I was offered the opportunity to teach a class next quarter, and I took it. I’m going to be teaching cinema — whatever that means — to about 10 students two times a week for 30 minutes per class. This was something I discussed with the superintendent during my interview with him, but it hadn’t come up again since he hired me. Until today, obviously. This is going to be fun. I’m a little scared, very eager, and extremely clueless as to what to do. I’m thinking of first teaching the kids the principles of telling a story. As long as they have that down, I think the rest will come easier. Afterwards, I was thinking of maybe doing a little bit of 5secondfilms.com inspired short films. If they can tell a story in five seconds, film it, and show it in class, I think they’re good to go.

The principal offered me this job while I was sitting by the conference table in the district office writing notes in my little Apprentice notebook. The internet was still down, and I didn’t know what to do. In the morning, First Call Computer Solutions — the guys who set up the network all those years ago — gave me a call and tried walking me through the issues. I told them all the information I could give them, and we tried a few things. One of the main things he wanted me to do was to ping our switch, which is this device that connects devices to the internet. We tried to see if we could at least contact it, but we couldn’t. It was unreachable from the few sources I tried, which could mean our switch had failed. We tried a few more things, but we couldn’t do anything if we couldn’t connect to the switch. I reset it to factory defaults, tried again, and still nothing. Something’s wrong with it, and tomorrow they’re sending someone up here with a temporary switch to see if that would fix the problem.

Since this happened early in the morning, and I really couldn’t do anything else network-wise for the rest of the day, I wandered around the campus and talked to students, teachers, and other staff members. It was a relief, to be honest, to get away from those issues and just branch out. Many of the students think I’m cool, and yes I’m bragging. I was talking to one student in the hall when one of his teachers came up to us, and the student told him that I was one of the coolest guys he knows. Later, I wanted to go back to my office, but the path there went through some school girls during recess. They asked me where Luigi was, I told them he’s messing up our internet, and they laughed and said I was so cool. It was strange, but a good ol’ ego booster, especially when I felt useless today.

During the end of the day, I was asked to be a judge for this elementary school geography competition. Fifteen students were given really tough geography questions, and if they missed two questions, they were out. Everyone but one girl missed their first question. They were really tough questions, especially for 4-6 graders. In the next round, two more girls answered correctly, but everyone else didn’t so they were out. The semi-finals had three girls, and the questions became harder. Everyone missed their first few questions until finally someone answered one correctly. In the next round, someone else answered one correctly, giving us our championship round. Each girl missed the first two of three questions, but with the last question, one of the girls answered correctly and the other one didn’t. These were tough questions and to have someone win was incredible. It was fun, and I’m glad I was able to take part in it.

Sometimes we can’t let the bad hinder our ability for good. The internet was down, and people depended on me to get it back up and running, but I couldn’t. I felt like a failure until I decided I wasn’t. The switch could have failed. There was nothing I could’ve done to fix that short of going to the store myself and buying a replacement. I joked around with people as I walked around the campus, and they understood what was going on. I liked explaining the issues to people because it let them know what was going on. I didn’t do that last time. I just had a good day when it looked like I was in for another long, hard, and horrible day.

The network is down again at school, and I was irritated this morning when I came into work. It had actually gone down about half an hour before my shift ended yesterday, but along with the internet being down, our phones were down, too. I figured it had something to do with our phone and internet provider, but we called them this morning and they said it was all on us. Well, on me. I purposely tried to stay away from any and all server stuff since I fixed it last Monday, but maybe I should’ve babied it a bit while it was recovering. Regardless, the internet was down for everyone, and it was my duty to fix it. Unfortunately, I didn’t. The internet was down. I couldn’t do any research. Reception is horrible in Charlo, so I had to go outside and pray to the reception gods for a little bit of 3G. Every time I found something to try on Google, I walked back to my office, tried it, and when it didn’t work, I walked back out, spent some time in the cold while waiting for Google to load, and then go back into my office once I found something else to try. This got old really quickly, so for the last part of the day, I just tried figuring it out on my own. I made progress, took a lot of notes, and I’m going to go back tomorrow to try a few more things that I couldn’t get to or didn’t even think about today.

All this reminds me of is being careful for what I wish for. I complained last week how work was slow and boring compared to the insanity of the week before. Oh how I wish I had a boring day today. Oh how I wish to respond to teacher’s telling me their internet isn’t working, and when I get there, I tell them that the ethernet cord isn’t plugged in. I wish all problems were that easy. Unfortunately, they’re not, and that sucks. The internet is down, and I don’t know if it’s a network card issue or a software issue or a specific server issue. I’m not sure if I could’ve done anything that could have done this, and I did, what that thing was. I don’t know if it was Windows Update again screwing around with our systems, or something in Group Policy, or if we were hacked or infected with a virus. I don’t know.

I’m tired of these issues, but I am the tech guy there, and I am making more money than I’ve ever made in my life, so I have to suck it up and deal with it. I don’t think I’m panicking or anything, but this is getting ridiculous. I just renewed my Lynda.com subscription because I knew I didn’t know enough and I wanted to learn more and be better. I literally just had a day to even try to learn more before it all went to hell again. When I’m at work, though, I’m calmer about it because my mind is focused on a singular problem and doing all I can to find that solution. It’s only when I come home when all that frustration comes out. It did help me out today as I worked out harder than I have so far in Insanity Max: 30. Before when it took me at most around 10-11 minutes before I maxed out on any particular workout, I lasted over 17 minutes today. I needed an outlet to let loose and working out was it.

There’s no point to freaking out when I’m the only tech guy at the school, and it’s my job to fix any and all problems that come up. I love this job, and I’m getting paid handsomely for it, and I don’t want to get fired. That’s motivation enough. And I love solving problems. Here’s to tomorrow’s entry being about how I fixed everything.

I sat in my office when my phone rang. It was a student calling from his teacher’s phone. One of their computers was down, and has been down for over a week, and they needed my help in fixing it. He described the problem vaguely over the phone, and from that information, I decided to take the Windows 7 installation disk as a precautionary measure. The problem with the computer was that it started into Startup Repair mode, but except of fixing it, it kept saying it couldn’t find any errors. The computer would then restart and boot straight into Startup Repair again. It was a vicious cycle that I couldn’t get out of. Starting Windows into Safe Mode would take me straight into this screen again, so I inserted the Windows 7 disk and booted into it. I ran the Startup Repair from the disk, and it gave me all the same issues. I tried running some commands through the command prompt, but none of them worked because this Startup Repair had told Windows it needed a reboot so it could complete its repairs. An essential kernel file was corrupted, and I couldn’t do anything about it.

After some time researching the issue on Google, I ran a few more commands, deleted some files, recreated others, and ran another scan. The scan said it would take an hour, so I left to do other work. I came back maybe thirty minutes later and found that the scan had finished and that it didn’t find anything wrong. I did some more research, ran a few more commands, and finally, I was able to fix it. What had happened was that Windows Update was updating Windows, but that it had somehow failed. Once I was able to boot into Safe Mode, Windows reverted all the changes from its failed update, and I was back to the login screen. I rebooted and logged into a normal Windows state, and everything seemed to be working fine. The teacher came up to me and said, “It works,” in a surprised and relieved way. I said, “Yup,” and left.

I went back to my office and opened up my calendar on my computer. I was here until 4, and it was almost noon. I wanted to revise my daily schedule, to push some things earlier so I can try to make it to bed by 8:30 PM. It’s 8:37 PM right now. I spent a bit longer reading than I imagined I would, but that’s okay because once I write this entry, I get to go to sleep. I get to go to sleep earlier than usual because I want to make sleep a bigger priority than it has been in my life. By scheduling almost every minute of my days, I was able to see where I could cut, where I could improve, and how I could be better.

To fix the computer, I had to figure out the underlying cause for all the symptoms. In order to become better, I have to figure out every aspect of my life that can be improved. I’m cutting back my TV watching habits and replacing that time with productive tasks to do. I’m starting my routines earlier so I can go to sleep earlier and have more energy to live my days when I’m awake. More energy means more work I can do to be better. And that’s what this is all about.

To be better, I have to attack every aspect of my life from all angles, and I cannot quit. If I quit, then I’ve failed. I can’t fail. I won’t let myself fail.

January is in the books, and we’re now at the mercy of February. It’s a new month, which means it’s a time for reflection and planning. I started something new today: I compiled all of my entries from January into a single PDF and read it all on my iPad. I’ve never read these many of my entries all in one go, and I learned a lot. I learned my moods really dictate what my entries end up being about. If I’m sad, I write a somewhat reflective, somewhat longing entry. If I’m pissed, I write with profanity and an energy that is kind of lacking in my other entries. I also started the month in California, drove back home to Montana, built and lived with my new furniture, got sick for the first time in 4 years, skipped a week of working out, my car broke down and was repaired again, spent a week trying to figure out why the internet at my work was down, fixed that issue earlier this week, and spent this past week building my house. Pretty awesome month, if I do say so myself.

The momentum I built up yesterday carried over into today. I had the most productive weekend in a long time. I checked off so many tasks on my todo list, finished so many projects and started just as many more, and I was still able to watch some TV and even the Super Bowl. I finished another book today, my third for the year. I start the last week of “easy” Insanity Max: 30 tomorrow. I also renewed my Lynda.com subscription today after realizing that I needed to be more educated in certain areas of my job. I also went grocery shopping, staying under budget, did my laundry, and cleaned up the house. What a weekend.

There were times today where I didn’t know if I should be doing what I was doing, so I looked at my calendar — which had my routine broken down by minute — and realized that since I haven’t broken down my weekends from 8-4, which is my work schedule during the weekdays, I could do whatever I wanted. The fact that I had my day broken down, and the fact that I went to look at my calendar for guidance, I think reflects a shift to my routine and habits that I’m excited for the future. There’s a lot I want to do, obviously, and if I can get a lot of that done or even just started this month, then I’ll be super happy. I don’t know why working so much makes me happy, but it does. I’ve definitely noticed that when I’m lazy and don’t get anything done, I become restless and depressed. That’s when I indulge in all my worst impulses and fall into a rabbit hole of misery and despair. By working, I’m kept busy, I accomplish things that I know will make my life better, and the simple feeling of accomplishment feels good. Why wouldn’t I want to feel that all the time?

So here’s to February: you may be the shortest month of the year, but that just means I need to work with an extra sense of urgency to get everything I want done in a month done.

I live most hours of my days with a screen of some sort in front of my face. The main one is my MacBook Air, but my iPhone is really high up there, with my Kindle and iPad always there when the other two aren’t. I don’t know what to make of this. On the one hand, I live and die by my technology. They provide so much richness and value to my life that living without them is almost the same as not living at all.¹ On the other hand, though, I know I’m missing so much of life by isolating myself in front of these various sized screens. There’s people to meet, places to see, life to live. I don’t know. I didn’t intend to write this today because I had a really productive day today spent in front of my screens.

Do you guys know about the Pomodoro technique? It’s this productivity technique where you set a timer for 25 minutes, you focus and your work, and when the timer goes off, you read for 5 minutes. That 30 minute block is called a Pomodoro. If you do four pomodoro’s in a row, that’s two hours of focused work you could get done. I adapted this today with 45 minute focus time and 15 minute breaks, and after two of these, I get a 30 minute break. I wanted to do 4 of these today, which would’ve translated into 3 hours of work interspersed with breaks that lasted 90 minutes. I didn’t get those 4 pomodoro’s, but I did get 3, and I did get a lot accomplished. Mostly long-lingering computer tasks that have been on my mind for a long time. I’m glad I finished some projects and started others. I felt really accomplished, and I hope to take this momentum into tomorrow.

I don’t know if I’m willing to take a somewhat regular technology sabbatical. I don’t even know if I want to. My summer’s are when I go out into nature and fight fires, and that’s my yearly technology sabbatical. I don’t know if I want to do it when I don’t have to. Is that wrong? Is that just part of our generation? I wonder how people felt when everything was lit up with lightbulbs for the first time. Did people yearn for the dark? Or the light from a candle? Now people freak out when blackouts happen. Take away my phone, and I’ll guarantee I’ll freak out. That’s a scary thought to think about. What is it about these devices that makes us so dependent on them?

They do everything. I can do almost everything I’m interested in with these devices. From working to learning to entertainment, I can do a great deal. It’s what I use to write these blog entries, and I don’t know if I would be the person I am today if I didn’t use my laptop to write these entries. These devices are part of my life, and they help me lead a fulfilling life. I don’t know what I’ll do without them.²

I accomplished a great deal today, both at work at and at home. I feel good and productive and relieved. At work, I finally did something I’ve been thinking about doing since the beginning of my time there: I cleaned up the Group Policy manager. For those who don’t know what that is, let me explain. In Windows Server, there’s something called a Group Policy manager, and what this does is manage all the policies that are applied to all of our computers in our domain. This can be as generic as defining how users log on to computers to the specifics of which icon appears on certain computer desktops. The more polices the computer has to process, the slower the startup time becomes. I was able to combine about 10 policies for just printers into one simple policy, and about the same for icons. I think I did this better than what was there, and I’m really happy about it.

The other thing I did today was break down my daily routine in my calendar. It was enlightening and gratifying. I’ve almost blocked out every minute of every day except for about 30 minutes in the evening. It’s kind of insane. I watch about 3 hour-long episodes of television a day, and that’s where I think I can start cutting back on a daily basis. I think from 3 to 2 a day will be a nice start. I think if I have more direction when it comes to my free time I’ll be more productive overall. I really never took advantage of those 30 minutes in the evening because I didn’t know what to do. Maybe now I can optimize my days a little bit. Kinda anal, but I’m okay with it.

I’m almost 40% through this self-imposed journey, and I don’t know how much I’ve actually done. Looking back, I guess I’ve done a lot, especially since before I basically did nothing, so the contrast there is pretty stark. I mean, I’m in the best shape of my life, I found and kept the best job of my life, I drove to freaking California and back with all my stuff and a bunch of furniture from IKEA. That last one is still kind of unbelievable to me. I’m also trying every day to be better, and that’s something I’m proud of, even if I don’t live up to my expectations. Maybe I’m hard on myself because I know I can be better. I know I can push myself harder, and I know I can succeed. It’s just a matter of actually doing it. Yes it’s hard, but that’s the point, right?

I’ll be done with Week 3 of Insanity Max: 30 tomorrow, and simply hearing Shaun T every day telling me to keep pushing is something I’ve grown to need. If I can’t do one more rep, I do three. I don’t give up, I don’t stop, I keep moving, and I keep doing better than my best. That’s the only way to live.

Lets do this.

So I made no progress on my plans from yesterday to be better today. My routine is stuck, and I need to muster up more strength to unstick it. I’m not sure how to do that other than having the willpower to do it. Right now, I don’t have the willpower because I’m already doing a lot. I still have my routines in the morning and at night, I still workout every day, and I work 40 hours a week. Like I wrote yesterday, I really only have three hours to play around with, and right now, I’m spending most of them watching TV, and I enjoy it. Three hours is a lot, especially if I decide to implement one, maybe two, more things to do in that time frame. I can do more work with my novel or learn a new skill or finish many tasks on my todo list. The problem, like I said, is finding the willpower, but my willpower is finite and I’m afraid I’m already spending it all.

I’m thinking a lot about my schedule. My daily schedule. I’ve been thinking about breaking down my day, down to the minute, on my calendar. I want to know where the “dead spots” are. What I can cut, where I can add, and when’s the best time for me to use these three hours to the best of my abilities. I haven’t done it yet, but I plan to. I really have no idea. I can sense what my day looks like since they don’t really change. But if I’m trying to go to sleep my 8:30 every night — in order to get 8.5 hours of sleep a night — then my time is super valuable and scarce. And I have to figure out how much TV, if any, I’ll allow myself to watch a day. Any show will eat into my three hours, so that’s something to consider.

Why am I trying to do this? To optimize my days down to the minute? I don’t think I’m going to live by my schedule, but I am curious to see what a typical day looks like on a calendar. To feel the rhythms and see where it might be the best place for me to start implementing these new time blocks of productivity. Maybe it’s anal. I don’t care. I’m curious, and now I’m committed. But, if I’m being honest, I don’t feel like I’m doing enough, like I’m failing myself. I made a promise to myself on Day 1, and I don’t know if I’m living up to my expectations. Part of me doesn’t like writing these entries online anymore and misses the intimacy of a paper journal. The other part of me knows my entries won’t be half as good as the ones here. I simply want to keep improving, to keep doing my best to be my best. It’s hard, and sometimes I feel like quitting, but I have a drive to just keep going. To keep moving my feet.

And that’s something that’ll never not be a part of me.

On Monday, I finished reading Manage Your Day-to-Day: Build Your Routine, Find Your Focus & Sharpen Your Creative Mind by 99U, and yesterday I started to read Maximize Your Potential: Grow Your Expertise, Take Bold Risks & Build an Incredible Career by 99U. Both books are in the productivity genre of literature that I actually enjoy reading, and every time I read books like these, I get pumped up. I want to do more. I want to be more efficient, more productive, and more creative.

There was something I read in there today about shaking up the status quo and pushing yourself past your comfort zone because that’s the only way you’ll ever improve. I needed to read that because that’s how I’ve felt for a few months now. I try to push myself, but I’m so complacent in my routine that I just don’t want to. A big part of my routine, unfortunately, is watching TV. If I watched zero minutes of television a day, I would reclaim hours of my day to push myself in ways I know I’ll be proud of. But it’s hard. I love TV. I love coming home from work, grabbing a few snacks, lying in bed with my laptop, and hitting play on some television show. It’s relaxing and fun. But every time I do, I later lament those lost hours. I could’ve spent more time on my novel if only I didn’t spend that hour watching the Good Wife.

There was a chapter in there devoted to deliberate practice. This was made famous by Malcolm Gladwell, who wrote about the 10,000 hour rule to master anything. I’ve always been of two minds with this. On the one hand, I loved it because it gave me a tangible goal to strive for. 10,000 hours is a nice number that we can all somewhat see. It’s a big number, but it seems doable. On the other hand, I feel like it discredits anyone who doesn’t or hasn’t spent that amount of time with their craft. Like, take an up and coming rock band. They’re good, but the musicians are all in their early twenties. Do we think they spent 10,000 hours deliberately practicing their music? I doubt it, but it doesn’t discount the fact that I like their music, and that I think they’re good. I guess it’s about mastery and not just being “good.” Whatever.

I don’t know where I’m going with this. These sessions have become a chore and not really the necessary time to really evaluate my life and my actions in an honest and open way. Chore might be the wrong word. It is the wrong word. It’s a task I want to check off my todo list. That’s what this has become, and I feel guilty about that. I feel the same way about my novel. I loved the first three chapters of my book, but I’ve slowly grown to resent the last six. It’s difficult to give everything I do 100%, and it’s especially disconcerting when I want to give everything I do 100% and I don’t. Hence the reason why I’m reading these books. I want to get better, but a big part of that process is finding the time.

I will always have 24 hours a day to live my life. I’ve been neglecting my sleep for months. I get, at best 7 hours of sleep a night. I want to get 8.5. I spent 8 hours at work, but I spent about 30 minutes driving to and from work, with an extra half hour thrown in for randomness. That’s a good 9 hours devoted to just work. Already I’m at 17.5 hours of my days accounted for, leaving me with 6.5. I spent an hour working out and showering, maybe 30-60 minutes cooking and eating breakfast, lunch, and dinner, about an hour spent writing my journal and novel. That leaves me with about 3.5 hours left. A good 30 minutes of that is spent doing some other stuff, like meditating, and other routines. If I didn’t watch TV, I could use that time to improve, but instead, I watch TV. That’s where that extra time goes to. 3 hours a day, at least, spent passively watching people act on a laptop screen. Is that wise? I don’t know. I can’t squeeze every hour of my days with doing something productive. I’ll just burn out.

Three hours to improve my life. Wow.

Compared to last week, today’s day at work felt slow even though I did a lot. Semester grades were due last week, but since the network was down, the deadline was pushed to this week. I spent most of today fixing any and all issues that arose in Infinite Campus, and I think by the end of the day, I was able to get to most, if not all, of these issues. One of the things that sucks about the network crashing last week, including the fixes I made, is the fact that all of our netbooks and laptops need to be plugged in with an ethernet cord for them to get the updates from the server in order for them to be able to use the Wi-Fi. Fortunately, that’s not something I had to do. Instead, that was something I had to advise the teachers about, and since they have a couple dozen students per class, they can use them to implement these changes.

I feel more confident now. Nothing like a crisis to make me feel like I conquer anything now. I was in full on crisis mode last week, and I spent every minute of all my shifts last week focused on fixing the problems we were having. Today felt less exciting. I was glad I was able to use my MacBook again to get my work done, but with no mysteries to solve, I felt.. I’m not sure what the right word is. I wasn’t bored. I wasn’t unmotivated. Everything was stultifying. That’s an SAT word I taught myself years ago. I had no enthusiasm at work because there were no mysteries to solve. I love helping teachers with their jobs, but it was all part of my old routine. I liked my old routine pre-crisis, but post-crisis? There’s no excitement!

I know how insane this attitude sounds. I’m still getting paid the same. The stress is way lower than it was last week. Teachers, staff, and even students have come up to me to thank me for fixing the internet, and that feels good. It makes me feel confident. But no one’s going to come up to me to thank me for making sure their grades were sent home or whatever. Nor should they. Is it the recognition that I miss? Maybe a little bit. Mostly, I miss solving big mysteries. Even though I had a bad week last week, I had fun. I was struggling to figure out the problems, and I loved investigating all the symptoms, researching, testing, re-hypothesizing, re-testing, doing more research, throwing a tennis ball against the wall until another idea popped in my head, re-testing again, re-researching, throwing the ball even more times against the wall, and finally figuring it out and seeing my tests bear fruit. That was fun. Seeing everything start working again after a week of false starts and failures just make me feel good.

It’s insane to pray for another crisis just to feel that way, but my current routine really isn’t going to manifest them. I have been thinking about the future, about all the changes and upgrades I could make, and those thoughts are exciting. Maybe that’s where I’ll focus my energies. Who knows, right?

I fixed it. I fixed the network problems we were having at school for the past week. And if I just stayed an extra hour yesterday, I could’ve fixed it then. It turned out to be a Windows Update that corrupted our trusted root certificates, which prevented anyone from connecting to our wireless server. Let me warn you right now, I’m going to get technical because I want to write this down both for posterity’s sake and to see if I can understand all the things that just went wrong. Let me start from the beginning.

Last Monday, I came to work with teachers telling me they couldn’t log on to the wireless network. I sat down one of the teacher computers, and I sure enough, I couldn’t connect to the wireless except on one of these computers. But I could connect to the internet if I was plugging into the ethernet, and both my iPhone and MacBook Air could connect to the wireless network. I ran tests. I ran a lot of tests, and I couldn’t figure out why this was happening. I thought maybe something I did the week before — something like the roaming profiles and folder redirection I was so excited to finally implement — did something to it, so I decided to recover a backup of our two main domain controllers to a point before I made these changes. Turns out, that had nothing to do with it, and I just made things worse.

Once I recovered the first of the two domain controllers from our backups, I inadvertently disjoined our NAS (Network Attached Storage) drive from the domain. Our network could no longer see it, and I was getting reports from teachers that their students couldn’t access their documents on our network. That was an issue I didn’t discover until days later, and it was one of many issues that came up during this dark period. Our two domain controllers are virtual computers, meaning they don’t exist physically. It’s a version of Windows running inside another version of Windows. Once I recovered the second domain controller, I went to “boot it up,” except the Hyper-V manager that runs this OS gave me errors that it couldn’t start it up. This normally happens, and the way to do it is to send it a command through the command prompt. But! I needed the network for this command to work, and I didn’t have the network since our two domain controllers couldn’t talk to each other. We have two just in case one goes down, and they’re setup to replicate to each other every 15 minutes or so. So I decided to reboot the whole host computer in hopes that fixed anything. It didn’t.

By rebooting this computer, I somehow crashed the whole network. Nobody could logon to the internet anymore, and I was panicking. Both the wireless went down and our physical connections were down. Our domain controllers couldn’t talk to each other even though they both existed and could contact every other server on the network. What the hell happened? I think by rebooting the computer, which is something these machines aren’t really mean to do that often, one of the NIC’s (Network Interface Cards) blew out or was damaged somehow. These are the cards with the Ethernet port, and it was a reason why we weren’t getting any internet activity on my primary domain controller. Once I switched ports, internet went back up, and with our primary domain controller up, our secondary domain controller could finally see it and it could finally replicate itself with the primary domain controller. The physical connection to the internet was back, but the wireless was still down. What happened?

At the beginning of the week, I looked at the error logs on the server that was responsible for our wireless network. But from the 16th to the 21st, there weren’t any messages in the log. I checked the logs on the 19th and 20th, and since I didn’t see any messages, I disregarded this server as the source to our problems. The reason I wasn’t getting any error messages was because the event log was full, and once I logged on to see that message, errors finally started to get logged. I investigated these errors on Friday, but I couldn’t figure them out by the time I had to leave. I came back on Sunday, did some research, and discovered the problems Windows Update caused. There was an update designed just for Windows clients that updated their trusted root certificates with newer versions. All good, right? Well, this update wasn’t configured for Windows Server 2003, which is what my server in charge of the wireless ran. Windows Server 2003 has a small size limit as to how many certificates it stores, and since this update installed more than it could handle, Windows Server 2003 deleted many certificates to make room for the new ones, including our valid certificate in charge of authenticating users who wanted to access our wireless network.

The way enterprise authentication works is this: one server runs both our RADIUS server and an Internet Authentication System server. The Internet Authentication System (IAS) and RADIUS work together. RADIUS connects to our primary domain controller, which runs our Active Directory, which has all our user accounts, with their user names and passwords. IAS stores the encryption and certificates that RADIUS uses to authenticate users who want to logon. Windows Update corrupted these certificates. Since the certificates on our authentication server didn’t match anything, it denied access to everyone. I had to create an entirely new certificate, add it to our RADIUS server, made sure IAS and our primary domain controller accepted it, and then finally wireless would work for everyone. And it did.

There’s a lot more I didn’t talk about, and that’s because I spent most of last week explaining more of the details. But that’s what happened in a nutshell.¹ I’m glad this is over, and I’m glad I can finally get on with my life and start doing my job. This week really set me back, and now I try to play catchup. Gotta admit, this was pretty fun. I love mysteries, and this one both frustrated me and satisfied me. Now it seems like there’s nothing I can’t handle, and that’s awesome. I no longer feel insecure at work. I got this.