Technology

Storage

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Jayson is pushing an online disk storage system. He is thinking NAS. This will solve a problem we have with one nights tape backup taking so long is that it gets in the way with SQL server db backups for the next day. We just don’t have enough time in the day to run the amount of tape we need. if we backup to a disk array and then to tape weekly we can increase restore time, and backup times. from an engineering standpoint it is a great idea.

We toyed with it last year, but never got to budgeting for it. Now we think we really need it. I have to see if we can get the money for it. Jay is going to do some more research for me and then we will come up with options.

My New Linux Box

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I have not had good luck getting Suse Enterprise Linux 9.0 installed on my new server again. it is not me. I cannot even get to the partitioning screen using text mode. The machine just hangs. As I said before when I try using Suse 9.3 I get told that it cannot find a hard drive. The drive is there fine, but for some reason the software wont find it. instead of messing around with those distributions I am just going to use the older (but totally usable) Suse 9.1. Lets face it I am going to mess up the install and need to do it again. I don’t want a distribution that will cause me headaches to install. With Suse 9.1 I can install it in vmware on my XP desktop and mess with configurations I am thinking of trying on the physical machine. Yes this is for personal use, and yes it may be overkill ot use a test machien. This is what I do. I deploy things. This is the smart way to do it, and it saves me from having to reload the hardware each time (and I anticipate it being many times) I mess up the OS.

So far I have 9.1 on the new box, and I am waiting to configure it. Doing some other stuff right now, but I figured I would take a break to write a bit. Updates later.

Mac Spotlight

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When google came out with Gmail I said so what. I don’t need a free email address with tons of space, I have my own domain. When people said you can use it to search for mail contents, I said I didn’t need that, and I didn’t want google “seeing” everything I got in email. When Microsoft and google both came out with desktop search tools I was skeptical. When Apple came out with spotlight I was just as skeptical.

I tried spotlight out last week when I installed 10.4 on my mini. It seemed cool, but I didn’t think of much use for it right away. The other day I configured Apples mail client to see if it was better than entourage. It has its advantages, and so does entourage. Then I realized that all mail located in my Apple mail client is indexed into spotlight. I was still skeptical until I did my first search. I was looking for a piece of mail in my inbox (1 of 500 messages currently there). I typed the first name of the person sending the mail, and a word I knew was in the subject or body of the message. Spotlight spit back 3 possible answers and sure enough 1 of them was exactly what I was looking for. No need to create folders and sort through my inbox every week or so. All I need to do now is just dump my mail into an offline folder (i use IMAP for online storage) and just run a search when I need something.

Because of the spotlight searching ability I may start using Mail over Entourage. Apparently Entourage is not indexed in spotlight, but they (Microsoft) claim there will be a plug in for the Entourage database at some point that will allow indexing. I for one eagerly await the release of that. Until then you may find me using Mail for mail, and entourage for contacts and calendar. I just wish Mark/space, Apple & Palmone would get sync’ing perfected so I can use iCal and Address book with categories on my mac and have the categories carry over to my palm and then over to my PC when I am at work on Outlook.

Mac Dev Lessons

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I have been playing with Apache, PHP, MySQL & Surgemail on of all machines my Macmini. I was still having issues with the new linux box so I messed around with these programs on the mac. Man most of it was easier than the linux setup, but it was still hard. I found several prebuilt install packages for most of the programs I was playing with.

I learned a few valuable lessons today. First never install anything you don’t know how to uninstall. Doing technology for as long as I have, I should know that by now, but I guess not! Second, I need a setup for testing and messing around and a separate environment where I keep working things like my current website, email, etc.

Right now I actually have my website running on my mini. I don’t want to keep it there, but for now until I sort out my linux issues it will remain. Tomorrow I am going to do mothers day stuff so I probably wont have time to mess with this stuff. Hopefully I will get to some more during the week.

iChat Plus Jabber = Cool

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I never really warmed up to Apples iChat program until this week. I liked AIM. I never really used MSN. So I stuck with AIM. I like AIM (the service, NOT the program) only because I could not find a better program that will get me on AIM (the service not the program). GAIM, Trillian, etc didn’t do it for me.

On the flip side I use Jabber at work. I love it. It is another fantastic tool that Gus turned me onto years ago (wow, it has been years). Well my love of jabber and my use of my Mac had issues since there was no good jabber client for the mac. I have been using PSI for a while now. it is a good tool, but it had some serious quirks that I didn’t like. Actually they drove me crazy, but I had no other tool that came close to it on the Mac. Then came Tiger. I was pleasantly surprised when I found that iChat now supports jabber. After a few minutes of tinkering I figured out how to get my jabber server up on my iChat software. A few customizations with iChat (that I didn’t know I could do before) and now I am thinking differently about iChat.

Now I have another windows program that works as good or better on my Mac! Dare I dream to work completely off the mac without dealing with my Thinkpad crashing all the time? I have to stop myself from getting excited!

New Server, Almost

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I took the plunge and forked overs some money to build a “decent” server to run my site on at home. I got a tiny desktop case CPU, RAM, & DVD drive for really cheap. I already had a drive for it. I built it today and I am now trying to put linux on it. I am going for Suse 9 Enterprise or Suse 9.3. Not sure what will end up on it just yet. I put Suse Enterprise 9 on before but had problems so I am trying it again.

Right now I am having media issues with both 9.0 and 9.3 so I am not happy. I am still very new to the Linux crazy so I am very frustrated.

Now that I am building this new machine I have a few decisions to make. Do I keep using Typepad, or host my own blog using Moveabletype or WordPress? I like Typepad, but I am not sure if I want to pay to host when my subscription is up when I am hosting my own server. I liked moveabletype as a program but it is a pain to setup. I proved that today with several attempts at configuring it right. I hear WordPress is good, and they “claim” to have a simple install process.

Not sure what I am going to do just yet. I just want to get Linux installed and working right now…

IDE & SATA RAID

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One of our IDE & SATA RAID card manufacturers is telling us we need to run some sort of synchronization utility at least every month to prevent disks from corrupting. We are having an issue where the disks are getting marked bad, when they are in fact fully functional when we format and try to use them again.

This is disturbing to me. I am continuing to feel that this company (maybe the entire technology) is still have baked. We don’t have these issues with newer SCSI drives and controllers.

Oh and the synchronization utility they want us to use took 3 days to run on a disk array with 1tb of data. These guys have got to be kidding…

Cisco 7920 IP Wifi Phone

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I have had the opportunity to play with the Cisco 7920 Wifi IP phone recently. I have said before I am a fan of Cisco Call Manager (CCM). I use it, I like it. I thought the 7940 wired IP phones were great. This Wifi phone operates just like a 7940 but it is a cordless. I have taken it between 2 locations with the same WEP configuration and it worked seamlessly. I took it between 2 floors with seamless wifi setup and it worked without a problem. The battery life leaves a bit to be desired, and a cradle would be nice for what these things cost, but the phone is still great.

I am tempted to get a wifi IP phone for my personal Broadvoice account. They offer help on configuring them, and they even sell one through Hello Direct. I am just not sure if the quality is as good as the Cisco one? Too bad the 7920 is only a skinny based phone and wont work on SIP.

Static IP Bliss

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I finally took the plunge. I finally forked over the extra money to my cable company for a static IP address. Granted I have had the same ip since I moved in, but my provider (RCN) blocks web and SMTP ports. That means I couldn’t host a website or a mail server. With my static ip (and RCN having $20 a month from me) I can (according to tech support) host stuff on my server now. I am kind of pissed that I have to pay since I was able to do this with Time Warner for free in the past. Granted I am not sure if TW actually allowed it but it was technically possible to do. I could have gotten a port redirector service to allow me to host my site with port 80 being blocked but RCN did offer me this pay for an IP option. I cut back on my cell phone since I haven’t been using it so the cost to me is a wash.

I have just configured my router for the static VPN tunnels that I have. Stupid changes were needed on the Pix’s on the other end to get it to work, but after about 10 minutes on each tunnel I was up and running again. With 2 configuration changes on my router I was able to get a demo page up on apache. Seems to be working now. All I have to do is take the virtual machine I am running my site on, back it up and move it home. Hopefully everything comes up ok. Once I move the site to my home machine I can begin to work on a linux only version of the site.

Once the site is moved I can really test and see if RCN’s claims are accurate about their ip service. More news on that later.

Lazy Saturday

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I hung out at home yesterday. I watched a bunch of TV off my Tivo, and finished installing Mac OS 10.4 on my mini’s. I am almost done on that front. I moved my iTunes music collection to my work mini before I went to bed.

I didn’t do as much cleaning of my apartment as I would have hopped. Maybe tomorrow.

Today I am planning on going to John’s for some Halo on the Xbox. Not sure what time I am leaving. I should probably get showered and dressed now just to be sure I am ready. More later.