This is the first really late night I’ve had since I quit managing the lab. Today I had to get a new visiting asst. professor’s computer up before he finally snapped and started shooting people (I just found out he’s an ex-marine). Anyway, it should have been a simple process. Pull machine from the back, install archived image from the server, throw it in the office and walk away happy. I told him I’d have it done by 1:00.
Immediately upon setting up his machine and putting it in his office, it started rebooting. We started tearing down possible problems. We reimaged it, we swaped out the power strip, we swapped out the power cord, we rolled back the network driver, we unplugged the network, we reimaged it, we swaped out the mouse, the keyboard, the monitor, we reimaged it and updated patches, we reimaged it, updated patches, updated virus definitions, nothing worked. We finally decided that not only was it infected with virii, but all the images for that particular model were also.
Around 7:00 
Craig found another equivalent machine in the back. We put it in place, left the network unplugged and booted it up. It appeared clean, and only a bit out of date so we moved patches over via a flash drive. After making sure we had protected as much as possible, we finally hooked up the network and started running online updates. Its still running stable and I’m about to pull a new image of it for future use. I expect I’ll be done here in about 45 minutes.
So at any rate, I finally sent Heather home because while I don’t think I’m going to be up here that much longer, the dogs have been in their cages for about 12 hours, and that’s just mean. Wish me luck, folks, it seems to be finally in the home stretch.
