The three of us, Jamie, Royce and myself, headed out to PQ Africa this morning to meet with Les and see what the temporary site looked like. Since PQ Africa is in the process of moving, we’ve been offered space in Vector’s offices in Midrand, even further out of the city to the north. Drove to Vector to find that the Sun equipment is all present, though still boxed, and the IBM servers are expected tomorrow … awaiting some missing parts.
Back to Jo’burg to the Monash temporary offices at Nashua, and we are handed our first technical assignment. It seems that only one external IP address has been given to the Monash staff, all the rest are connected on the 10.0.0.x network. Ed’s PC has been turned into a dual-homed NT server, which has had most of Microsoft Exchange and IIS web and proxy servers installed on it. Apparently he could access the internet prior to this happening, but no one else could. Now, everyone can partially access the web, but mail won’t work.
A few configuration tweaks and changes and George and I end up with most of the machines being able to access the web via the proxy (but only if using Internet Explorer), and mail via Microsoft Outlook and/or Outlook Express. No matter what we do we cannot make Netscape Communicator work with the proxy. A minor panic ensued when it appeared that we had stopped Outlook from running, since the calendaring, address book and contacts details of this are heavily used, but the traditional Windows reboot fixed this.
This is not an auspicious start, the mixture of workstations running Windows 98, NT server and Windows 2000 professional seem to be running everything but the Monash SOE software. There is no backup software of any kind, and no consideration has been made for backup or disaster recovery. We all decide to “consider” the options available to get some form of backup in place ASAP.
Later in the day Les calls to let us know that the IBM servers will be delivered tomorrow — probably around 10:00 — and that we should be able to start work on them immediately.
