Between meetings, cleaning my office, and real work I tricked out an old desktop today. Jayson and I seem to accumulate computers at work. He has 1 for normal use, it is a tricked out P4 so he can run multiple VMWares. He then has a laptop, and I think a desktop is collecting dust under his desk as a Novel 6.x server for testing.
My computers in the office are my laptop, a desktop that is nicely configured for VMWare workstation and burning, etc. I also have an older box setup to run Suse 9.1. I had another machine that I customized for testing, but it finally pissed me off enough today that I needed to replace it. The hard drive is going on it. So I replaced it. then the IDE controller got all flaky on me, so I gave up on it. I took an older (almost 3 years) P-4 1.5 GHZ that for some reason had a gig of ram in it and but a newer burner in it. Cleaned it up, and now it is a Windows 2003 server I am going to use as a test box. We hate that we have desktops proliferating in our office, so I threw on a test copy of VMWare GSX server on this new “super desktop” I built. I am proving that this server software is worth the money to go buy and put on a nice dual processor machine.
Right now I have several tests of software I need to run. First up is Ipswitch’s Collaboration Suite of software. It looks like their Imail mail server on group ware steroids. My company wants exchange like functionality, but they don’t like the cost in software, hardware, and manpower needed to get exchange. This product looks like it will do what most people want to do, and that is share calendars, contact lists, etc right in outlook.
Immediately we need to test and then deploy Intuit’s Track It. We are planning on using it as our support and helpdesk ticketing system. The software arrives tomorrow, and we need it deployed (if we decide to go with it) by January 1, 2005 in order to support some changes we are planning in our support structure for the new year.
Another focus I had today was getting the specs needed to setup another VPN tunnel to a partner of ours in India. That was a fun conference call.
Then I had a bunch of meetings about some data migrations we are planning, and a failover drill that is 4 months in the making.
Gus and I also went over a power point I am making for a big presentation next week. He had some changes and I created a few new slides. Have I mentioned I don’t like power point? The funny thing is when I first started out on the helpdesk all those years ago, I actually was very good at power points. I just haven’t done them in a while.
All around a very busy day. I didn’t leave work until 7:30PM tonight. I need to make dinner now. I just felt like writing when I got home. Some days (most days) I don’t feel like writing right away after I sat at a computer all day, but today I did. Go figure?