It seems to work quite well.

I had need at work to script the creation of some directories with a rather complex permissions scheme.  This is something that when I did it manually would require about three hours to complete, as setting a bunch of complex NTFS permissions will make you go cross-eyed and brainless (with apologies to the Talking Heads).  PowerShell has Get-Acl and Set-Acl, but no Cmdlets for manipulating DACLs or creating new ACEs.  No problem thought I, because PowerShell allows you to call into .NET classes, and I could use that to manipulate the DACLs returned by Get-Acl.

I started building a module to work with NTFS Permissions and ran into some odd problems.  Every time I manipulated the DACLs and attempted to pass them on through the pipeline by emitting them, the Path property became blank.  Yet the original DACL would retain the Path and all of my manipulations.  So I sent the original and my copy through Get-Member.  Hmm…  The path on the original is a PSProvider path, and it also contains a number of PowerShell NoteProperties.  The copy was missing the NoteProperties and the path was blank.  Yet, the .NET type listed by Get-Member for both the original and the copy were identical – curiouser and curiouser said Alice.

So, apparently the object returned by Get-Acl is not a pure .NET type, but has been modified with some additional properties so that it works better with PowerShell.  This makes sense when you think about it, as PowerShell was built on .NET 2.0 after .NET has shipped; so the native .NET classes have no way of knowing what is occurring within PowerShell.  It makes sense, but it isn’t documented (at least that I could find) that Get-Acl adds these NoteProperties to the returned .NET object.  So PowerShell was doing exactly what it had been programmed to do, and .NET was doing exactly what is was programmed to do.  And my script was lost in the middle.

Perhaps there is a way to get a copy of the original object intact with the NoteProperties and my changes.  I haven’t found it.  But for now I am happy that Set-Acl accepts a -Path parameter if the passed in DACL is missing one, which of course mine were.  So now my three hours of coma-inducing work occurs nearly instantly once I press enter.  Now the longest part of the operation is verifying that I haven’t mistyped the user IDs that need access to the special directories.

For PC-BSD I had to remove the lagg0 interface and manually configure the wlan0 interface for direct connect rather than using wpa_supplicant.

And yes, I am posting this from PC-BSD.

The magic lines in rc.conf

wlans_ath0=”wlan0″
ifconfig_wlan0=”ssid <yourSSID> wepmode on authmode SHARED deftxkey 1 wepkey 1:0x<yourkey> up DHCP”

I’ve been trying to get backups reconfigured at work for months now.  Everytime I try to work on it, something else comes up.  So today I put up a “Do Not Disturb” sign, and ignored my email.  I actually got real work done for the first time in about a month.  My day usually consists of one constant interuption after another and “please, will you do this little thing” which “little thing” invariably takes over the rest of the day preventing me from finishing the work I really need to do.

After getting backups where I wanted them, I checked my email and realized none of it was very critical, though everybody thought they had a really really important thing that had to be done right away.  I think I am going to keep the “Do Not Disturb” sign, and next time shut off the phone as well as email.

So what does this have to do with dentistry? Well, I had the first half of a deep teeth cleaning done this morning.  Not lots of fun, and they numb up one side of your mouth/face.  It took about an hour and a half for the cleaning.  I listened to music on my Zune so I wasn’t totally bored (an idea I got from Steve Roberts). After the cleaning I headed over to Circuit City, and with half a numb face requested the price guarantee.  Which they gave me.

After I got my refund I headed out into the mall and joined up with my family for the end of their walk with the grandparents.  Then we did a bit of shopping and we came home.  I decided to play with the websites a bit, and sometime while trying to figure out Joomla to get a start on the GeoCon site, I could feel my face again.

Needless to say I was not happy.  So I went out and bought a very nice new HP laptop.  AMD with ATI graphics and Vista 64bit.  Three hours I tried to get it on the wireless network.  Just when I was about to give up, I tried entering all the connection data manually one more time.  And it worked.  Annoying.  The automatic process insisted the router was not talking to me at all.  Apparently some change with Vista makes the automatic association process break with some “older” routers.  Mine is only about a year and half old.  Tried the latest firmware updates, tried everything I knew.  Then it just worked.  These driver stupidity issues is why people hate Vista.