Making some back end changes to this site and my other server systems. The biggest achievement was moving my mail server. Basically a cut and paste of files and registry entries from one server to the virtual server I am using to host much of my site now a days. The DNS changes to the mail happened very fast. I was happy not to have much of a lag.
Technology
On-Call This Week
After weeks of flying under the radar I got the joy of being “technically” on call this weekend. I mean technically since I am always on call. I get calls for problems even when I am not the person who is supposed to be called. It comes with my position. One of the worst things that can happen to me is to be sleeping and get woken up with some major systems outage. It get the same feeling I used to get when I ran on an EMS squad in college and a call would come in late at night. The only difference is being on call at work usually does not require me to go out in the cold to respond to something.
To set a good example I took the on call pager this week. Well it is not really a pager. We all have nextel’s (most with Blackberry’s), so we just route the emergency number to the Nextel of whoever is on call. Of course most of the team was happy when I got to be on call. They assume if someone calls for a non emergency I will give them a verbal beat down. They are probably correct.
Linux Is Addictive
For years I have been getting poked and prodded by Gus to do more with linux. Of course he would say this as he gave me a workload no 2 people could handle. Over the past few months Jayson and Danny have been getting into the act of wanting to push our linux use, personal and professional. Now I got Brian, Chris and Kai also saying we should play more with Linux.
Jayson took it upon himself to setup a web server at his house. it is an old dell box I had lying in my closet. I have yet to put any applications onto it, but he has a website, blog, wiki, and mail system running on it so far. His enthusiasm is addictive. I have been working on a virtual machine that I can host my stuff in, but I am thinking that won’t be enough. I could just host my stuff with him. That was the idea of giving him the box in the first place, but then I think what fun would that be?
I want to play with my own personal wiki. The other stuff he has done I don’t really want. The mail server sounds good, but I am not sure if I want to put mail (i rely on mail allot) on a system that I don’t fully understand yet.
What everyone doesn’t (or does) understand is that I want to learn, it is just not super simple!
Yet More Vmware Stories
I have spent 2 days working on fixing my active directory test virtual machines. I upgraded to vmware workstation 5.0 hoping to solve some cloning issues. if that doesn’t (didn’t) fix my issue I will use Microsoft sysprep on the virtual machines to resolve the SID problems.
I am also building myself a stable Suse 9.1 VM. The process of upgrading all the VM’s I have to work with workstation 5.0 will also take some time. The Kingston guys finally saw how I can connect to our GSX server today when I was up there. now they want one.
After some initial issues with the Suse 9.1 VM I am on my way to getting this to work. I keep hitting roadblocks with my configuration. it just shows how much I have to learn when it comes to linux.
Crap Desktop Upgrades
I am going to my sisters place in a bit to take their 5-6 year old P-III 700 and upgrade them to a 3 year old P-4 1.5 or so. Only for my sister would I waste time on upgrading them from really old crap, to just crap. They don’t want to spend the cash on a new machine and they think this will do what they need. I don’t want to argue with them, but if it was anyone else I would not be doing this. So much crap can go wrong with an upgrade like this. lets just hope for none of them to happen.
On the plus side I get to see morgan!
Hotspots
Yesterday Jayson, Danny, & I took off to Starbucks to study (tech books), talk about work, etc. We have wanted to try that for a while but have been busy. We finally made it out. James joined us for a bit, but was busy and had to go. First, the starbucks in Union Square was noisy. Yes there are actually 2 Starbucks in Union Square but I assume the other one was as noisy as this one. Jayson says the one by his house is not as bad and he has gone to read and drink coffee for hours without problems. I felt like I was back in High School with two tables of extremly loud high school girls sitting rite by us. The place was packed. 4 of us sat at a table made for 2. Totally not the laid back experience we were looking for. not sure if I will suggest that again.
We did make productive use of our time while we were there. I tried out the T-Mobile Hotspots. I used it in Delta crown rooms before but I wanted to give it a shot at Starbucks. There were 3 free networks in range (or so the laptop said), but I couldn’t connect to any of them. So I paid. it is not cheap, but it works great. We ended up shopping for an LCD TV online. as I said in my post yesterday the specs I want are just too pricey right now.
Website Work
I updated tons of photo pages on my photo album website. I have compressed down a ton of images to save space. I have also replaced allot of the old iPhoto generated pages with a newer style I am using. I am also creating new index pages so I can update the site easier. Fireworks was bad since links would be broken since it didn’t see the dynamic updates that frontpage did. Now I can move around the structure of my site without having to manually change hundreds of links.
Freedom Day
Today is the day I have been waiting for. It is the day that my mobile phone contract is up. I rely on my mobile all the time so since february I have been thinking what I would do when this day came. My issue was I have 2 phones on the same plan. One line was under contract and the other one has not had a contract in years. The one without the contract I wanted to keep, and drop the other one that the contract just ended on. The issue is you have to change price plans when you switch off the family share plan to a single phone plan with T-Mobile. I didn’t want to change the plan type on the phone I wanted to keep and then have to get into a contract since I was making a change. I am so against contracts for crap like a cell phone that I would have switched from T-Mobile and switched providers just to prove a point that a long time customer should not have to sign contracts!
Turns out T-Mobile was super cool with my situation. They offered me a regular 1000 minute plan with no contract, but I couldn’t get unlimited nights. For the price, and the fact that I still got unlimited weekends I took it. I can always get rid of it later if I have a problem.
So after my billing cycle changes (sometime this weekend I think) I will be down to one phone and no contract! Lets just hope that when I get my bill next month they didn’t f–k anything up.
External Hard Drive
Ever since I upgraded the hard drive in my new HP computer (like a week after I got it last year) I have had 2 160GB hard drives lying on my desk. I haven’t needed the space since I have 2 new 250GB drives in there now. Since I am using my DVR more and more I decided to put the 160’s to use. I got an addonic’s external USB 2 drive enclosure. It is neat. For $40 you can put a normal IDE drive in it and make it a USB 2 drive. For me this is perfect since I have no more internal drive bays on my computer but I have extra USB ports. I will get another one of these enclosures soon now that I know they work as advertised.
Fresh New Circuits
We just got our new 3700 series Cisco router today. it will be used for our new 4.5 megabit internet connection we are getting for NYC. This replaces our 2 redundant T-1’s. this connection is basically 3 T-1’s plugged into 1 big router. less redundancy, but triple the bandwidth. We figured our corporate office can have some acceptable downtime. Since our uptime stats have been great on our current circuit it seemed like a good gamble. I hope that once this is done I can use my VOIP phone without getting terrible choppiness sometimes.
We hope the circuit goes live in about 1-2 weeks. Verizon will be out tomorrow (had to cancel for some reason today) to do the smartjacks. Like I always say, you cannot have enough bandwidth.