"Neither Rain nor Sleet nor Snow nor Dark of Night"

The rain doesn't seem to stop them, and "dark of night" doesn't make any sense when they close up the post office by 5:30.

A year or two ago, they said that they wouldn't be able to deliver the mail in the sleet or snow unless we moved our mailbox so that they wouldn't have reach across the front steps.

That's why we have two mailboxes now.

Winter is Back

Winter is back. My shoes have white salt lines around them. Driving to work this morning, it was nothing but grey skies seen through a dirty windshield.

I hate it when the snow at the curbs turns black. How can snow be so ugly?

There was a tow truck at the toll booths waiting and watching for something bad to happen on the slippery roads.

My rear-view mirror has fallen off and it is too cold to glue it back on. It hangs there from a power connection and goes "bonk" if I slow down too fast.

Just have to deal with it and keep going...

... time passes ...

The drive home is much better. I figured out how to unplug my mirror so it doesn't bonk anymore. The roads are clean and dry and feel safe again. The unsightly parts of the city are covered in a clean white blanket. The blue sky has reappeared and there are fluffy little clouds going by. The sun is setting across the river, and along the horizon the sky has a rosy peach color, blending up into a baby blue that you only see in the winter.

My shoes will survive...

I will survive...

Life is good.

Crazy Wild Desktop Day

I knew it was going to be bad when the pager started going off at 7 AM, before I had crawled out of bed. They said that "a lot" of people were getting rebooted for security patches and after reboot, they didn't get their desktop. They also said that they didn't get the "I Accept".

Okay, I dialed in and checked the WSUS server: 1,800 desktops or so updated so far. Not a Good Thing if they were all broken.

"Not getting their desktop" was something that was reported from time to time. Also known as "lost the printer setup" or "lost email profile". When we do automated installs, it is generally by making the machine automatically log in to a special, captive desktop admin account. The account runs a login script that does the install. When a user reported that their desktop is blank, email profile is gone, printers are gone, I had written it off to something failing in the script and the user not knowing that they are logged in to a different account. TAC walked them them through getting it straightened out.

This was not like that. These updates were being done by Automatic Updates. Straight Microsoft code with no automatic login or anything.

The patches were released by Microsoft on Jan. 10 and we applied them to our 30 or so test desktops. No problems in the last couple of weeks. They were scheduled to be released to all desktops last Wednesday, but we had too many other problems going on that day. Finally released then Monday evening. They downloaded to the desktops during the day yesterday, then started installing at 4 AM this morning.

It looks like all of the ones that installed at 4 AM worked without problem. Machines that were powered off overnight were different. The user powered on the machine, Symantec AV kicked off a scheduled weekly scan (on Wednesday by coincidence), the patches started installing, and then the user logged on.

"Can't load profile... NTUSER.DAT file in use." (Was it being scanned?) Windows was kind enough to create a new profile by copying the default user profile... but none of the user's desktop shortcuts, printers, My Documents, etc. were to be seen. Some new profiles were worse than that: Default User\NTUSER.DAT could not be copied because it was also in use. Ugly profiles resulted. (They didn't get the "I Accept", which being interpreted, means the login script didn't run.)

1,880+ out of 3,000+ already installed and the others probably couldn't be stopped because most would already have been downloaded and waiting on the desktop. Vogue la galère. We'll just keep it going.

To shorten a long story... We developed a safe and effective fix to get the users back on their original profiles and "a lot" did not turn into "very many" or "every".