It is just really getting the routing and bridging and junk figured out; getting the server stood up and performing.

The second happened last night. For my VM box I had bought a new DVD burner. Instead of letting this go to waste in the VM box, I swapped it with a DVD-ROM from my gaming rig a few weeks back. I had forgotten about this until yesterday, so on the way home I bought some DVD+R Lightscribe and DVD+R DL disks and vowed to get things working. I spent about 2 hours trying to get it recognized by Windows. Windows Device Manager showed an Asus CRW device. WTF? No, it’s Samsung! Firmware failed! Why the crap is this coming up as Asus?!?

It wasn’t until this morning as my alarm went off that I thought, “wait, I already have a drive in this computer and…oh god…it’s an Asus CD-RW drive. Ugh, I’m an idiot!” Yup, the drive, while powered, is probably just misjumpered or loose on the IDE cable or something else such that Windows or the BIOS were not really seeing it. I kept trying to get my Asus drive to turn into a Samsung burner. Poor bugger…kinda like treating a daughter like a son?