Day: 9 September 2003

Two Late Nights In A Row

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I just found out that I need to be around tonight at 1AM for a software release. This will be really fun because I will be up till the same time Wednesday for a hardware release. Needless to say I am not happy about the situation. I hope I am awake tomorrow. I have a meeting filled day from like 10AM through 2PM. Meetings are never fun.

Unfortunately Keith cannot do this hardware swap by himself tomorrow. I don’t think he can mount the gear with one person. if he could I would seriously thinking about letting him.

The Long Reach Of Voice Over IP

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Today was a momentous day. We finally received power supplies for 2 Cisco VOIP phones. With 1 entry into our DHCP scope we turned the phone on and it saw the Cisco Call Manager. Call Manager is like a PBX or phone switch. Within 2 minutes we were making calls to my cell phone to test. It worked great. The only minor issues we have are making calls to different extensions on the same phone system. Small routing issue that we are working through.

The next step is to be able to use our call center software in NYC connecting to the servers in Kingston. We are having some minor issues with that, but we are slowly working through them. If that works we will be able to take calls in two facilities using one phone system. This is big if we have capacity issues in our new space down the road.

I now have a cisco phone at my desk in NYC. I hope to fix all the problems this week. I am very excited about getting this working.

Bring Your Powerbook To Work Day

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I didn’t take my thinkpad home last night due to the dinner. So I decided to commute in to work today with my Powerbook. It is the 2nd time in a week that I am doing it. For some reason I just feel comforatable typing on it, but not on the Thinkpad. I miss the blog entries on the train like today’s entries. Of course because I have 30 minutes to type I tend to ramble on about useless stuff. That is just what a blog is supposed to be. I will see if I will want to commute with both. I doubt it though. We shall see…

Training For A Call Center

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Yesterday a new class of trainee’s started at our Kingston Call Center. We have 24 customer service reps who will “hopefully” start taking calls full time on 9/22. The class was so big that we had to put the working reps in the training room and the people to be trained sat in the call center. Joe our Tech guy in Kingston is overloaded right now. Justin went up for 2 days to give him a hand. Justin was eager to go up, so it worked out ok. I need to get up there one day next week. I will also need to be there on the 22nd.

Besides the ongoing call center build out I have hardware swap out’s to deal with in our Data Center Thursday morning. Tomorrow will be interesting since it will be a long day.

I just received my first Penguin Computing Server. These guys make cheap linux servers. The joy of it is, I can put Windows OS’s on it without a problem. The Super Micro servers I have been buying for windows will not handle Linux. I have some issues with the hardware, but for the price we will deal with it. A decent server can be had for around $1600. I can get a really cheap one for under a grand. We are actually looking to get some cheap windows box’s and may actually use these guys.

I am still awaiting a heat sync for a Super Micro test server we are testing. I got a trial of a serial ATA server. Actually we had the financial ok to buy it but instead of buying a regular server we got this to test. If we like it, we will keep it. If we don’t like it, we will send it back and get a normal IDE server. Serial ATA looks good, and this machine can do hot swappable drives, where IDE RAID cannot.

I need to also start working on our Exchange 2003 test server. Gus and I want to get one working for the Information Systems team and see if it is easy to admin and troubleshoot. If it is we may want to make a larger scale deployment. The difference this time will be we don’t outsource it and we do it ourselves. In December of 2002 we outsourced our mail and put it on Exchange 2000. It was a horrible failure. Too much latency with accessing exchange over the WAN. We abandoned that option and returned to our original mail provider with just POP/SMTP mail. We have been happy since.

Steaks

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After much delay our telecom integration company, Gus, and I finally got together for steaks. We went to Keens chophouse in Manhattan. It was really good. The team we got finally has a clue and it was actually enjoyable to sit back and eat with these guys. I don’t think I have ever been that full after a meal. I had a hard time walking the 4 blocks to Penn Station. My paints feel tighter today!

We still have allot to do so the get together was also productive. We are looking at a bunch of other solutions they can provide assistance for.