Do I take the red pill or the blue pill..

I am sitting in the office today, trying to get some work done for one of our customers. Boring, repetitive work, and I am having a hard time keeping going. In essence, a customer wants to know when a certain event happened in their domain. An event that they swore up and down to me didn’t ever happen, but as I showed them on their DC’s, DID happen. They are freaked about this, and although it IS bizarre, there is no need for them to spaz out like this. In order for them to have me track it down, they have sent me the event logs from their servers. ALL the event logs, from ALL of their servers. From January 1st of this year. The ones they have been saving weekly. *sigh*

Needless piece of information: There are no programs out there that will allow you to import multiple .evt files at once..or join multiple .evt files. Well that is unless your actually on one of the servers in that domain..which I am not..obviously.

So my day is sucking eggs big time, and I get an email from one of the corporate lead engineer guys. He says there is a customer that wants to upgrade to OES2 and have I done one before? Immediately I feel the anger building, which I will talk about later. I tell him that OES2 JUST went into beta2 and isn’t available yet. I get our local (well only one in the state) Novell rep (nice gal and an acquaintance) on the phone just to verify and she says that THEY don’t even have a ship date listed yet. Shortly later I get another engineer that was copied on the email, replying back that OES2 isn’t anything more then Netware 6.5 with a new SP or SUSE with SP2. WRONG!!! Which leads me to why I was starting to see red (no pun intended).

Novell in their infinite wisdom has decided to pretty much fuck up every Netware engineer’s lives. Why? Because some Microsoft hating bastard decided that the exact opposite of Windows is LINUX. AND that same bastards influence is running rampart around their company. So, to show just how different and better they are against the evil empire of Microsoft they are going to ship OES2 WITHOUT THE FUCKING NETWARE KERNEL!! Sure, you can run Netware as a virtual on OES2. They are saying it will make the Netware guys feel better by allowing them to have an environment that won’t seem as drastic. Of course if you need to do anything else on the server, like say…oh fixing it, or upgrading it, or just about everything fucking else, your going to need to learn SUSE. Oh, and just to make sure that your going to have to learn it, they are going to discontinue support on 6.5 in 2010 (only a few years earlier than normal for them on their products).

Do I know SUSE? No.

Do I want to learn SUSE? Fucking no!!

Am I going to have to pick up yet another NOS/Language? You bet your sweet bippy.

Am I the only Netware engineer pissed at this? Well..only about 100% of my customers hate this.

Did I mention my position in our company? I am our lead engineer on GroupWise and Zenworks for one. I am also one of two lead engineers in eDir. I also am one of our lead engineers in AD, Exchange, and ISA. So, can you guess what my job is? That’s right boys and girls, I am our head migration engineer. 80% of my work is done on migration projects. As in Company X wants to migrate from Netware to AD, or GroupWise to Exchange. I have absolutely no preference in their products. Each has it’s benefits and weaknesses and I see them both on every project, every day. However, I started out on the red team and have always felt I leaned more towards them. That was until lately.

Oh Bill..? Can I take the blue pill, so the story will end, and I can wake in my bed and I can believe whatever I want to believe?? Please???