Jesse Schibilia

I’m sure many of you have heard about the varsity team sports cuts that will be occuring at the end of the 2007 season at Rutgers. If not, read up. They will be cutting the fencing program that I was a part of for the last five years. Obviously, this weighs heavily on my heart.

The cuts were made across the entire University. No part of our school was safe. I can understand that in tough financial times, the fat has to be cut. But I feel as if Rutgers Athletics made the cuts of entire teams to make the cuts visible. I am sure they could have rearranged the team budgets to have the same affect of cutting six entire sports. Instead, they want to avoid public outcry by saying “Look at poor Rutgers Athletics, they lost six entire teams!” The cuts made add up to 3% of the total Athletics budget ($1.2 million of $38 million). I am sure all of 30 teams would be able to maintain with a 3% budget cut straight across the board for each sport.

The cuts that were made are seen as “strategic” because we are considered to be teams that are less productive. Take one look at the t-shirt I made for Rutgers Fencing this year and tell me that we aren’t productive. We have 86 NCAA individual appearances and 32 All-Americans in 20 years. We brought Rutgers a national sabre champion in 2003. To my knowledge, there have been no other teams at Rutgers with any NCAA championships. So the notion that fencing is not productive is ludicrous.

I registered a domain name to create a website for an advocacy website for the cuts. I have been waiting for data from the rest of the teams so that I can put it together, but I have yet to hear from any of them. I am still trying though, and once it is up, I will post the URL here.

I have had a problem with one of my XP desktops for several months. None of my computers were able to access any of the shares or printers on that computer. It had bothered me for a long time, but it was never a terribly worrisome problem so I never really plugged away at it. Today I sat down to try and figure it out and I wanted to share my solution to this very specific problem.

Symptoms:

When trying to access shares on the offending Windows XP box from another Windows XP box:

• You can see the offending computer on the network.
• When you try to access this computer, you get the following error message:
• “Error: \\pcName is not accessible. You might not have permission to use this network resource…Access is denied.”

When trying to access shares on the offending Windows XP box from an OS X machine:

• The computer is shown in the Finder under Network > network name and you can click the connect button.
• When you click the connect button, you get a login screen for the network resource, then the following error message:
• “The alias ‘pcName’ could not be opened because the original item cannot be found.” (Options: Delete Alias, Fix Alias, OK…none of which do anything to help the situation.)

Solution:

Type ‘regedit’ into the run line off of your start menu. Navigate yourself to the following section of your registry:

• HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SYSTEM\CurrentControlSet\Control\Lsa

Look for the following registry value:

• RestrictAnonymous

The default value should be 0, but networking problems can arise if the default value has changed to 1. If this value is set to 1 in your registry, change it to 0 and close regedit. This registry value deals with the sharing and enumeration of shares. You do not need to touch any other values within the LSA section of the registry tree.

Try to access the previously offending XP box from another networked machine. It should make a difference. You might try to restart the box after making the registry changes for good measure.

You can also fix this problem, or just cross-check that the solution worked with the registry fix, in the Local Security Policy Administrative Tool. In your Control Panel, go to Administrative Services, then Local Security Policy. Navigate to the following section of the tree:

• Local Policies > Security Options

Find the entry:

• Network Access: Do not allow anonymous enumeration of SAM accounts and shares.

This entry should be set to ‘Disabled’ by default. If you have made the above fix in the registry, it should now read ‘Disabled’. If you haven’t made the above fix in the registry, you can achieve the same results by changing the value to ‘Disabled’ here.

I hope this helps, it certainly helped me!  I think mine may have been messed up when I downloaded some type of freeware to help optimize XP.

I have been living at home for the last month or so and I am still searching for the right job. I am still looking at several very presitigious firms around New Jersey. Things look very promising, but I hope that I get a job soon because my mother works me like a slave as compensation for living here. So far I have:

• Cleaned the gutters
• Sanded and refinished a rocking chair
• Pressure washed, stained, and sealed the back porch
• Edged around the house
• Spot patched a large stone back into a column
• Cleaned out the garage

The list is sure to go on. If I don’t get a job in IT, I suppose there is always manual labor…

I recently interviewed for a position as a Linux SysAdmin. My experience in Linux is limited. I have only spent about 10 hours on SuSe Linux on my computer at home. I have done a considerable amount of work on LAMP servers and in shell accounts in classes. I think that my inexperience in Linux came across to the interviewers as disinterest.

I contacted some folks at US Fencing about developing a website where athletes coming out of college can connect with individuals (parents or other athletes) in the community who are in a position to offer jobs. The idea stems from my problems trying to find a job without an internship on my resume. The idea was received well by a few of the executives at US Fencing and they want to talk with me further about it. I have to develop a business plan to see if it is sustainable as a non-profit service to the community, but I think that it would be a great project for me to run.