Life, Kids, Technology & that move to another continent
We met our integrator about the statement of work for our IPCC deployment. They calmed our nerves about most issues but we came up with another one. Dan and I will talk about this tomorrow.
If that is done, we can sign the papers and in 90 (work filled, super stressful, and probably extremely interesting and fun) days we will have an IPCC call center.
More news as it develops…
I was by myself in my office today. Jay had the day off. I am solo again tomorrow on a trip upstate. That is all I can say here, but will write more on my private work blog.
Mothers day was nice. Saw my mom, sister, dad, morgan, and others. Morgan is so funny. And the dangerous thing is she knows it. I think she is also a bit jealous of the new twins. My mom said it shouldn’t matter since the twins are not her grand kids so she will continue to spoil Morgan as much as she has. My dad quickly agreed.
After 2 changes of venues we ended up at mikes mom’s house for mothers day. I ended up taking metro north up and back. No rides for me this trip. it was not so bad. Metro north is even easier than the LIRR since it is on the east side.
I passed on desert in little Italy. Jayson wouldn’t commit to doing it until like 8PM when I got his call. By then I had just ate and I didn’t really want to trek out for a 30 minute train ride to have sugary (ohh, so good) desert at 9PM to not sleep the night because I am on a sugar high! Maybe next week.
I have been quiet on the work front recently. Not because I don’t have things to talk about but because I have been busy. We went over the statement of work for our IPCC deployment yesterday. We need to go over a few details to make sure we know what we are doing! More news as that LONG project progress’s.
Today was at times very busy and very easy going. What do I mean? We finished our work upstate early, so we decided to head home. But as we were doing that others had problems that were ongoing. Jay and I decided to hit the Walmart on the way home. I needed food.
After loading up on food and a new watch we headed home. When we rent cars and go upstate we usually fill up with gas at the last gas station in New Jersey on the palisades parkway. Well it was closed for construction. We had no choice but to get fuel in the city. Have you seen many gas stations in Manhattan? I haven’t either.
After dropping my groceries off at my place we headed off to find fuel. Jayson knew of a place near his house (which BTW was near the rental car return place). By now it was after 4pm on a friday in NYC. traffic was horrible. it took us 40 minutes to get to the gas station. then we had issues with it being too crowded and we were unable to get a pump on the side where our truck had the gas cap. After a fit of frustration we were going to drive into queens to find a station and then come back (we were right by the 59th street bridge anyway). knowing that would take forever we doubled back and the original gas station we went too was less crowded. 20 minutes after we originally showed up to the station, we got fuel. Another 20 minutes (to go 3 avenues and 8 blocks) we dropped off the rental car.
I was then off to the Apple store. I wanted the latest OS (10.4) and it just went on sale. See next post for details.
Jayson and I are off to Kingston Thursday. We are bringing up some gear and covering for chris and kai who will be doing a move of our Core switch to its new home on the first floor. We christen the 1st floor telco room Thursday night with moving the core downstairs. Besides acting as the core for the entire office it will act as the switch for all users on the first floor.
Hopefully nothing goes wrong since it is (dare I say just) a hardware move. Of course when you are dealing with large, complex, & expensive hardware nothing is simple.
Jay and I will stay overnight and cover the Friday day shift to also ensure that no problems ocure after the move. Lets hope all is well…
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.
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.
We completed our upgrade to a brand new 4.5 meg internet link tonight in our office. We dropped our redundant T-1 connections in favor of the less reliable (arguably) single link with triple the amount of bandwidth. We (i) did it for like $400 cheaper than we were paying before using the same provider. Lets hope this alleviates some of the bandwidth issues we have seen in the office.
Some minor issues slowed us down, but in the end we were up and running in like 2 hours. Next up is the analysis on our Kingston office to see if they warrant an upgrade to 3 or 4.5 meg links. They require a more redundant connection but they have been expanding and their bandwidth may start becoming a problem. I think we can find the point in time where we believe the bandwidth will trend higher than we can support and get an upgrade done.
It is rare for a week to go by that I don’t at some point think that VMware is not the best thing since sliced bread. We finally finished rolling out our first GSX server. It was barely up for a week when one of our developers needed another server for something that we never budgeted hardware for. Actually they specifically said we don’t need new hardware for this project. Instead of having to go looking for approval for a new database server, I just looked at our used resources on the virtual machine and allocated another VM. they were up and running in a day.
Restores are also fantastic. I have restored several dev VM’s since we brought this system online. I am already seeing where the box we built will be over loaded soon and we will need to get another one. I am also pushing the practical applications of another virtual machine in our production environment. it would save a ton of cash in the long term.
On the development and testing side next week I am going to setup a 3 server domain (totally virtual) to test the upgrade path from windows 2000 active directory to 2003. I have done this before, but it was almost 2 years ago. I want all the quirks fresh in my head. to do this with real hardware would have taken ages, and would have required me to put up a bunch of old desktops to do the job. this way I have one desktop at my desk that I just configure the way I want, run the test and then blow away the virtual machines when I am done.
Went upstate on a road trip with Dan today. I had a bunch of things to take care of. Dan wanted to leave to head back to NYC by 3:30PM to make our first softball game. Being the realist I am I said we would never leave on time, and we would never make a 5:45PM game. I was right on both accounts. We didn’t leave until around 4PM. We missed all but 2 innings of the game.
We ended up getting lost getting to Roosevelt Island. Yahoo maps gave us the wrong exit name, and the stupid exit was not numbered. once we drove past it we knew we missed it, but it took tons of time to turn around. The rest of the directions were good though. Thanks to David for emailing them to me, and thanks to the Treo 650 and T-Mobile wireless data for bringing up the directions on my phone and actually working! Tech that works is priceless!
We lost by 1 run. It was tied until the last inning. At least it was not a blow out! Went out for a drink after the game and then headed to J & G’s for dinner.
All in all it was a good but busy and travel filled day.