Day: 30 October 2003

Recomendations

by

I was backed into a corner to make a recommendation on a laptop to buy. My brother in law’s mom wanted one and she said she trusted my judgment and wanted me to decide for her. After 3 conversations where I said I don’t like to do that and I like to make suggestions only, she convinced me to take the plunge. That means this decision will come back to haunt me later. She is nice, and just want somethings that works. I recommended the Apple ibook 12″. It fits her requirements and I think it will be easier to use than a windows machine. I like mac’s now, but I would not normally recommend it to a windows person. I did for her since she used mac’s in the past and had good things to say about them.

Lets just hope that she is as happy with an iBook as I am with my Powerbook.

Upgrades Complete (Mostly)

by

I did my Mailflow upgrade. Keith and I also patched more than 50% of our servers. we will try to get a bunch more done after 12AM when the office officially closes for the day.

i ordered my extra data t-1 for our office finally. we will use it to send VOIP traffic over to our Kingston office. It should take 30 – 45 days to get it up and running.

We spec’ed out a design for our Biztallk deployment. We will be putting a new fulfillment system in place in the next few weeks. We will deploy Biztalk server, MSMQ, and some other neat products. I have concerns because MSMQ needs to be loaded on a domain controller in its 2.0 version that we will be using. We need to move quick so we picked servers to use that we have onsite already. I had to bump 2 other projects to get the gear but both of them are lower priority. We will just buy new gear and earmark it for those projects. We are pretty much standardized on Supermicro for our Windows servers. If I get these 2 new box’s that brings my total of supermicro box’s to 8 we have gotten in the past 6 months. I really like there serial ATA 1U servers. They make a dual xeon version of it that looks fantastic. All for under 3K. We still use compaq for our high end database box’s and anything we need that uses SCSI. We just got a ML380 2 weeks ago, but nothing beats several inexpensive servers that you can get for the price of 1 bigger box.

I also started relying more on ROBOCOPY utility from Microsoft. In addition to regular tape backups I am replicating using robocopy some specific data on some file server to have an online backup also. I also used it for my first web site deployment. We have a large (300 gig) site that I needed to setup on a 2nd server. One of our dev staff setup the IIS site and configured it, and I am robocoping the contents to the new box. if it works we will do it more frequently. We had a plan to do that over the summer, but other projects took precedence.

The Review

by

As with any company my company does annual reviews of each employee. My review was supposed to happen in early September. We started to do it and then it got delayed. 6+ weeks later it looks like it will finally be completed. I am not too worried about it, but anything like that gives you cause for the jitters. And that is all I will say on the matter. Some things are just not discussed openly.