And no play makes BillH one tired Jose. Well, it’s something like that anyway. Friday I left once again for the ATL. The week before it was install networking equipment and lead training. This time it was bring their network into our Active Directory. We use Quest for that and it works pretty well; however, even Quest admits that you should expect to do 10% of the computers by hand. I think it was a higher percentage because of two factors:

• They had a lot of laptops that went into hibernation mode. This means that while they were recognized as there by Quest that they didn’t actually run the tool because they were hibernating.
• They have five remote sites and Quest doesn’t necessarily work well over a WAN link. Yes, it is supposed to, but again we had a number of hibernating laptops as the remote sites are showrooms that have field sales folks there who have …. laptops.

It all led to a lot of work making sure that all the local permissions migrated but the personal profiles used were the same, printers migrated, Citrix apps migrated, network shares migrated, and the DNS and DHCP information all migrated.

I got there about 4pm on Friday. The hotel where I stayed was about one and a half blocks away, so I didn’t need a car to go to and from the worksite. It seemed like all we did was work and eat. Get in about 8am Saturday, work all morning, eat lunch, work all afternoon, eat dinner, work late, walk to the hotel and pass out from exhaustion. Then repeat the whole process on Sunday. Monday, we got there at about 7am (remember, now, this is Eastern Time and I’m used to going to work at 9am Central Time!!) to help the early arriving users if there are any kinks. And there always are kinks, no matter how well you plan.

Monday night at 7:45pm, my flight took off and I headed home. I’m still kind of in a funk, but hopefully after another night or two in my own bed things will seem better. It didn’t help that I was on a tiny regional jet, not on an exit row or a bulkhead row, and me and the guy next to me were the two biggest guys on the plane (and it was full - no empty seats).