Work

The Picnic

by

Well I was going to write all about the company picnic that I was going to on last Sunday. It rained, so we had no picnic. So nothing to talk about. It was rainy and everyone from work that I would hang out with (now that we all had no plans) were either sick or lazy and didn’t want to do anything.

I was with them on the being lazy part, so I did almost nothing productive on Sunday. I played with Sync on my Mac and robocopy for Windows. My goal is to automate backing up of my most important stuff. I have both scripts working. Robocopy can be (and will be) made into a scheduled task to run weekly on my XP box. Rsync needs a bit more work to make it a cron job that runs on a schedule. I may not even do that since my laptop is not regularly plugged into the firewire drive I will use as backup. I may just run the script manually when I want to backup stuff.

The picnic will most likely be rescheduled for the weekend I am away for a wedding. Not a huge loss for me. I always have mixed feelings about all day recreational get togethers from work. The parties usually rock, but the picnic can get a little long. Of course the wedding may end up making me feel the same way:)

Roller Coaster Day

by

When I didn’t think the day could get any crazier it did. I was very busy all day putting out fires at work (figuratively not really). Just as I recovered from a week delay on our AD project, I get major complications from our IPCC deployment. Dan and I had a opinionated discussion with our integrators. We also are very close to purchasing our first SAN. We are pretty sure we got the price to a number we are happy with.

Finalized plans to make changes to our voice circuits to allow for more resiliency if we have a failure. Stupid issues arose regarding mislabeling of circuits. The little details that we are not following up on are killing me, but when asked to get tons done in a certain amount of time, you have to give somewhere. I just don’t like doing it.

I have other issues going on with VPN tunnels to partners of ours. It has been very stressful. I thrive on stress, but sometimes it is allot. Hopefully tomorrow will be calmer.

AD Day

by

Worked on clearing out my backlog of open tasks to work on. I got through allot of my small misc. tasks in my list. That was good. I also got started on the first 3 new servers for our Active Directory project. We had to start over due to some complications. after some research we figured out we probably didn’t have to start over, but we wanted to play it save so we just swapped the drives from those machines with new ones Jayson had built. Working through some other issues with the setup, but we built a test environment to hopefully prevent issues like the ones we just had.

Busy day, but productive.

Technorati Tags: , ,

Another Overnight

by

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…

A Good Day

by

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

by

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.

WSUS In Action

by

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!

Sailing

by

Today about 20 (or so) of us from work took a half a day and went sailing. It was a team building exercise. I normally think that sort of activity is cheesy but I had a great time. We learned allot about sailing, and we got to do work on a real sail boat. We went on a 70+ year old boat. it was an 80′ or so boat if I remember correctly. It was cool.

Granted there was a crew that did the real work. The sail boat had an engine that we used for most of the trip since the wind was not so great for about half the trip. Other than that I had a blast. I learned (i think we did) what the poop deck was. I answered the age old question of “is left or right port?”. I got to play with a real radar system. I got to say “i have the con” and actually mean it. I also got to ask if we could fire the deck gun, but we didn’t have one. that would have been cool too.

We sailed up the Hudson for a while. then we turned around and headed down past Governors island, the Statue of Liberty and a bunch of oil barges.

I don’t normally get motion sick, but I took a Dramamine pill just in case today. On our holiday party boat cruise I didn’t feel well so I wanted to play it safe. Turns out I think the holiday party issues was just a migraine. No issues for me today.

The weather was cool and cloudy so the temperature on the water was perfect. I think everyone had a good time, even those that were not “boat people”. I for one had a blast, and it was actually work!

Mail Server

by

We have been having a problem with one of our Mail servers. It is the machine that holds a bunch of small domains we own, and our call center mail system. It wont allow us to log into terminal server. VNC keeps crashing, and LDAP doesn’t start. It serves up mail fine though. We have had this issue for a week or so. We have been trying to figure out the problem without causing more issues.

I finally broke down and configured the replacement box today. We put the new hardware up at our data center on Tuesday but had not had a chance to cut all the mail over onto it. I configured Imail, moved the mailbox’s and domains. All but our biggest domain is now cut over. Everything looks normal so far. I will cut the remaining domain over when our call center closes tonight. hopefully everything will go smooth. I should just need to update the MX record, and sync the mail. All the accounts are created, and copies of the mailbox’s are on there from a snapshot a few hours ago.

Keeping my fingers crossed!!!

Technorati Tags: ,

Remote Problems

by

Tuesday I had to deal with problems while I was 2000+ miles and 3 time zones away. First we are having lingering issues with a mail server. No one can log into it locally but the email services are running. so for now we are in a wait and see state with it. we are making sure we have good backups of everything on the box before we mess with it more. Also Kai and I being away isn’t helping.

A reporting function of Zeacom failed again. The only solution is to reboot the system. This is what the brain trust at Zeacom support tells us. Rebooting that system is not without its own risks. Kai and I are the only ones who have rebooted it before. Brian will do it tonight, but it will be his first time. He has seen Kai do it so hopefully we have no issues.

We also had performance issues with Jabber and some other minor crap. I had to juggle this, Dan complaining of site performance issues and 4 lectures. it was a busy day. The problem with the site performance issues is we see nothing wrong on our end. Dan is just frustrated. Not sure what else we can do (from my end) right now. it is not like the local director is acting up again (thank goodness), that I can make a change and magically it is all better. that is what he is hoping for.