I am sitting on the train wanting to write more about what has been happening, but my hands are starting to hurt. lots of typing recently. So I will try later this week to keep up to date.
Month: November 2003
Jayson’s Wedding
So for a number of reasons I am unable to goto the big wedding in vegas the week of thanksgiving. Actually, from what I have been told it wont be that big. it will probably be a blast. I am planning on going down to visit in December. I haven’t seen jay, joe, or gretchen in ages.
New Servers
I may have mentioned a project I am working on to build the hardware for our new fulfillment system. Our design calls for 3 servers. We finally got the 3rd one in today. One of the first 2 had a bad drive so keith was working on that today, while I was building out the newest one we received. I have to say the serial ATA RAID 5 setup is just as sweet as serial ata mirroring we did on a previous machine.
Hopefully all 3 machines will be built and ready to goto our datacenter on friday. then we can create a domain and finish configuring them.
I also got thrown some security documentation that I have to do. it was a last minute thing that is going to be a pain to write. I am told I do documentation well, but I don’t like doing it all that much.
Automatic Updates
Tonight we try our second wave of automatic windows updates for desktop computers. We (keith & I) finally got the Microsoft windows update server working. This server replaces Microsoft’s own windows update site for your company. you can pick and choose what updates your desktops get and when. It saves us from downloading patches we have no idea about. It is a great idea. I looked into this service back in August, but had trouble with programing the client machines to auto update. I then didn’t have time to finish the project. A few weeks ago keith took up the research into the auto update server. He did everything I did and then learned out how to program Active Directory to tell computers in the domain to look for the auto update server. We took the existing server I had up and running and made some changes in active directory and now we have an automatic update system. no more running around to each computer for patching security wholes.
Last night we ran a small test. Tonight we do 1 department. If all goes well again, we will do another department tomorrow, and the rest of the NY office next week. So far all looks good. We will know for sure tomorrow morning.
The Set Up
There are a few things I don’t or won’t talk about on this blog. So far I have avoided dating completely. Not sure if the internet is the venue to discuss that very much. I bring it up because I felt compelled to discuss one angle of dating right now. The blind date and or the fix up date comes to mind. I am not against either in theory. Just I won’t accept being fixed up by anyone. Some people that are on the “not allowed to fix Scott up list” is my mom. Come on, do you really want your mom to set you up on a blind date? My mom has wanted to fix me up with daughters of her friends for a while. I have continually told her no. Not sure if it was a battle of wills, but finally I said OK when she said a friend of hers at work wanted to set me up with someone else she knew. I will know how it goes soon. I am still not sure about the whole fix up by a parent thing. if it was my sister I would be ok with it. if it was a cousin or my brother in law I would be cool with it, even encourage it. The fix up just doesn’t feel right coming from a parent. That goes out the window if the fix up is a hit, unless said parent speaks to or knows allot about the girl. That is the really weird part.
Well, there is only one way to find out how everything pans out!!! Thank for sitting through my ramblings.
A VMWare World
I have spoken often about the wonders of VMWare. I will keep doing so. I finally got my desktop at work configured with a larger hard drive and have been busy setting up Virtual Machines. I have several deployment projects that are benefiting from VMWare. I can take 2 physical machines and make them into many virtual machines.
Howard finally started using VMWare with Red Hat 9 on his laptop. It is funny that I am getting him to use it more, when my cousin and howard were the people that got me hooked on the idea of virtual machines in the first place.
I am using VMWare on numerous projects currently. I have a test domain controller running windows 2003. That is a physical server. I then take my desktop and attach servers and client machines running VMWare to it to test all sorts of things. Today I created a sub domain on my test domain using a windows 2000 server virtual machine. I then was able to test destroying active directory without worrying about rebuilding a server. I just saved the Win 2000 virtual machine and I can restore it if I have problems.
I have done the same thing with SMS 2003. I am busy now and cannot work on it so I just backed up the virtual machine I was trying it on. I don’t have to take up a server testing with it. it is just 5 gigs on a hard drive.
I was also able to test some security changes we made to my companies active directory without affecting anyone. I just added a windows XP virtual machine to our domain and ran tests on it. I just restored from backup if I messed up the virtual machine. it is great technology.
Keith and I also used a virtual machine of XP to test windows update services we are deploying. that also saved us from creating ghost images of desktops and tying up several in this test.
My next challenge is getting a working FreeBSD 5.1 workstation as a virtual machine.
Microsoft just announced a new version Virtual PC. I will see if it is anywhere near as good as VMWare.
Early Night
I was tired after work yesterday so I just went home. I dropped off my dry cleaning and cooked myself a steak. Watched a little TV and went to bed. Nice eventful evening. I actually like that sometimes. No surprises.
Family Things
It took me most of Saturday afternoon, but I was able to install all the programs on my dad’s new computer. Then it took me 5 hours to move all his stuff off his old machine and finish setting up the new one on sunday. It didn’t realize he only had a 10megabit network card in his old computer. It took forever to move his 3 gigs of data off the old computer. It took 20 minutes to move it onto the new computer from my laptop.
I was able to setup all his new gadgets to the new computer. he has his new 512 meg flash drive to bring stuff to work on. I also got his Treo 300 to sync up to the new computer.
With all that work done, we went to my sisters for dinner. I got to see Morgan crawl. I helped my sister move some stuff to my parents house for storage. I also burned myself a new CD of morgan from last month. I will update the website soon.
I am cleaning up my place so I can figure out where the furniture is going to go. My sister gave me the number of the movers they used. I will call them this week.
In my spare time I was also messing around with some video editing. I am playing with Final Cut Express. I imported an old family video I had and I am trying to figure out how to do editing. My dad said he has a bunch of 8mm reels that we could get converted to DVD also. I am going to see how much that will cost. Getting a VCR tape into a DV format that Final Cut can edit is a time consuming process. Granted I don’t have the best tools to do that, but it does work after you follow all the steps. I didn’t have much time to work on that project this weekend.
New Computer
Got my dad’s new computer today. It is sweet. I am configuring it for him now. I hope to give it to him tomorrow.
Ongoing Work
Last night it looks like we got a ton of pages about 1 drive being out of space. Not sure why we didn’t get a low disk warning first. I just tested that dam warning system like a month ago. No one (myself included) woke up to the pages. that is not good.
Justin is out again. He has more dental problems than anyone I know. Keith is coming in late. he did work on our VPN last night. I don’t get him. We discussed the work, but he never asked to take some time off until the last minute. It drives me up the wall when he does that. If I knew that bit of info, I wouldn’t have said ok to the work last night. I needed people this morning since I knew justin was out. I need to teach these guys how to prioritize time. Spending an hour on a minor problem that doesn’t need to get done right away is not worth it if you can be spending that time on something else that people are waiting for results on.
All that being said, today is not starting off very well. At least the Database guys are working on the error we were getting. it doesn’t look like our sites were down, but getting errors is bad.
Yesterday I did more research into using Microsoft Operations Manager for our data-center. I like it, but I also have some issues with it. In our test, I was unable to get historical reports. I also sized the database wrong so I ran out of space. I needed to extend the db. I also don’t know if some of our new internal network security will cause the Operations Manager server to stop receiving data from our production database servers. For now this is all theoretical, but I am trying to hash out a working course of action.
On another project I ordered 2 out of the 3 servers I need for our new MSMQ system. It is a messaging system we are going to use for order processing. I need to order 1 more database server and then I will be done.
I am also trying to find time to work on ISA or a linux proxy server. No time has yet to be found.