IT support is a thankless [worthless] job...

4:52am: I'm still sitting here in the office. The EDS infrastructure team is trying to test Group Policy changes on the Domain Controller based on Microsoft's suggestions (i.e. wild guesses) of what to change in the settings to fix the dotNET web app user authentication problem we've been witnessing with the W2K3 upgrades to the DC. Nothing is going right right now, but at least we have discovered some leads as to what the source of the problem is. I fear, however, that we are going to have to do this again yet ANOTHER weekend. More freakin' testing...

7:01am: Things are getting tense. I think the lack of sleep has made everyone on the conference call insane. Everyone is getting cranky and short with each other. It's sort of funny in a pathetic sort of way. After two hours of Microsoft's complete and utter madness, we're finally backing the test changes out and returning the environment to how it was before the tests began.

Working with Microsoft is an exercise in patience. There is no project or account manager assigned to a particular case, just a never-ending stream of technicians and call center people in India to whom you have to repeat the problem over and over and over again. They constantly bring the wrong people into the calls, and often it takes forever to get a hold of the on-call people. The Indian techs are typically very hard to understand (especially at five in the morning). You end up sending your reports to ten different people. Stupid Microsoft.

At least we got a little further ahead as to the root cause of the problems. We've sent all of the network monitor captures and machine diagnostics to Microsoft for analysis. They think the problem lies with the identification of the server URLs from the Domain Controller server, but we ran out of time tonight to test the hypothesis (due to be done on another Sunday morning in the near future).

That's it that's all. I have yet to do a final client test to make sure all the web apps are back to normal once EDS is done promoting the old DC Servers back into the environment. I'm so tired. So...hungee...

9:22am: Fuck, I'm still here. Now EDS is having problems promoting the old W2K DC back into the environment, so I can't do a final test until that problem is resolved. This really sucks. I'm not going to have a chance to hit the sack until sometime this afternoon now.

I've got a meeting at Peak Power at noon. Here's hoping I'll get some sleep at some point today.