Day: 20 May 2004

Day One Of Move Completed

by

We have completed the first of 3 days of planned moves and changes at work. It was done with still no AC. The units are sitting there, but not plugged in.

Jayson, Nelson & I were able to move 10 users from their current spots in our call center area, to the new smaller call center area. We also displaced about 5 other users that were current occupants of the new space. they will be in limbo for about a day and a half until we can get the construction of the new cubes done.

John, Nelson and a few others were also cleaning up all the non-computer crap in the old call center area. They accumulated allot of it over 2 years in that space. It was so messy, Dan even vacuumed for a bit.

All in all, things went smoothly. Tomorrow is the big work though. This was just leading up to the major job. Hopefully the cube guys can get this done in a day.

After we finished, Dan, Nelson, Gus, Alyssa, Jayson, & I went to Pete’s tavern for dinner. it was cool. I had the fish and chips.

I am on the train home now. It is kind of late, for a work night. I should be home by 10PM if all goes well. I just hope I can get some sleep tonight.

Remote Agents And Terminal Server

by

While I was awake and not sleeping last night, I thought about my remote agent design issues. Currently we have schematics of different electronic and home appliance parts on CD’s we use to look up stuff. The problem is they take up a huge amount of drive space. We get updates every month that need to be added to the existing data. This is fine when a computer is on our network, we just run the update from our file server. What do you do when you have remote computers over a VPN WAN link trying to get the same update? Pushing out 500 megs to 2 users is possible, but what about 20, or 200? It becomes unfeasible due to bandwidth limitations.

One option is to not give the remote agents this software, but they rely on it. My thoughts then turned to Terminal Services. What if all the updates are on the central server, and users just connected to the server via terminal services. That way I don’t have to worry about anything on the local machine except for an IP address and terminal client working.

This is contingent on our phone control software working with Terminal Services. I believe it does, but an answer to that question is easy enough to get.

The next problem is cisco soft phone. I doubt it would work through terminal services. We may need to go with a physical cisco IP phone at a person’s house. It adds cost per user, but it may be necessary. Also going with a hardware VPN solution is looking better than a software solution. If anything goes wrong with the remote computer we would be responsible to manage it. We cannot troubleshoot software issues like vpn over the phone, and we are not equipped to send someone onsite to fix problems like that.

A hardware VPN device that we can remote into and verify it is working, along with terminal services is looking like a good solution. it is not the cheapest but maybe the most feasible. We would require someone to have their own computer, and all they would need to put on it is terminal client. That takes 5 minutes to setup. Wire up a VPN router from cisco or linksys plug in a phone and they are up and running.

Now all I have to do is sell everyone on the solution and make sure it works from a technical standpoint.

, , , ,

Insomnia

by

Not sure what stress factor in my life caused it, but I woke up last night and could not fall back to sleep. I don’t know when I got up, only that after what felt like ages I checked my clock and it was 3:30AM. It was several hours before I was able to go back to sleep.

I wasn’t nervous or anxious or anything, sleep just would not come to me. ironic since I may need to be up late tonight moving desks.

Once I cannot sleep I just lie in bed and my mind races I mile a minute. Then I can’t fall back to sleep. I don’t know what happened, but eventually I tired out and fell back to bed.

Some people have suggested that I get up and actually do something when I can’t sleep like that. I always thing if I do that I won’t go back to bed at all, and my sleep pattern will be screwed up. I did think about getting up this morning, but I stuck it out and eventually went back to bed.

I just hope it doesn’t happen again this week.