Dwarfsoft [GPA]

I have been kept busy a bit with Assignments over the last couple of weeks. Work has commenced on the Uni project for CIS3006 (Business Computing Project) which I have titled Athenaeum, as it is a Library Cataloguing system. I figure that entire project should only take a short period of time, however, the excessive reporting that is required in this course is more than doubling my workload.

I have also done the first Assignment, which was an Online Test, for CIS3008 (Systems Planning and Management). Worth 5%, I have picked up 4.5% of my result already. I have started work on the modules for CIS2003 (Component Based Software Development – basically ASP.Net), and installed the software and started looking through the modules for CIS3007 (Enterprise Systems Development and Architecture – Basically J2EE development).

Today I also installed Novell Netware 6.5 on my old AMD K6-2 333MHz. This is in order to study up and take the first of the CNA exams. I have put off doing the exam for too long since the training and I have started to lose some of the information, so need to refresh myself with how the whole system works. At times like this I am annoyed I don’t have either more computers, or a powerful enough PC to virtualize server and clients.

This week I also found out that one of my colleagues has been taking an online Microsoft course for Windows 2003 Server Installation and Maintenance. I have been helping him through his online assessment components, and this has piqued my interest in completing the exam I was studying for (070-290 – Installing and Maintaining Microsoft Windows 2003 Server). I also have the Windows Small Business Server 2003 Exam to complete, as I had already attended this training last year.

Basically, things are getting busy and I find I have little time to dedicate to updating blog. There is also a lot of movement in the office, and I am under the impression that I have been given the opportunity to move into a higher position sometime in the next two weeks. This will be great news for me as I could really do with the additional financial input that the position would grant me. This is not set in stone though, and I may just be moving across at level. This is another reason why I should complete some of the above Certifications.

Moving across to this new job may provide me with an opportunity to go on CCNA training, and gain Certification for that. This would be ideal and is one of the things on my potential Goals list for 2007. My current position at work has actually got a lot more interesting of late as I have been called upon to produce more scripts and more tools. This started about 3 weeks ago when I started creating a tool to check TED distributions on multiple servers. Once I had created the scripts and the HTA application to wrap it I was asked to produce a Security Auditing tool for folders. I have created two versions of this, the second pulls the information out of a call to Rights.exe for the UNC Path, and then I use this information by connecting via LDAP to NDS to get a list of all users who have access to the folder. Upon completing this I have been required to write a tool that lists what folders a user or group has access to. This, however, requires a heavy usage of the Trustee.txt/Trustbak.txt export (Trustee.NLM nightly export) which can be quite large for a CSV, especially across the network.

Scripting more has allowed me to hone my coding skills and helped to make my position more tollerable, and has allowed me a lot more freedom and communication with the Cluster Manager. This will hopefully bode well for the position I hope to be attaining soon, or so I hope.

Cheers, Chris.