Quality Time at Drill

This weekend's drill was fairly quiet for the commo section. SPC Vaughn is at WLC, and SGT Lant is at school for a new MOS, something in finance. SPC Dupio had a family emergency and was back home in Hawaii. And PFC Whittier was, predictably, no where to be found. That left only myself, SGT Nieto, SFC Zimmerman, and MAJ Friberg.

We continued where we left off on last drill's work, and got to work on the phone systems. This time SGT Nieto actually showed me how to program the PBX machine, and wow, that's a chore. It's not really so complex, so much as cryptic. Everything is done on a command-line text terminal, and the commands aren't very intuitive. Even so, I learned a lot, and I think our phone system is back to operational status. We still don't have all of the documentation that we should, but at least I know how to get things limping along again. SGT Nieto says he doesn't really want to train any of the other junior enlisted guys on the PBX system, just because he doesn't trust having several guys messing with the system. There's an amusing story about a young SPC Lant making a mistake some years ago that rendered the entire complex phoneless, and now I realize just how easy that would have been.

But besides the running back and forth fixing phones, there were a couple of highlights. First was Sunday's "mission" at Starbucks. One of MAJ Friberg's ongoing projects is getting the upper staff network access in the field. As such, he needed to test VPN access from some place outside the Army Reserve domain. So MAJ Friberg ordered his three enlisted personnel to assist him in testing. At Starbucks. While we were there, it made sense to pay our rent and buy some coffees. After some initial configuration issues, we almost got the VPN working. We think we know the last step, and it's just a matter of calling the help desk for remote access rights. Fun mission, overall. Good training.

Also, the supply section finally got our unit's ACU's issued out. I bought one set out-of-pocket some time ago, but one is not enough for going to Ft. Carson for three days. Now everyone in the unit has them, and enough to take them out to the field. We even got the floppy hats, which means they might be authorized when we go to the field. Sweet!