Life, Kids, Technology & that move to another continent
I got word today that the office move that I am trying to plan for is almost a reality. We have verbal agreement on our lease terms, and the people that want to rent our current space have also come to verbal agreement with terms on our current space. That means I must frantically work to get a Cisco vendor selected and order a phone system.
I meet with an potential integrator today about this project. I just hope I can get quotes approved fast enough tot meet everyones time table.
I spent the morning with a potential vendor discussing network designs and Call Manager configurations. It was very productive, but I am always backlogged when I spend half a day or a day out of the office. I spent the afternoon catching up on paper work while most of my team went to the data center to mount a new core switch we are trying to deploy.
I ended up at Dan’s with Jayson after work to upgrade the ram in his new iMac. We got dinner out of the deal and I also moved over his files from his old windows machine and setup his iPod on the iMac. Now I am iTired.
My scheduled trip to our Call Center for tomorrow is canceled. I didn’t want to chance the trip in the snow they predict. I will try to reschedule for sometime next week.
Technorati Tags: apple, mac, call manager
Finally after 4 attempts (or at least I counted 4) we have upgraded our VOIP PBX to the latest version of Cisco Call Manager. Now we are happily (for now) running on version 4.1.3 release 2. This is a vast improvement over our previous version 3.3.3. Looking at version numbers doesn’t explain why, but trust me it was a needed upgrade.
We had so many false starts with this thing that I am happy that it is finally over. The problem is that the upgrade is over, but the upgrade was the first part of other enhancements we need to make. Everything else was held up by the upgrade. Hopefully Kai will pull it together and complete the other dependent tasks related to this upgrade now that we are on CCM 4.
I also hope this is the last time we have to use our current integrators. This upgrade was part of the original deal to install our IPCC system. Now that it is done I am going to shop around and try to find a new Cisco partner. I am going to lunch with our Cisco rep this week to discuss things. I am also going to lunch with another Cisco partner that our telecom rep knows. They are supposed to be a Cisco gold partner. I am keeping my options open for now. Soon I will need to pick someone to do our phone system in our office if we move to a new location.
Wednesday & Thursday I moved file shares in one of our offices to a new file server. I completed most of the leg work a week or so ago, but I had to go through and make sure everything worked. Now we are well along on our migration to our new 2003 domain for the entire company. James has also started moving users from our old domain in our NY office to the new one. So far no major complications. We had to tweak the site replication times, but nothing else yet.
I finally got to do James’ review today. It was only a few weeks late, but I hate it when mine is late so I know how it feels. I think it went well. His was the first this year. It works out that most people got hired in the beginning of the year so I have a few coming up. lets hope they all go as smooth as this one, but odds may not be in my favor.
Danny was off Wednesday, then came in, but then took off today. Kai is out tomorrow due to an upgrade, and Jayson is on vacation from today until Tuesday. I feel like I am the only one not taking off. I know that isn’t true, but I have remembered I have not taken a day since December. I need to plan some sort of get a way. At least today was not too crazy with 2 people out.
After a month and a half of looking Kai finally got a new hire in our Call Center support team to replace Chris moving into our Development group. Tim started today. So far no feedback, but he was by far the best candidate in the group that I saw. Lets hope it works out like the previous hires did. I may have issues with the way Kai does allot of things, but he can recruit the right people even if takes way too long to do so!
Thursday was pretty much a repeat of Wednesday. I didn’t leave the office until around 8PM. I spent a large portion of my day helping (or organizing help) to get a project finished. The day was just a blur of activity.
Friday was hectic also, but not as bad as the rest of the week. I had to deal with AC issues in a computer room, and ensuring all projects are moving along normally. I was able to get out early enough to make it to my parents for my sisters birthday dinner. We ended up going out. It was nice to be able to unwind and have a steak, see my parents, niece, and sister.
Carrie gave me a ride to the subway while morgan sang me all the new songs she has learned!
Today was hectic. The morning was spent updating project plans for all the big projects I have going on this quarter. I spent a while doing that and still have more to do. Working with project plans always seem like a never ending task.
I went over some technical policies with my boss, and then began work on a server migration. I actually get to do some technical work on this move. Mainly because almost everyone else is busy and I really need to get the project moving along. We are trying to migrate our data in one office onto a new larger file server. I wrote a few robocopy scripts to sync the data off of our old file servers to the new one. The files are coping since this morning.
I also worked on some fault tolerance concepts regarding our file servers using Windows Distributed File Server (DFS). I was able to setup a replica of the DFS share we use for file sharing. Next I looked at modifying our login scripts to map to the DFS root in Active Directory. That helps if the server with the DFS root fails we can use an alternate one already setup in AD. I also looked at a bunch of other ideas along those same lines. It was very productive.
In the afternoon I had to deal with last minute changes to some security rules in order to complete a project. In the end we found a way to make everyone happy, but it took some time, and a bunch of network design explanations.
I got home a bit late, I ordered food. I was just too lazy to make dinner. Now I can’t believe it is almost 10:30.
It was hot at work. We turned the AC on in our office also. Just my luck that we are having AC issues all around. Our other office had an AC issue in one of the computer rooms, and our room in NYC was a bit hot. Not broken, but not at a cool 69 degree’s like it should be. I had to deal with that in the AM. Then I had some meetings and taking care of misc issues.
My group had to stay late to do a bunch of physical computer moves. Because so many people stayed it only took us an hour to do. I think everyone was working except for one phone that needs to get addressed first thing tomorrow. For the messiness of the job I am happy to report my Dockers where not ruined. We shall see how many issues we have related to the move from users tomorrow. That is the true test of if we did the work right.