Heh, I've already had my experience and I haven't even entered the "real world" yet. I'm just a lowly student tech at my school for another month or so...
We were at a girl's room that had a problem with spyware. Naturally, we run Ad-Aware to get rid of the problem. Ad-Aware lists each file that it checks as is goes. After a couple ten thousand files, we got to C:\drivers\ati\rage\98 or something like that. Wow, ATI drivers. Then we started seeing all the animal porn file names. Not just one or two, but several hundred. I guess they were big files (movies), because Ad-Aware would pause on each for a brief moment, long enough for us to read the files.
I guess the girl had been hiding the files from her roommate, didn't want the roomie to be snooping around and find out about her fetishes... Heh.
What's worse than seeing those file names go by? Realizing that I sat in the same chair that the girl sat in when she viewed those files...:\
LSP-Fix is the easiest way I've found to fix the garbage that New.Net leaves behind. I've worked on computers that have had New.Net uninstalled but still couldn't use the net - I guess their uninstaller is really borked. LSP-Fix fixes their problem in a matter of seconds, doesn't even require a reboot, IIRC.
I'm taking a course this semester that uses Parallax's BASIC Stamp. The professor decided to put some reading materials and a CD in the bookstore for us. The reading was just printouts from the CD. The CD was just a collection of PDF documents and some programs from Parallax, all stuff we can download for free, but he took the time to put it on CD and give it to the bookstore.
There was about 50 sheets of paper photocopied front to back, and the professor actually burned the copies of the CD himself. Cost at the bookstore - $50. I paid a friend $10 for a copy of the CD and printed out the documents in a computer lab (putting my 'technology fee' to use). He coulda had the copy shop across from the bookstore print the pages for about $5, and made each of us give him a $1 for the CD. At least that way he would have made a few cents - he says he doesn't get anything from the bookstore.
Parallax says that a "reasonable" reproduction fee can be charged for the documents, otherwise they are to be freely distributed. I've been awfully tempted to send them an email about this stinkin bookstore.
Guy on a forum I read did something similar.. saved the goatse guy picture, converted to grayscale, pasted it into Word a few hundred times, used the Windows Print to Fax stuff, and off he went. He said it got to page 124 before he lost the connection.
Heh. I'm a student tech at my school.. was out at an university owned apartment this morning.. Older gentleman, said he teaches a course there. He was moaning and groaning that his connection had been down for a week or so. First sign of a problem is about a dozen porn dialers in add/remove programs... Bunch of other porn associated stuff in there and on his desktop. Kinda shocking, really. I figure that some porn program has hosed his system, so I slap in my Knoppix CD to make sure and still can't get a connection (Windows indicated the cable was plugged in, but couldn't get an IP address). Unplug his cable, plug it back in, and it works again. Oh well.
While I'm there, I offer to run Ad Aware and put the school's Symantec Corporate AV on his computer.. Go download Ad Aware and the default save location is some directory filled w/ porn videos showing thumbnails of them.. Hardcore type stuff..
Remember, this is an older guy who teaches a class or two for the school.. Well, he sees my weird reaction and mentions that he is teaching a human sexuality course and he visits lots of adult sites for his research... Neat research..;)
Heh. I didn't even get a chance to get laid off from there. I passed my second test the Friday that stuff went south. Went in to the Atlanta office on Monday to turn in the employment paperwork, just for shits'n'giggles, and was told that the company was no more.
For managers to access the Kronos information, they have to install a client and map a drive to this "server".
I've seen some of the supervisors at school accessing their supervisor stuff on Kronos via some sort of web interface that uses Java (one guy had some spyware that was screwing with Java). They used to have to use some DOS-type interface via a Novell drive, guess a new version of the software came along.
We're using Kronos at my school too. Our problem is that we don't have enough supervisor logins, I guess Kronos wants us to purchase more of those. Instead of buying more, they have one lady in charge of solving timesheet problems for all the student employees of the Housing Dept (techs like me, kids that work in the offices, kids that work at the residence hall desks, etc).
my understanding is that if you go Big Blue they knock on your door asking to replace hardware before you even know there was something wrong.
Yes sir. I was taking a tour of my school's machine room a few months ago and one of the sysadmins told us a story like that. They have an IBM mainfr..err.. "enterprise server" in there. One day, they get a knock at the back door and it's someone from IBM there to replace a piece of hardware; none of the operators on duty knew anything about a problem.
We're a good 60 minutes from a big city, so the problem had to have existed for a bit. I was kinda disturbed by the fact that there could be a hardware problem that no one knew about, but impressed by IBM's service at the same time.
A guy that posts on a car forum I admin has posted a few times while he's been in Iraq. Just yesterday he posted that he's getting his access through a "Linksys WRT54G, with some kind of booster attached." Says his speeds are about the same as dialup at home.. "all traffic is going over sat., including DSN telephone service, so they have the internet bandwidth capped pretty low." He's an MP, but has just said that he's "near" Baghdad and has been shot at..
I guess someone over knows how to get our boys 'net access..
When I moved from Georgia to Indiana 2 years ago I moved my Sprint PCS service with me. When I got here, I realized that Sprint's service sucks in my area so I cancelled the service and switched to Cingular. The guy w/ Sprint told me I was paid up and to ignore any more bills, their system would catch up in a month or two. So I ignored the bills.
6 months later I get a letter from NCO saying I owe $130+ (like 4 months of service). BS. I call Sprint and ask em what the deal is, they can't help, account has been written off. Ask NCO what the deal is, all they know is that I owe em $130. So I sent em a letter asking for verification of the debt, and I never hear from them again.
Fast forward to June of this year.. another collection agency, same amount. Send them a letter asking for verification of the debt. Never hear from them.
I think that's one of the stipulations of the Fair Credit Reporting Act.. The collection agency has to be able to verify the validity of the debt if you ask, or they aren't allowed to try to collect on it -- put up or shut up. You are limited in the amount of time you have to send that request for verification, and they have a time limit on responding to, read the law to find out more. I haven't checked my credit report; hopefully both agencies didn't ding me. And I don't know what I'm going to do if Sprint keeps sending collection agencies after me, it's getting pretty annoying.
The collection agencies haven't called my current cell phone, and I have no idea if they call my home phone since I leave the ringer off all the time.
I was reading through this discussion and was about to post about the work UCONN did. I think one of their admins posted the link to their page to resnet-l last week and I was impressed.
They did a very nice job containing the spread of the worm. Kudos to them.
On the other hand, the response from our office (Housing Tech Support at a school in Indiana, we just help students get online, don't deal w/ switches and routers) has been somewhere between nothing and next to nothing. I asked my boss to go buy us some blank CD's as it became apparent that Blaster was going to be a huge problem, she just ignored me. Sigh. Luckily I'll be unemployed in December (when I graduate), and won't have to deal with my boss' incompetence any more.
I'm a student tech for the Housing Dept at my school.. My boss is an complete tech idiot, even though her resume shows that she's been working with computers since the mid-80's. On Thursday I walked in from fixing a computer and she tells me a girl is on the phone and upset because people are looking at all her files. I say, "Tell her to stop sharing them." She replies, "How?" I reply, "Uninstall File and Printer Sharing for Microsoft Networks." Pretty simple, huh? Her reply, "Don't get all technical with me, explain that."
I just walked out of her office and hid for about 20 minutes to keep from blowing up on her.
She was helping a student on the phone the other day, and going through the actions on her computer so she knows what the student is seeing. She wants the student to release their IP address, so she types in "ipconfig/release". I wander off for a couple minutes to do something else, and come back to find her talking to the Help Desk asking if the network is down. I remember what she had done, so I open a command prompt on her computer and type "ipconfig/renew" for her.. and whatta ya know, she's back online.
After reading this discussion, I realize that I've seen the Dilbert Principle in action. We have a girl that is about worthless, just comes in the office and surfs the web. Boss lady gave the girl a raise and made her the "office manager." Great.
Good thing I graduate in December, I don't think I could handle this nonsense much longer.
Try a policy like that anywhere but a completely liberal-arts college, and you would be roasted....College students in technical programs can be and are extremely possesive about using their personal systems.
Hah. I'm a student tech at your average state university.. mix of everyone, not an overly large geek contingent. We got an email this week from an angry mother because we couldn't get out to fix her daughter's computer in, what she thought was, a timely fashion. Besides saying everything nasty she could think of, she said, "We certainly didn't spend all that money on a computer so it could sit on a desk worthless!" As if not having a working network connection makes a computer worthless... One of our techs went out there and found the girl was using a phone cord to plug into the ethernet jack in her room. He sold her a 10ft CAT5 cable and she was off and running... sigh. We've had several instances like that this week.
These liberal arts kids take their computers very seriously! I mean, without them, they wouldn't be able to find out that someone names Melissa loves them because they are so big....
Oh yes I do - TESTIFY! What's more, how can you even begin to troubleshoot an issue when you can't read Korean or Japanese (I work for an international school)?
Fortunately, I really haven't had any real troubles with computers that have been in foreign languages. They're just silly little things like setting Windows to get a DHCP address or removing a proxy server.
All the buttons and such are in the same place across the different Windows languages, so I can just click to where I need to go by memory. Always impresses the students when a big ole white boy gets their Chinese speaking computer working in about 2 minutes flat.
I've run across several rouge DHCP servers this past week at my school. Our dorms only have one active ethernet port per room, so kids gotta buy a hub or switch if both roommates have a computer. My boss and I went by all the shops that sell computer stuff this summer (Best Buy, Circuit City, Staples, Wal-Mart, etc) and told the store managers to ONLY sell hubs and switches to students as we'd just tell them to return routers.
Well, those stores ran out of hubs and switches, and instead of losing a sale, they just sold the kids routers. And the kids plug both computers into the routers and the wall.. but not the WAN side into the wall, the LAN side. So now they're trying to serve DHCP addresses out to everyone on the same switch. I shut down the DHCP server on one by going to http://192.168.0.1 and just using the default password... saw about 25 computers in the DHCP client list. I talked another guy through doing it over the phone. I know there's several more out there but I haven't had time to track em down. Our normal policy is to send the MAC address to the Network Services folks so they can disable the port on the switch.
I'm pretty sure it was the IBOT that was featured on one of the tv news magazine shows the other night.. 60 Minutes or Dateline, I forget. They said the cost will be in the $30,000 neighborhood... I was floored by that figure!
But you shoulda seen the guy that was testing it.. Paraplegic who hadn't walked in years after an injury (didn't catch the details, if they reported them). He was able to play catch with his kids, order a drink from a somewhat high lunch counter, and pick up a book from the top shelf at a bookstore. The dude was in tears over being able to do such simple, to the rest of us, things. If the "wheelchair" enables more people to do more everyday things that the rest of us take for granted, I'd say it's worth every penny.
How resilient are these USB keychain/pen drives? I've been thinking of one for quite a while, but I feel like I'm pretty rough on my keys. Tossing them on the table, dropping them, carrying boxes and having the boxes press on the keys, etc. I'd hate to ruin one, and whatever important data that goes on em.
Uses I've thought of include giving hi-res pictures to people on dialup (most of my family), taking Windows updates over to mom's house instead of waiting on her dialup.. Software for work that I currently carry on CD (I do tech support for my school, so stuff like Ad Aware, Symantec AV, blah blah), documents and such for classes.
Basically, I think I'd use one, just afraid that I would ruin it. Maybe I'll just pick up a cheaper / smaller one and see how I do before getting a bigger / more expensive one.
FWIW, don't think I saw it mentioned in this discussion, there's a thread on the Gentoo forums about making a Live keychain based on the Live CD.
A nifty tool I've just discovered is Bart's Boot CD. I'm using the CD that has multiple boot images on it. Boot with CD-ROM support, boot with network support, and an offline NT password recovery tool. The network support image will autodetect the network card and load the driver for it. Pretty neat.
I did a little hacking on it this week so that we could use it for drive imaging the computers in our labs at school.. Two key strokes and my brain dead co-workers are at the Drive Image screen. We have three different network cards in our computers, so that autodetect feature is really nice.
We only deal with network problems for students, and only then with software. We aren't allowed to open the computer to check things out, so I don't have to carry any screwdrivers or anything. I carry along a Knoppix CD and a CD filled with software.. School's Norton AV Corporate client, Adware & Spybot, latest IE setup files, lasest Mozilla & Netscape for Windows and Mac, a ton of NIC drivers, Win98 CAB files, Wink2k SP4 and XP SP1A, and some other random software. Also has some of Symantec's cleaners -- Klez, Nimda, etc.
One particular piece of software I carry is LSPfix. Basically, it'll fix what Net.net's spyware crap screws up. We had a quite a few problems with New.Net's crap last year, so this little program saved me some time quite a few times.
If I buy something on the company credit card and send in the rebate with proof of purchase myself who gets to keep the money.
I'm still confused on this. My boss does this stuff all the time. Just yesterday, she gave me 2 spindles of CD's to use. One was some no-name, one was TDK. The no-name was still shrink wrapped, the TDK's were missing the shrink wrap and UPC. Hmm. I remember seeing TDK's on rebate sale somewhere this week...
She's always slow to buy stuff we need, except when there is a rebate sale. Then she's banging on Best Buy's door at 10am waiting on them to open up so she can get that product w/ a rebate. The accounting lady for our department refuses to deal with rebates, so boss lady just sends em to her house.
Since the school won't deal with the rebates, I think the "right thing" to do would be to spend that money on crap for our use.. Case of coke for the fridge or something. But, hey, what does my opinion matter, I'm just a lowly student worker and she's the big boss who plays Yahoo games 7 hours a day.
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Heh, I've already had my experience and I haven't even entered the "real world" yet. I'm just a lowly student tech at my school for another month or so...
:\
We were at a girl's room that had a problem with spyware. Naturally, we run Ad-Aware to get rid of the problem. Ad-Aware lists each file that it checks as is goes. After a couple ten thousand files, we got to C:\drivers\ati\rage\98 or something like that. Wow, ATI drivers. Then we started seeing all the animal porn file names. Not just one or two, but several hundred. I guess they were big files (movies), because Ad-Aware would pause on each for a brief moment, long enough for us to read the files.
I guess the girl had been hiding the files from her roommate, didn't want the roomie to be snooping around and find out about her fetishes... Heh.
What's worse than seeing those file names go by? Realizing that I sat in the same chair that the girl sat in when she viewed those files...
I forget the name of this particular gem but it modified the HOSTS file to redirect websites to *other* sites.
That sounds like Trojan.QHosts.
LSP-Fix is the easiest way I've found to fix the garbage that New.Net leaves behind. I've worked on computers that have had New.Net uninstalled but still couldn't use the net - I guess their uninstaller is really borked. LSP-Fix fixes their problem in a matter of seconds, doesn't even require a reboot, IIRC.
I've tried it on several computers over the past few months. I doubt the owners have even heard of the resource kit..
I'm taking a course this semester that uses Parallax's BASIC Stamp. The professor decided to put some reading materials and a CD in the bookstore for us. The reading was just printouts from the CD. The CD was just a collection of PDF documents and some programs from Parallax, all stuff we can download for free, but he took the time to put it on CD and give it to the bookstore.
There was about 50 sheets of paper photocopied front to back, and the professor actually burned the copies of the CD himself. Cost at the bookstore - $50. I paid a friend $10 for a copy of the CD and printed out the documents in a computer lab (putting my 'technology fee' to use). He coulda had the copy shop across from the bookstore print the pages for about $5, and made each of us give him a $1 for the CD. At least that way he would have made a few cents - he says he doesn't get anything from the bookstore.
Parallax says that a "reasonable" reproduction fee can be charged for the documents, otherwise they are to be freely distributed. I've been awfully tempted to send them an email about this stinkin bookstore.
Excellent guide.
Guy on a forum I read did something similar.. saved the goatse guy picture, converted to grayscale, pasted it into Word a few hundred times, used the Windows Print to Fax stuff, and off he went. He said it got to page 124 before he lost the connection.
Heh. I'm a student tech at my school.. was out at an university owned apartment this morning.. Older gentleman, said he teaches a course there. He was moaning and groaning that his connection had been down for a week or so. First sign of a problem is about a dozen porn dialers in add/remove programs... Bunch of other porn associated stuff in there and on his desktop. Kinda shocking, really. I figure that some porn program has hosed his system, so I slap in my Knoppix CD to make sure and still can't get a connection (Windows indicated the cable was plugged in, but couldn't get an IP address). Unplug his cable, plug it back in, and it works again. Oh well.
;)
While I'm there, I offer to run Ad Aware and put the school's Symantec Corporate AV on his computer.. Go download Ad Aware and the default save location is some directory filled w/ porn videos showing thumbnails of them.. Hardcore type stuff..
Remember, this is an older guy who teaches a class or two for the school.. Well, he sees my weird reaction and mentions that he is teaching a human sexuality course and he visits lots of adult sites for his research... Neat research..
Heh. I didn't even get a chance to get laid off from there. I passed my second test the Friday that stuff went south. Went in to the Atlanta office on Monday to turn in the employment paperwork, just for shits'n'giggles, and was told that the company was no more.
For managers to access the Kronos information, they have to install a client and map a drive to this "server".
I've seen some of the supervisors at school accessing their supervisor stuff on Kronos via some sort of web interface that uses Java (one guy had some spyware that was screwing with Java). They used to have to use some DOS-type interface via a Novell drive, guess a new version of the software came along.
We're using Kronos at my school too. Our problem is that we don't have enough supervisor logins, I guess Kronos wants us to purchase more of those. Instead of buying more, they have one lady in charge of solving timesheet problems for all the student employees of the Housing Dept (techs like me, kids that work in the offices, kids that work at the residence hall desks, etc).
my understanding is that if you go Big Blue they knock on your door asking to replace hardware before you even know there was something wrong.
Yes sir. I was taking a tour of my school's machine room a few months ago and one of the sysadmins told us a story like that. They have an IBM mainfr..err.. "enterprise server" in there. One day, they get a knock at the back door and it's someone from IBM there to replace a piece of hardware; none of the operators on duty knew anything about a problem.
We're a good 60 minutes from a big city, so the problem had to have existed for a bit. I was kinda disturbed by the fact that there could be a hardware problem that no one knew about, but impressed by IBM's service at the same time.
I wonder what RedHat is planning on doing differently for this hurricane?
Maybe a bit OT, but...
A guy that posts on a car forum I admin has posted a few times while he's been in Iraq. Just yesterday he posted that he's getting his access through a "Linksys WRT54G, with some kind of booster attached." Says his speeds are about the same as dialup at home.. "all traffic is going over sat., including DSN telephone service, so they have the internet bandwidth capped pretty low." He's an MP, but has just said that he's "near" Baghdad and has been shot at..
I guess someone over knows how to get our boys 'net access..
When I moved from Georgia to Indiana 2 years ago I moved my Sprint PCS service with me. When I got here, I realized that Sprint's service sucks in my area so I cancelled the service and switched to Cingular. The guy w/ Sprint told me I was paid up and to ignore any more bills, their system would catch up in a month or two. So I ignored the bills.
6 months later I get a letter from NCO saying I owe $130+ (like 4 months of service). BS. I call Sprint and ask em what the deal is, they can't help, account has been written off. Ask NCO what the deal is, all they know is that I owe em $130. So I sent em a letter asking for verification of the debt, and I never hear from them again.
Fast forward to June of this year.. another collection agency, same amount. Send them a letter asking for verification of the debt. Never hear from them.
I think that's one of the stipulations of the Fair Credit Reporting Act.. The collection agency has to be able to verify the validity of the debt if you ask, or they aren't allowed to try to collect on it -- put up or shut up. You are limited in the amount of time you have to send that request for verification, and they have a time limit on responding to, read the law to find out more. I haven't checked my credit report; hopefully both agencies didn't ding me. And I don't know what I'm going to do if Sprint keeps sending collection agencies after me, it's getting pretty annoying.
The collection agencies haven't called my current cell phone, and I have no idea if they call my home phone since I leave the ringer off all the time.
I was reading through this discussion and was about to post about the work UCONN did. I think one of their admins posted the link to their page to resnet-l last week and I was impressed.
They did a very nice job containing the spread of the worm. Kudos to them.
On the other hand, the response from our office (Housing Tech Support at a school in Indiana, we just help students get online, don't deal w/ switches and routers) has been somewhere between nothing and next to nothing. I asked my boss to go buy us some blank CD's as it became apparent that Blaster was going to be a huge problem, she just ignored me. Sigh. Luckily I'll be unemployed in December (when I graduate), and won't have to deal with my boss' incompetence any more.
I'm a student tech for the Housing Dept at my school.. My boss is an complete tech idiot, even though her resume shows that she's been working with computers since the mid-80's. On Thursday I walked in from fixing a computer and she tells me a girl is on the phone and upset because people are looking at all her files. I say, "Tell her to stop sharing them." She replies, "How?" I reply, "Uninstall File and Printer Sharing for Microsoft Networks." Pretty simple, huh? Her reply, "Don't get all technical with me, explain that."
/release". I wander off for a couple minutes to do something else, and come back to find her talking to the Help Desk asking if the network is down. I remember what she had done, so I open a command prompt on her computer and type "ipconfig /renew" for her.. and whatta ya know, she's back online.
I just walked out of her office and hid for about 20 minutes to keep from blowing up on her.
She was helping a student on the phone the other day, and going through the actions on her computer so she knows what the student is seeing. She wants the student to release their IP address, so she types in "ipconfig
After reading this discussion, I realize that I've seen the Dilbert Principle in action. We have a girl that is about worthless, just comes in the office and surfs the web. Boss lady gave the girl a raise and made her the "office manager." Great.
Good thing I graduate in December, I don't think I could handle this nonsense much longer.
Try a policy like that anywhere but a completely liberal-arts college, and you would be roasted....College students in technical programs can be and are extremely possesive about using their personal systems.
Hah. I'm a student tech at your average state university.. mix of everyone, not an overly large geek contingent. We got an email this week from an angry mother because we couldn't get out to fix her daughter's computer in, what she thought was, a timely fashion. Besides saying everything nasty she could think of, she said, "We certainly didn't spend all that money on a computer so it could sit on a desk worthless!" As if not having a working network connection makes a computer worthless... One of our techs went out there and found the girl was using a phone cord to plug into the ethernet jack in her room. He sold her a 10ft CAT5 cable and she was off and running... sigh. We've had several instances like that this week.
These liberal arts kids take their computers very seriously! I mean, without them, they wouldn't be able to find out that someone names Melissa loves them because they are so big....
Oh yes I do - TESTIFY! What's more, how can you even begin to troubleshoot an issue when you can't read Korean or Japanese (I work for an international school)?
Fortunately, I really haven't had any real troubles with computers that have been in foreign languages. They're just silly little things like setting Windows to get a DHCP address or removing a proxy server.
All the buttons and such are in the same place across the different Windows languages, so I can just click to where I need to go by memory. Always impresses the students when a big ole white boy gets their Chinese speaking computer working in about 2 minutes flat.
I've run across several rouge DHCP servers this past week at my school. Our dorms only have one active ethernet port per room, so kids gotta buy a hub or switch if both roommates have a computer. My boss and I went by all the shops that sell computer stuff this summer (Best Buy, Circuit City, Staples, Wal-Mart, etc) and told the store managers to ONLY sell hubs and switches to students as we'd just tell them to return routers.
Well, those stores ran out of hubs and switches, and instead of losing a sale, they just sold the kids routers. And the kids plug both computers into the routers and the wall.. but not the WAN side into the wall, the LAN side. So now they're trying to serve DHCP addresses out to everyone on the same switch. I shut down the DHCP server on one by going to http://192.168.0.1 and just using the default password... saw about 25 computers in the DHCP client list. I talked another guy through doing it over the phone. I know there's several more out there but I haven't had time to track em down. Our normal policy is to send the MAC address to the Network Services folks so they can disable the port on the switch.
I'm pretty sure it was the IBOT that was featured on one of the tv news magazine shows the other night.. 60 Minutes or Dateline, I forget. They said the cost will be in the $30,000 neighborhood... I was floored by that figure!
But you shoulda seen the guy that was testing it.. Paraplegic who hadn't walked in years after an injury (didn't catch the details, if they reported them). He was able to play catch with his kids, order a drink from a somewhat high lunch counter, and pick up a book from the top shelf at a bookstore. The dude was in tears over being able to do such simple, to the rest of us, things. If the "wheelchair" enables more people to do more everyday things that the rest of us take for granted, I'd say it's worth every penny.
How resilient are these USB keychain/pen drives? I've been thinking of one for quite a while, but I feel like I'm pretty rough on my keys. Tossing them on the table, dropping them, carrying boxes and having the boxes press on the keys, etc. I'd hate to ruin one, and whatever important data that goes on em.
Uses I've thought of include giving hi-res pictures to people on dialup (most of my family), taking Windows updates over to mom's house instead of waiting on her dialup.. Software for work that I currently carry on CD (I do tech support for my school, so stuff like Ad Aware, Symantec AV, blah blah), documents and such for classes.
Basically, I think I'd use one, just afraid that I would ruin it. Maybe I'll just pick up a cheaper / smaller one and see how I do before getting a bigger / more expensive one.
FWIW, don't think I saw it mentioned in this discussion, there's a thread on the Gentoo forums about making a Live keychain based on the Live CD.
I suggest a brief look around the Gentoo forums.. You'll find a number of people using Gentoo on production servers.
A nifty tool I've just discovered is Bart's Boot CD. I'm using the CD that has multiple boot images on it. Boot with CD-ROM support, boot with network support, and an offline NT password recovery tool. The network support image will autodetect the network card and load the driver for it. Pretty neat.
I did a little hacking on it this week so that we could use it for drive imaging the computers in our labs at school.. Two key strokes and my brain dead co-workers are at the Drive Image screen. We have three different network cards in our computers, so that autodetect feature is really nice.
We only deal with network problems for students, and only then with software. We aren't allowed to open the computer to check things out, so I don't have to carry any screwdrivers or anything. I carry along a Knoppix CD and a CD filled with software.. School's Norton AV Corporate client, Adware & Spybot, latest IE setup files, lasest Mozilla & Netscape for Windows and Mac, a ton of NIC drivers, Win98 CAB files, Wink2k SP4 and XP SP1A, and some other random software. Also has some of Symantec's cleaners -- Klez, Nimda, etc.
One particular piece of software I carry is LSPfix. Basically, it'll fix what Net.net's spyware crap screws up. We had a quite a few problems with New.Net's crap last year, so this little program saved me some time quite a few times.
If I buy something on the company credit card and send in the rebate with proof of purchase myself who gets to keep the money.
I'm still confused on this. My boss does this stuff all the time. Just yesterday, she gave me 2 spindles of CD's to use. One was some no-name, one was TDK. The no-name was still shrink wrapped, the TDK's were missing the shrink wrap and UPC. Hmm. I remember seeing TDK's on rebate sale somewhere this week...
She's always slow to buy stuff we need, except when there is a rebate sale. Then she's banging on Best Buy's door at 10am waiting on them to open up so she can get that product w/ a rebate. The accounting lady for our department refuses to deal with rebates, so boss lady just sends em to her house.
Since the school won't deal with the rebates, I think the "right thing" to do would be to spend that money on crap for our use.. Case of coke for the fridge or something. But, hey, what does my opinion matter, I'm just a lowly student worker and she's the big boss who plays Yahoo games 7 hours a day.