Telephone interview with Blizzard: II, and postal strikes

So I got a second phone interview from one of the technical guys at Blizzard, and I got a chance to ask a few questions about what I'd be dealing with, what my responsibilities would be and so on. Long and short of it is that I've been asked to go to France to see them in-person. Fantastic.

Unfortunately the whole problem (photo trouble, apparently) with the passport has only been compounded by the fucking postal strike. I'm sorry, but most employees don't stop fucking working because they want a payrise for doing their job. Ok, so maybe they aren't being paid enough, but because this country is ridiculously backwards, from time to time, and we rely on an un-fucking-reliable public service I might miss out. I'm sorry, but the lack of redundancy here worries me.

Tomorrow I'm going to phone the UKPA (UK Passport Agency) and see if I can get a passport renewal in-person at the Newport passport office. Surely it won't take as long as waiting for the pissing postal service to get off their big arses. Honestly, if I tried this I'd be fired. What's bloodly different? There are plenty of unemployed and I'm sure that the possible lack of a job might encourage some to come back to work.

Telephone interview with Blizzard

I've literally just finished a telephone interview with Blizzard, for a (junior) Linux sysadmin position. Having never had a telephone interview before I was more apprehensive, and a hell of a lot more nervous than I've ever been over a job interview in the past, of course some of that maybe due to the fact that it was fucking Blizzard!

It started off with questions about what I knew about Blizzard, and so forth. Upon asking whether I'd played any games I mentioned the first games Blizzard games that I've gotten into - Diablo, Diablo 2, Starcraft, etc. and of course the recent addiction in my life, World of Warcraft. Mentioning this I got a few questions about my level, what my account name was, followed by the comment "we don't want to employ gold farmers, obviously!". My thought was "bugger me, they don't half take it seriously!", but I suppose that's only natural really.

This was followed by a set of brief, and quite simple, technical questions. Such as what's DNS, SMTP, what's a MAC / IP address and subnet, what's NFS, Apache configuration, etc. Having never supported Linux (professionally - hence the junior role) I wasn't sure exactly what to expect, but it wasn't as bad as I thought it could've been. I do fear that I said "um" far too much through nerves and a little too much blabbing, but it's over now, so there's not much I can do about fixing that.

In short it looks pretty exciting, although there are a few problems in my way - it was only a telephone interview, if they're interested (which the interviewer certainly seemed in indicate) I'll have to travel for an interview in person, my passport has expired (why didn't I notice this!?), and the job is in France (although they will assist in moving, and the major language of the office is English [apparently]). I'd be locked into supporting Linux systems, by the sound of it, where as with my current job I've got the potential for a larger range deployments and roles. On a smaller scale though. On the other hand. It's fucking Blizzard, man. I might never get the opportunity like this again...

So here I am, waiting to see whether they're still interested.

Mad solutions to common problems

Whilst arguing discussing the merits of Exchange over RPC over HTTP/S, with SIR-Millar and Theo, and how it would've been nicer to see some viable calendaring alternatives in the long term (and how I've become a corporate whore), I started thinking about my current personal calendaring system, only to come unstuck. I really should be storing my calendar remotely, and not relying on the $work calendar. Unfortunately there are relatively few calendaring solutions out there. I've settled on caldav, as the Lightning extension for Thunderbird supports it. Unfortunately there aren't really many *good* caldav servers. There is an apache module, but it looks like it relies on evolution data server, and also relies on custom patches. Just one more thing to chalk up to the todo list I fear.

This also got me thinking about a solution we've been using ourselves at work, very successfully I might add for over a year now, whereby we've virtualised our entire Windows, and partially non-Windows (phone system) infrastructure. We've rolled out cutdown versions of this to other clients, whereby we've virtualised one server (such as a terminal server). We're now going for the whole she-bang, with one key difference. We're also virtualising SBS, with a multi-terminal server environment. SBS is the one thing that's worried me, but this morning I was happy to see that a mad Canadian has also done it (although they actually deployed it on real customers when we were still playing with the idea on our own network). Hurrah!

For those concerned about virtual environments I recommend doing some play/testing. It certainly works, and makes backup and restoration a practical doddle once you've got a new host box. Granted it does increase the strain on your backups, but with the cost of a decent LTO3 drive and tapes within reach of even small customers, it's a no-brainer. Just make sure those backups go off-site.

Windows: SVCHost / Generic Host problems?

Basically there's been a cock up with Windows / Microsoft Update somewhere along the line, and the SVCHost which runs almost all of the core services craps out. The shell continues to run, so most users are blindly clicking the "yeah whatever" (read: yes/ok/continue/don't send) button and carrying on, oblivious to what's actually going on to the machine.

We've been getting this at a reasonably steadily increasing rate at work, on a number of customer laptops (and a solitary pair of desktops) since May. It's now started to affect some non-work friends who don't do their updates so often. I figured it was time to share with the world how you fix it. Quite easily by applying MS KB927891 (2000 XP, 2003, x86, x64 and ia64), or KB939159 (Vista). Once done, you're laughing and the user has a "fixed" PC. The only problem is getting the damn hotfix on their PC over the network before the damn SVCHost crashes (like hell should you go on-site for something that simple :P).

Saving the earth using WOL, one SBS deployment at a time

For those who aren't familiar with WOL, or Wake On LAN to give it the full name, its a process for waking a machine over the network (i.e. remotely) from a low power, or from a switched off, state provided that there is power to the network card (and that the machine supports it - which most modern ones do).

Unfortunately Wake On LAN is often one of those forgotten technologies in SMEs these days, and probably quite rightly so as it can be a little tricky for some users to grasp, and it can be a lot of work to setup in larger networks; often relying on custom interfaces and additional web pages for users to visit etc.

However, there is now a cool addon available for Windows Small Business Server Remote Web Workplace which adds a simple "Send Wake On Lan" button for the web interface. Granted this still doesn't address the issue of having to configure the target machines for Wake on LAN (typically via the BIOS), but its a big step for end users in my opinion.

Now I'm sure most people will already get this, but for the googlers of the world what this means is that now you can be greener in your office and also lower your electric bill. Not to mention freak out your users or employees!