Month: May 2004

Cari Night

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The local bar we like to goto after work has a special deal it does. They publish a months worth of names. One name per day. If your name matches the name they have on a specific day, and you show up you get free drinks for the night. They give you a special cup and you can get beer on tap and well drinks for free.

Friday was Cari night, so our Cari at work had us all come out and drink with her. It was a good time. Jeff, Dave, and Nick meet me out. They are friends from my first tech job. They work across the street, but we don’t always get a chance to get together. It was a nice night. I drank a bit. Recently I have been feeling the effects of alcohol allot quicker than I am used to. I have always been a light weight, but I haven’t been this bad since college.

I cut out relatively early since I had to take the rail road home. I can’t wait till I am in the city.

Hanging Out

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Saturday night I got together with Rich, and we went over to Alison’s. They never meet before so it was good to get that over with. We went to Chillis for dinner. I like that place, but don’t go that often. Then we went to Jillian’s. Alison beat both rich and I at air hockey. I didn’t mind. At least she beat him! We hung out there for a while. It was fun. Alison likes that place. The only problem is they have a limited amount of games, unless you spend allot more and go bowling, drink, or play pool.

It was an early night. I needed to catch up on my sleep…

VPN Changes, Man I Am Out Of Practice

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I really need to brush up on my firewall rules knowledge. It took me 20 minutes to figure out how to modify a rule. Once I realized how it was setup it was trivial to fix, but that initial learning curve to remember how it was originally configured is the hard part.

When things settle down I need to sit in front of the Cisco simulator software we got and play with some ideas I have regarding new changes I want to make on our system.

Robocopy Is Nice

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I have to move entire directory tree’s from one server to another. I have to do this with keeping the NT security on the tree’s intact. We are talking about hundreds of gigs of data. I also want to copy it once, and then every day replicate only the changes we made that day out to the new server. I want to do this until I am ready to cut over to the new box completely. How do I do it, robocopy. It is a nifty tool in the Windows 2000, & 2003 resource kit.

i just wrote a batch file and put it as a scheduled task every night. it works exactly as advertised. I cut over 1 of the 6 directory tree’s I needed to last night. I will work on more this weekend if I can.

Move Day 2 Complate, Now On Day 3

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I lived through day 2 of our move of space. The cube guys did an awesome job. Now people have to realize I am not an interior decorator and stop asking me for filling cabinets and shelves. I really don’t care about them, or if you get them. You should all know me by now!

We had some minor electrical and cabling issues. The electrical is all better now. The cabling we came up with a creative way to solve the problem.

Today is the day we move everyone to their new spots. I want to get computers moved and phones working. I just have to get 15+ people where they are supposed to be. At least the portable AC’s are now up and ready for use. they should be on today if it is humid.

Day One Of Move Completed

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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

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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.

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Insomnia

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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.

The Mundane

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Recently I have been talking about mundane topics. It is what is comming to my mind when I sit down to write. I have read that these topics are not necissarily what makes a good blog. They are probibly correct. I just don’t really care. This is more for me to write about what is going on in my life, for me. If I have a good story or two to tell about what is going on, I will. If not my mundane rambling will continue.

I find it kind of theraputic to write out bits of what happened durring the day like this. It helps me relax. If I repeat topics, it is because I am thinking about htem and they are important to me or I am very opinionated about them.

Allot Of Treo’s

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For a device that has only sold a few hundred thousand units, I have seen many Treo 600’s today. I saw 3 different people besides myself on the subway with them today. They are popular but not ubiquitous yet. It is funny to see so many people with them.

One lady saw mine and was asking me if I liked it. it was funny to be approached about tech like that on the NYC subway.

Maybe one day they will be as common as the iPod is today? Well, maybe not.