Work

Remote Agents And Terminal Server

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While I was awake and not sleeping last night, I thought about my remote agent design issues. Currently we have schematics of different electronic and home appliance parts on CD’s we use to look up stuff. The problem is they take up a huge amount of drive space. We get updates every month that need to be added to the existing data. This is fine when a computer is on our network, we just run the update from our file server. What do you do when you have remote computers over a VPN WAN link trying to get the same update? Pushing out 500 megs to 2 users is possible, but what about 20, or 200? It becomes unfeasible due to bandwidth limitations.

One option is to not give the remote agents this software, but they rely on it. My thoughts then turned to Terminal Services. What if all the updates are on the central server, and users just connected to the server via terminal services. That way I don’t have to worry about anything on the local machine except for an IP address and terminal client working.

This is contingent on our phone control software working with Terminal Services. I believe it does, but an answer to that question is easy enough to get.

The next problem is cisco soft phone. I doubt it would work through terminal services. We may need to go with a physical cisco IP phone at a person’s house. It adds cost per user, but it may be necessary. Also going with a hardware VPN solution is looking better than a software solution. If anything goes wrong with the remote computer we would be responsible to manage it. We cannot troubleshoot software issues like vpn over the phone, and we are not equipped to send someone onsite to fix problems like that.

A hardware VPN device that we can remote into and verify it is working, along with terminal services is looking like a good solution. it is not the cheapest but maybe the most feasible. We would require someone to have their own computer, and all they would need to put on it is terminal client. That takes 5 minutes to setup. Wire up a VPN router from cisco or linksys plug in a phone and they are up and running.

Now all I have to do is sell everyone on the solution and make sure it works from a technical standpoint.

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It Is So Hot

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Actually it is not so bad outside. It is just so hot in the office. It sucks in the heat and doesn’t let go. I was sitting at my computer and I could not concentrate. I said screw this, and decided to leave early. I am not staying if it is so hot, and I will be up really late in that heat tomorrow moving desks around.

Thank goodness I didn’t get a head ache, but my allergies are killing me. Not as bad as all last week, but still not good. I may hit the pool just so I don’t feel so sticky when I get home.

Mozilla Vs. I.E.

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Over a year ago I saw a few articles about Mozilla.org.. Then I saw Gus using it, and all he could do was rave about it. I gave it a try, and I haven’t looked back since. I now use it on my Mac’s, PC’s and any Linux machine I use. Switching is like switching to a Mac from a PC. You always see everyone else using Internet Explorer and I try to convert them. Being the software and hardware standards maker at my company also allowed me to attempt to push it out to everyone.

When we built out our new Call Center, I put in the computer image a setup for Mozilla. No one really used it, but I wanted it there. A few months ago we had an issue with I.E. for a day and we got some people to try it out. Guess what, they liked it. That fateful day also got me to develop a way to push out favorates to our Rep’s. That was the final technical reason for not using Mozilla.

Kai then began a campaign, some would say religous crusade to get people to addopt Mozilla. He touted the huge memory advantage of using tabbed browsing, and how cool pop up blocker was, etc. People slowly started to see what we were saying for a year, that Mozilla is good.

Now we have well over half of our call center using the software. That number is increasing every week, since we are also encourperating its use in the training sessions for all new hires.

The only down side was I never realized how many people were using the software. Our developers never wrote our internal application to run on Mozilla. For a year I used it and it worked fine, but last week we had a new release go out that caused issues with Mozilla. The problem is all sorted out now, and all our dev guy’s know to write code to work with it.

I am happy that I was able to get such so many people to addopt using Mozilla. Maybe they will start using it at home also? You never know. Thanks to Kai, Brian, Keith, & Gus for their parts in getting the system out their over the past year and change. Thanks to Nelson for being my first Beta Tester (as always).

Final Move Plan

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I have mentioned our construction plans for this week. What we are going to do is break apart cube walls that were moved when we originally occupied our NYC office. We built a large open area out of what was once 12 cubes. Now we are partially rebuilding the cubes so we can put people in them.

The first thing we need to do is move anyone out of the existing area. We have like 10 people sitting there now. They will be put in their new homes Wednesday night. Thursday the cube guys come and make all the changes.

Friday we (Jayson, Nelson, & I, with Dan supervising since he cannot lift anything) will make a number of cube moves to get everyone where they need to be post redesign. This means that at least a dozen people need to have their desks. moved. It will be interesting how this plays out. Most people have not complained about this, but their is bound to be a few as the move gets closer, or as they realize exactly where they are going.

Alergies And The AC

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For the first time in a few weeks I am breathing normal. I switched from Zertec one a day to the 12 hour version. I was finding the once a day pill slowly wearing off as the day went on. By the time I needed to take the next day’s pill I was really not feeling good.

I took the first 12 hour pill last night. I didn’t have the greatest sleep, but I am not sure if it was due to the drugs. I woke up this morning and right after I got up I was breathing normally. I took the second pill before I left work, and so far so good. One problem I think I have been having is that all the windows are open at work. All the dust and pollen from outside is circulating around because we don’t have AC. The AC situation should be partialy resoloved today. We got two portable units that we will be powering up and hopefully cool the office till the main units are fixed. Maybe then I can breath ok!

Gus Back From India

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My boss is back from his trip to india. My vacation is over:) Just kidding. The work doesn’t really change, but stress level does when he returns. At least he looks rested and relaxed from his trip.

We hit the ground running with a bunch of new projects he wants me to look into. One involves a new beefy Linux Server. We will probably use Suse 9.0 for this deployment. Also on the plate is Project 2003 server. Jayson and I have kicked around the idea since he got here, but now we see a real business use for it, so we will push ahead with it.

We are also pondering remote agents again. We think we can use the remote agent’s to get french reps in NYC to connect to Kingston. This may or may not allow us to free up space in NYC. The office is getting crowded again.

All this on top of the 4 new sites we are building out, and the new server deployments in our data center, and the major office move of users thursday and friday. It will be a fun week.

Remote Power Control

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I think we designed our Data Center pretty well. Keith and I spent hours toiling over different ways we can make it better over the past 2 years. One area that I think we need improvement is the ability to power cycle a server remotely. We can view what is on our KVM remotely. I can go into the bios or configure a network card even if the computer is not on the internet. This is thanks to a backup dial up connection, and an IP KVM. the only thing I cannot do is hit the power button on a computer if it crash’s. That would be the ultimate ability. Besides changing tapes, I would have no other reason to goto our data center on a daily basis.

This would also save us money. We pay to have someone go to our cage and do what is called “remote hands”.

Virus’s At Work

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If you read the news you must hear about all the worms and other “bad things” spreading through the internet. My company has been diligent in attempting to prevent these things from infecting our computers. We have not been 100% protected, but from what I have seen we are way ahead of the curve in protecting ourselves.

I have seen lots of virus alerts from our virus scanning system. Thankfully, it is able to deal with whatever comes up. Also important is the Windows Update server. That thing is a life saver. I don’t know if we would have been able to install all these updates on all of our desktops without it. We need to goto the next level and get an SMS or ZEN type system next.

I have never been a huge fan of Novel, but they have caught my curiosity. What they are doing with Suse keeps me interested. Also that their directory services work on Windows is also cool. All that and ZEN Works is much better than SMS, or that has been my practical experience. I don’t know how SMS 2004 holds up. I keep telling myself that my company is a windows shop, we don’t want Novell. The other side of my brain is saying “you know Novell is better, give it a try”. For now I am ignoring that side of the brain. I would like to get a demo of Novell and give it a test drive. When (if) things ever settle down enough that I can try that, I will. Novell NDS, running on Suse linux. Now that would be really nice, if it worked as easy as the old novell used to!!!

3TB, Still Building

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Jayson started building a 3.x terrabyte disk array friday afternoon. It began to initilize friday. As of last night it was only at 53% complete. I will give it a few more days before I get worried. 3 terrabytes is allot of drive space. We currently buy Promise SATA and IDE RAID array’s. For the money, they are awsome. You get an unbelievable amount of storage space for so little, and the speed is not far off its more expensive SCSI disk cousin’s. These array’s actually use a SCSI backplane back to the servers they connect to.

In the past year I have gone from technology snop only wanting nice SCSI disk array’s from the likes of HP & Dell, to a huge proponent of Serial ATA. I have to say Promise makes a good product. The only downside may be we go through drives quckly. Not sure if it is coincidence or what we do, but I have had 4 drives go bad over the past year on a total of 5 disk array’s. Now when you add up that each array has 15 drives, it may not seem like allot. I may be over-reacting. In fact I think I am, but I have other SCSI arrays with no problems. It isn’t an issue yet, but I am keeping my eye on the situation.

All in all, SATA, or IDE RAID is solid and more than half the cost of it’s SCSI equivalent.

Birthday Lunch At American

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It was Dari & Jennifer’s birthday’s at work friday. We went out to America for a lunch. There was like 22 of us. It was a huge table. it was a nice time out. It was the first of 2 celebrations for their birthday. Dari’s boyfriend had setup a surprise dinner for her so we didn’t want to have her figure out she had a dinner that night, so we went to lunch.

Check out the mob for photos…