Pr3++yG33kyTh1ng

Yesterday I wrapped my paranoia around myself like a thick, fuzzy blanket as I uncovered a vast, global conspiracy between Dell Computers, Symantec and Microsoft.
The goal of this conspiracy, you may ask?
Apparently the goal is to annoy me.
If any of their spies had happened across this site, they would know it takes far less than a vast, global conspiracy to do that.
I'm comforted by my paranoia at this stage. Maybe they are all out to get me . . . But at least they are interested, you know?
In trying to drop a bit-for-bit OS image on a brand-new Dell server, we have run into issues with the system not seeing the USB hard drive which hosts the image.
Calls to Dell have been routed to Symantec who makes the software.
Symantec doesn't support images on RAID hard drives. RAID hard drives are standard on most servers manufactured since they phased out vacuum tubes, not to mention the fact that the process worked on 40 servers before this one and they all feature the same drives.
We have fallen off the Dell radar as a company at the moment because we gave them too much money.
I realize that doesn't make sense, and for once it isn't my caffeine visions.
We were classified as a medium business until we bought enough stuff to qualify as large.
The idea is that "large" businesses have access to more and better support than "medium" businesses, a system that appeals to the capitalist in me while making the little activist in my head craft protest signs with Sharpie markers until the fumes overwhelm him in the enclosed space.
Anyway, our account, while being moved between "medium" and "large", doesn't belong to any support group. Until they get it sorted out we are adrift.
Meanwhile, our outage window to apply the Daylight Saving Time patch looms ever nearer. When dividing responsibilities yesterday, I drew the short straw of downloading and documenting the patch for our servers still running Windows 2000.
This is where Microsoft joins the conspiracy, because there is no patch for Windows 2000 available for download, even though the Windows 2000 servers could possibly be subject to the same laws of space and time as the Windows 2003 servers.
Apparently, we should have updated to Server 2003 already.
If we don't want to upgrade and break whatever we have on Windows 2000, we can (according to this article) make the changes to the system registry manually on every server. There are a lot of changes to be made.
The little activist set down the Sharpie for a moment and downloaded a third-party application that makes all these changes and offers an uninstall option, which makes it better than most patches Microsoft churns out anyway.