Proof that even the Clued can be Clueless. . .

It had to happen. . . .

I've ended up doing techie duties again here at $WESELLCOOLHARDWARE. The sorry saga follows, with names excised to protect the hugely guilty. . .

Flashback. Thursday last week. Someone an infected attachment. Cue install of W32.Mytob.CZ.

Friday. The Technical team (who are hardware uberhackers) take the network down to disinfect it. $TECHNICALMANAGER decides it would be a great idea to change our network config at the same time, so uninstalls MS ISA Server.

With no access to the router.

Then tries to install Sygate Personal Firewall on an operational 2K SBS server.

So as of Monday, we have no Web access, no email, no access to shared folders, no Skype, no MSN. . .

Lunchtime Monday. The Boss sets me on the case. Only I'm not allowed to bring anyone in to help. Cue 9 hours on the phone with Microsoft, finally leading to . . . nothing. No further forward than when I reinstalled ISA myself.

Microsoft Support the Monty Python way - I'm banging a dead parrot on the counter, and they're swapping counters to see if that solves the problem!

Anyway, I finally got permission from The Boss to bring someone in.

One change of router and network reconfiguration later, we've got everything up and running. 4pm Tuesday.

And this morning - no mail. Outbound is fine, internal fine, but nothing coming in.

This, of course, is my fault. According to The Boss.

Blech.

A busy day ahead.

But first, some geekery....I'm still waiting for DSL to be activated, and living on dialup is driving me nuts. The current expected activation date is 20 Dec, the hardware's arrived, so now it's just a matter of waiting. I'll be SO glad to get back to a decent connection speed!

I'm trying to get a web-based calendar going - and get it all downloaded, organised, check the permissions - and then find I need to upload it to the CGI space I get from Plusnet. But - and here's the fun bit - can I access said space?

No. No FTP, no telnet, and a 403: Forbidden if I even try and surf to the empty page. Now I can understand the 403 - there's no index page set up, so it's trying to access an empty directory - but if I can't FTP, can't telnet, can't upload anything to the directory, it's precisely bugger-all use!

In other news, it's off to the shops today to do the pressie run. That should be fun.

And I'm picking my friend up from the airport tonight, as well. 3 weeks cycyling across Southeast Asia - she is, of course, utterly insane.

A Brief Web Presence

Hmmm. . .Probably the shortest-lived webpage ever...up, viewed (by me) and down in about 2 minutes.

Why?

Frontpage. Blech.

It looked awful, wouldn't work properly with ANY stylesheet other than one of its own set templates, barfed when I tried to change the categories, and gave me a range of folders I didn't want.

And it's fscking Microsloth, so I couldn't BEAR the thought of someone I know doing Ctrl-U in Firefox and seeing M$ plastered all over the page source.

It's back to handwritten HTML then, and diligent study into the basics of using CSS.