Mmmm...frozen Mt. Dew.

Had too much of it at the theater tonight, so here I sit at 1am typing away. Not a whole lot of stuff today. Figure I'll share a couple of little tidbits:

IPSEC VPN Tunnels don't pass Multicast packets. Who cares? Well, if you've got a client on the far side of a VPN telnetting to an AIX (or maybe any Unix) box on your end, and he/she leaves the session alone for a while, it disconnects them. It seems that if the session is just sitting there (no keyboard activity to let the server know that the client is still alive), and if it doesn't respond to enough "Are you out there" queries from the server, the server will toast the connection. AIX seems to send these packets out as a multicast, which doesn't go through our VPN. No way around it, either, without setting up routers internally on each network to create a GRE tunnel between the sites. Bummer.

Installed XP on another of our Compaq Prolinea 2266s today. Put a little extra RAM in those (I bumped the XP ones up to 128MB), and XP runs really well. I was quite surprised. I usually cut down on the color depth (shared video RAM, so the lower your color depth, the more system RAM you've got), and then change the visual settings to the "Performance" option. As long as our application requirements don't change, I think that XP could give us another two years out of these systems. Well, if the hardware holds out, that is.

I've got a plan for them, though, even when I start replacing them. Most of our sites use 64kbs leased lines to connect back "home". With MSBlast out, I've been trying to figure out a good way to get patches and updates out to a site, so they are easily accessible to users at that site without "downloading" it over the slow line multiple times. My hope is to put one of these old machines (running XP with 128MB RAM and possibly a set of mirrored 4GB hard drives) at each site. It'll have a single shared folder that I can run an automated cleaning process on occasionally. I can also use it as a print server--installing printers is a huge pain right now, because I have to track down the IP address of the printer, setup a port, find the driver, etc. If I create a print queue in XP (works in 2K as well), I can embed the drivers for various versions of Windows, and have a single stop for installing printers.

As a continuation of yesterday's post (well, really Thursday's post), thought I'd pass on some more coolness with PSTools. I installed XP SP1A onto a system today. Without touching the system. I copied the update to the system to be patched, and ran it on that system using PSTools. It took over an hour, but I think that was just system speed (these are something like 266mhz Cyrix chips, after all). I kept an eye on network traffic, and after the transfer of the SP to the destination system, there was no other network traffic. I'm definately approaching Network Admin Nirvana here. I think I'm gonna have to step into 1997, though, and write this into a VBScript. I want to do a batch file--I really do. But I can't keep ignoring the future. Now if you'll excuse me, I have to go fire up my 8 track player.