scott

Another Overnight

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Last night Jayson and I worked really late. We call this type of work an overnight. We end up going to work a little late, and then working till 2-5AM the next morning. Some work we do can only be done late at night during quiet periods. It is too difficult to sleep really late the day of work like this so I go into the office close to normal time. Basically it is like doing 2 days in one physical day. Due to sleep requirements we end up taking off the following day to catch up on sleep and get back into a normal routine. For me it is getting harder and harder to adjust to normal sleep after work like this.

Today I woke up around 1PM and felt like crap. I did some work remotely and then watched a bit of TV. I was planning on going to John’s for poker. I IM’d him around 3:30 saying I was TBD. I still felt like crap. I went to take a nap, and the next thing you know it is almost midnight. Now I am fed, and wide awake. I hate days like this. Hopefully I can goto sleep sometime soon…

The September Wedding (Not Mine)

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I have finally finished my travel reservations to my friend Rich’s wedding. I am happy that Rich is getting married. I love his bride to be (not that way, but she is awesome so I am happy for him), but I am not such a fan of traveling to Maine. I am never the one to be all excited for great scenery and a rustic atmosphere. I think that is what I am getting on this trip. I am more a fan of resorts having large pools and WIFI. Sorry, but I am not going to change that.

I bet the wedding will be amazing. I believe Amanda is doing allot of her own decorations. You hear that and probably think cheap or crapy. The truth is neither. She is/was a set designer. She can decorate like no one else I know. I am curious how she does up the place.

I am in the wedding party. That means a tux, and rehearsal dinner lobster bake. Mmmm lobster bake! Sorry lost track thinking about liquid butter and lobster. Where was I? Oh yeah, I am in the wedding party. I think that besides the normal wedding party responsibilities, it is a rule that I must hook up with a hot single brides maid. I am told it is a rule in most states, and a law in Maine. Amanda claims it is not. I think she just feels I am too good for her friends or family! That is my theory! In any case it will be an interesting 3 day weekend, especially if work goes live with a major project that weekend that was originally scheduled for weeks ago!

A Good Day

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it was busy today, but I got allot done. I got final approval for the active directory design I wanted.

The initial AD servers are built. Or I should say the OS is built. They goto the data center tomorrow. Then they get mounted and built. Once done the real work begins.

On another project I am having danny work on some VPN setup issues. I wanted to deal with it, but as Glenn said I need to delegate more. And I really do. I am so busy I need to hand off items to others.

IPCC deployment is delayed. This is an internal decision. I never really thought the target date was achievable anyway. These new targets seem more realistic. I would rather the system be correct, than rushed out. More on that as it develops.

Approval’s

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I had a very productive day at work today. Per my previous posts about not talking directly about my current job on this blog, I will only say that I got approval to complete some big projects as proposed, and I got the ok for some more help. All good things! More details on my work blog, but no one can read that right now:) But I want to write about it anyway! it will be good, you should feel left out.

Virtual Organization

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Every once in a while I get on a cleanup binge. I don’t clean my apartment or anything like that. I cleanup my virtual life. I have been going through crap on my hard drives, and removing any unneeded data. I have also been backing up stuff that I may or may not have a recent backup of.

I do this every few months. This time I am taking old CD’s I had of backups going back years and put them onto a hard drive. Recently (within the past 2 years) I have read that CD’s & DVD’s are not the best media for long term storage. So I am putting onto a drive as many backup’s as I can. I have also re-burned much of these old CD’s onto newer DVD’s.

Other aspects of this cleanup is to post to my website any backlog of photos I have. I am working on several updated pages.

On the physical world side I also cleaned my place today. The trick is keeping it clean!

Yankee Stadium Tour

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Today I went with a bunch of friends from work to Yankee Stadium. The team was away so it wasn’t for a game. We went for the tour. I had no idea that they do a tour year round when the team is not playing at home that day. I am not a baseball fan (and if I was there is a slightly better than 50% chance that I would be a Met fan) but this tour was cool.

We went to the Press box, a sky box, the locker room, and even got to walk around on the field and in the dugout.. We couldn’t go on the grass, but it was still cool being down there. I got some great pictures that I am going to post later.

When Miguel first organized this trip I said there was no way I was going. I figured a late August Saturday would be freaking hot and nasty. But when Friday came around and he mentioned that he had a few people cancel at the last minute I reconsidered. Thanks to the weather report, and that the tour was in the afternoon I figured I would go. I just have to forget that a stadium tour cost more than cheap seats.

Virtual PC For The Mac

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I have tried Virtual PC for the Mac before. I think it was version 5.x or 6.x. I don’t remember. It is hard to imagine that I have been using a Mac long enough to have lived through 3 revisions of software but you never know.

I was on MSDN today to download Beta 1 of Windows Vista for a developer (all 2.4gig or so of it that will take 2+ hours on a 4+ megabit link) when I saw MSDN had Virtual PC for the Mac 7.01 online. I decided to try it again. I am still a skeptic, but I figured I would look at it and see if it was of value. Right now I am installing Windows XP into a new Virtual PC 7.02 install. The concept of XP on a Mac is nice, but the slow speed may not be worth it. I may just have to wait for x86 Macs.

Man this install is taking forever…

Great Little Site

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Just got some cool stuff over at Thinkgeek. Honesty most of the stuff over there is useless, but man they make useless really fun. I had to hold back on what I wanted to get. I ended up with some really funny Simpsons posters. Next on my purchase list is the Office Space, red stapler.

SATA RAID?

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Not all RAID cards are made the same. This is especially true for SATA raid. I have deployed over 2 dozen SATA & IDE RAID servers in recent history (mainly SATA, but a few IDE box’s). My recent opinion of them is that they work great until the break. When they break they break hard. You begin to wonder if RAID ever worked right when dealing with SATA RAID. Then you go back to an HP (or even Dell) SCSI RAID server and after 10 minutes of using it, you feel like you found religion or something.

I have used Promise & Adaptec 2 & 4 drive SATA Raid cards and both kind of suck. I have used many Adaptec cards on numerous servers and I have had nothing but problems with them. Today marked the 4th 4 drive 2410SA card that has killed a server. Hey Adaptec, when a RAID card capable of RAID5 loses a drive, it is supposed to continue to function. That is the whole idea of RAID5. Not sure if you know that from the performance of your cards. When losing a drive (1 out of 4 btw) the RAID array is supposed to stay up, the server should continue to function, and when you reboot you are not supposed to have a blank configuration on your card.

Also is it written somewhere that I cannot find that says the 1210SA card does not support hot swappable drives? Because if I buy a server that allows for hot swappable drives, I expect my RAID card (even if it is a cheap SATA card, hey it is still RAID) to like rebuild when I put a new drive in a machine. Oh and it would be really nice if the card would rebuild without being told to. I mean Dell, & HP cards do that. Why do I have to invoke a rebuild every time we have a bad drive?

I will be honest I was surprised that I have had such problems with the Adaptec cards since I am generally a fan of their products. I just don’t know if SATA RAID is not fully baked in general? I have been a fan of SATA for a while. it is a great cheap alternative to SCSI, but a RAID system should be reliable. I can understand if you lose drives quicker on a cheaper SATA system, and that happens all the time for me compared to SCSI drive systems, but the problems I have been seeing go beyond just dead drives. So far the only cards I have seen that show signs of progress are the 3Ware 2 drive cards, and some new embedded RAID cards on HP SATA servers. Ironically Jayson tells me the HP cards are in fact Adaptec or Intel. Go figure.

Definitions are thanks to a great little site called Wikipedia!

WSUS In Action

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Now that is a really bad acronym. Bad names aside, Microsoft’s Windows Server Update Services is actually a great little tool. I have bashed MSFT recently (and rightfully so on some topic’s) but this product actually works. The older SUS (server update services) was horrible. This new tool solves many of the older ones shortcomings. I can tell one system to update a patch and then deploy it to hundreds of machines at once, or smaller groups I predefine. I can have a desktop test group have patches first to make sure they work ok, and then tell the system to deploy to other machines. I can see what machines need what patch, SP, etc. I can also see errors on patch installs.

Now the I have said WSUS is a great product, I have to ask why it took so many years to get admin’s such a tool? Windows update has been around for years. This is the Windows update that System Admin’s have needed/wanted for years. I could have really used this as far back as 2001 when worms were coming out requiring frequent desktop visits.

Now can I hope for SMS to become easier to configure and deploy to work alongside WSUS? Then we would really be in business.

Can you tell I am happy about a WSUS deployment I ran this weekend? No more sleepless nights worrying about patch deployment. Well I actually didn’t sleep well Friday after I authorized the patches, but it really had nothing to do with WSUS, so I won’t blame it for that!