Sometimes my job sucks...

I know, this is not an original thought or idea, but today it's very true.

As the Technical Facilities Manager for a computer training company, one of my responsibilities is to ensure the classrooms are ready for the next teaching session. In this case, I needed to setup my large classroom for a room rental next week. The event is being sponsored by another company (a training partner), so they have a computer image (a "picture" of sorts of a computer hard drive) I need to install on the computers for the class. Being over 7GB in size, it takes one day to download from their screaming fast (read dripping with sarcasm) FTP site. The next morning, I try to install the image no less than 4 times, each time producing an error. So I call the company and they overnight me 2 DVDs containing a "fixed" image... fixed. Yeah right.

For you readers who aren't into the technical stuff, you might want to skip over the next part. However, since this did take the better part of ALL DAY, I thought it was worth spelling out.

In order to get one of my computers to accept the Ghost© image, I had to:

1. Remove the Ghost Client partition.
2. Boot with a Ghost boot disk.
3. Push the image onto the machine.
4. Reboot.

Upon reboot, the generic image had no USB drivers, so I couldn't login (mouse and keyboard). So I had to --

1. Reboot using a Windows 2000 Server boot disc and perform a "repair" in order to get the basic drivers working.
2. Disable all the Symantec services since I was unable to uninstall it without the disc.
3. Install the actual Video, NIC, and Audio drivers for this machine.
4. Repair the installation of MS Office.
5. Install Windows 2000 SP4.
6. Install IE 6.1 with the latest service pack.
7. Reboot using a Ghost boot disk.
   
8. Make a new image from the machine.
9. Using Ghost, multicast it out to the rest of the machines in the classroom.
10. Go home, die, then go to the theater to play drums (only 3 performances of Godspell left!).

As of this writing (3:45pm PDT), the image is 67% complete (uploading to the server) . If this is my last blog entry ever, you know I committed seppuku.