A Dusty Cupboard

Fun and the command line aren't natural bedfellows, especially if like me you've spent most of the last few years doing those most important of Sysadmin functions: idle web surfing and scatter-gun character assassination. However, a change is as good as a rest and all that jazz, so just for a while I've foregone Wikipedia (the last internet refuge for the terminally bored) and plumped for a spot of work instead of passing my time alternately cogitating, digesting and forgetting about Lysander's role in the Battle of Thrace.

So today I'm continuing migrating stuff across from our old SAN. Fortunately for me, I'm employed at an educational establishment, and our students are currently somewhere else. Some would debate the point that they're seldom anywhere else other than somewhere else even when they're here, but either way, their absence from the campus at the moment is making my life a little easier. I mentioned a couple of days ago I was pulling profiles across: that seems to have gone well, and now I'm digging into migrating a few different groups home directories over. It's a little more involved than the profiles, because not only am I dealing with pulling the data and permissions across but in this case the folders also need to be shared, the users made folder owners, and then then pointed to the new location through Group Policy.

None of it's rocket science though. In fact, none of it's beyond the average twelve-year old. Which makes it slightly galling just how much I've been struggling to remember how to use these most basic of command line utilities. I even forgot how to share a folder from the command line, and had to look it up on Google. That's just plain embarrassing.

I've never used Group Policy Modelling before, but now I'm addicted. It's a left-field comparison I know, but in its functionality it reminds me of the old Query Analyser in SQL 2000 in that it's a great get-out-of-jail tool for people whose job demands they use it but who can't be arsed to find out how to do it properly. Or as in my case with the old SQL Query Analyser; those who have met a DBA or two who understands SQL properly. If it's not too late already, heed my sage words: run to the hills, just in case it's catching. You don't ever want to be like that.