Saturday July 17, 2004

The short version: Don't ever delete an administative account under which you've installed software on your XP machine. You'll end up with registry keys that aren't owned by anyone, which can be a total pain in the ass. Of course, the better advice is "buy a Mac instead," but we'll leave that for another day. I take some solace from the fact that I'm writing this from my iMac.

We use VPN software to connect to work from home and it's been working fine. But I wanted to mount my work directories at home and a FAQ at work declared that this could only be done if the XP username and password matched my UNIX credentials. [I've since been told this is hogwash -- that XP doesn't require this.]

So...I removed the VPN software and deleted my XP account -- the account under which I had installed the VPN software. Subsequent attempts to reinstall the VPN software from my newly created administrative account silently failed. Silently failed. How poor is that? Thank you, Cisco.

Many hours pass. Much experimentation and an object lession in how bad out-sourcing can be...imagine waiting for three hours and then being trapped on the phone while technicians from two companies play "You own the backline support", "No YOU own the backline support" for 15 minutes only to eventually find that they had me in the wrong support queue and that staying up till 1am with these people had been pointless since VPN problems are only handled during regular business hours. Special thanks to both Sun and Xerox for that one.

I finally figured out on my own that these registry keys were not accessible and were preventing the reinstall from working. I now know a lot more about XP registry permissions than I ever wanted to know after working my way through an absolutely baroque user interface and eventually deleting these keys. Once these were cleaned up, the reinstallation finally worked. Total elapsed time: two days with no VPN connection.

By way of a purification ritual, I immediately placed an order for my Linux "Kill Bill" t-shirt and am eagerly awaiting its arrival. Love you and the entire ecosystem you've spawned, Bill. Honest.