Work

Server Upgrade

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My Imail server upgrade completed successfully. Besides an upgrade that gave us the ability to host more mailing lists and domains, we also go some feature updates. The web interface has been redone. I am not sure if I like it better than the old one though.

Spam filtering has been improved, or so they say. I have to look a bit further into that to see if it is actually better. LDAP is now using OpenLDAP. Not sure if that is better or not either. We have to change the search base for everyone that uses the address book. That was an unexpected feature of this update.

I got a hard time from Dave about running the update at 10PM on a thursday. Normally our corporate mail upgrades are done Sunday afternoon’s but the call center uses this mail system and they have more people working on sunday than they do at 10PM on a thursday. Thankfully he was finally ok with the time frame. It took several hours to run the update, convert the LDAP DB, and then test the system.

I am running late this morning since I didn’t get much sleep last night. I hopefully will be in the office by 10AM.

Planning

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Yesterday we began to enact our departments 3 month project plan. All development projects for the next few months are out on the table so everyone knows what is going on.

Yesterday was another one of those days where half the day was spent in meetings. I did a lot of break fix stuff yesterday. I was not able to move along any major projects (that I can remember now).

It was busy. I didn’t even get to work on my new desktop machine. My HP Evo 330 that I use as my desktop computer at work was having hard drive issues. It keep rebooting and saying it can’t find one. I would have to play with the cables and it would start to work again. I didn’t have time to deal with that so I took a HP Evo 310 something and fixed it up. On tuesday I put a 200 gig drive in it, along with the 80 gig one that was there I now have plenty of space to put VMWare virtual machines. I also pulled out the burner from my 330 and put that in it too. The 510 is a decent machine now. I use this desktop mainly as a VMWare machine. I load it up with ton’s of virtual machines and I can switch between them when needed. I also sometimes use it as a backup box to my laptop. Mainly it is for VMWare. And you know how much I like VMWare:)

Spring Is Here

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Spring is upon us. I have broken out the light weather jacket for the first time in 2004. It will be 65 in NYC today. That means that my companies office will be like a sauna since I bet the heat will still be on, and the AC is not working yet.

I like the winter. You know why? You can always put on another layer of clothing. When it is hot, there is only so much you can take off! I don’t get people complaining it is too cold. I just don’t get it. Put on some gloves and a sweater. Because if it is hot you don’t want most people taking off their shirts!

Warm And Damp

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It is going to be in the 50’s today in NYC. It is also rainy. I have broken out my London Fog (Trench) rain coat. I need to replace this coat. It is getting up in years and probably could use replacement. The warmer weather is a double edged sword for me right now. For one thing my apartment building does not normally turn on the AC until May 15. By then it is really hot. Sometimes they turn it on early, but you never can tell.

Our work AC is nonexistent normally. We have had problems the past two summers with them. Now they are truly nonexistent. The water tower that runs them is gone. We were going to replace 2 of the 3 units with a more powerful air cooled system, but continue to use 1 of the water cooled units. That plan has to change since our building got rid of the water tower that we use. Turns out we shared that with another tenant and that tenant is leaving. Since the tower is in bad repair they are just getting rid of it. We are left to fend for ourselves. We have like 2 months before it starts getting hot again. Hopefully we get something done by then. If it gets too hot I am off to my apartment to work:)

I am not sure if anyone in the office can go through another super hot summer at work. It was 82 degree’s at work yesterday and it was in the 40’s outside.

RT

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I am still crawling into the linux world. The more I try to get into it, the more I realize how much there is to learn about it.

My latest project I want to get into is RT (Request Tracker). It is a ticketing or request system that is open source. Idealab uses it and many others. It is supposed to be really good. I am trying to install it on my Suse 9.0 desktop at work. If I can get it to work, maybe we will deploy it and replace Mailflow for our support tracking system. Mailflow is good, but I don’t like the fact that it requires you to use IE. That locks me into using windows. I cannot even use IE on my mac, the pages don’t load right.

I still have to see if/how RT’s reporting functions look. Mailflow has nice features that tells me when I get requests, how many and other historical information that is very cool so I can do proper planning.

The Site Launch

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Throughout the trip to Foxwoods I was always in touch with the office since they were launching a new website product on friday. It wasn’t that bad since most of my work was done before I left, or else I would not have been able to make the trip.

It only got interesting when the site actually got turned on. Keith was calling me and I was at the blackjack table. I wasn’t going to answer the phone there, and I found out later that it is against the rules to do so. I ended up handing the phone to dari. it was funny to hear her try to explain to keith why I couldn’t take the call.

In the end the site launched. We had our share of small complications, but it went out.

Extension Mobility

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With Cisco Call Manager we can do something called extension mobility. it allows you to goto any phone in the office and log in with your phone extension. Our call center software Zeacom Smartconnect has always had problems with extension mobility. Once we use it the extension would not work with the software until the system was rebooted. We put a patch on the system last Tuesday that was supposed to fix the problem. Turns out that it didn’t. Some extensions work, and others do not. it is driving Kai and I crazy.

It turns out that Cisco uses the MAC address of the device you are logging into to track the profiles for extension mobility. That doesn’t work with how Zeacom does things. They like netbios. We have had issues with Smartconnect and netbios before when we wanted to put devices on networks other than the network where the smartconnect server resides. Zeacom is working on yet another patch to get the two system to gel and work together. I am still eagerly awaiting extension mobility. I have been waiting since September 2003. Granted EM will work with the cisco phones, but I just cannot use the call center software once I use it. it becomes a real pain in the ass.

Auto Configuration Of Mozilla

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For the past year I have been pushing people at my company to use Mozilla 1.x. The free version of the Netscape Gecko browser engine. I have come full circle with this browser since I originally liked and used netscape 1.x and 2.x but dropped it by version 4.x for IE.

Our customer service reps have been complaining of slow computers for as long as I can remember. At first we thought it was all sorts of issues. We realized it was the reps after we bought brand new Compaq computers early last year.

It turns out that these reps have 10-20 windows open at any time. 80-90% of them are IE windows. A desktop with 256megs or ram ends up needing 300-500 megs of memory. For what these people are doing it is not cost effective to buy more memory, and don’t even think of asking them to close some windows. I won’t go on and on about that, but I am a power user and only have 5-8 windows open at a time. How hard is it to close something you are not using and open it again several hours later when you need it again for 5 minutes??? Answer is people are lazy.

The solution we have is use Mozilla. I found that mozilla with tabbed browsing only costs 18-25 megs of memory for the first browser instance, and 1-2 megs per tabbed window. IE on the other hand uses 18-25 megs per IE window. By using mozilla you could save hundreds of megs of memory on a computer.

The problem we have had with adopting Mozilla is administrative. We needed a way to push out the bookmarks file to every user when we make changes. My company controls our Rep’s bookmarks so they have the most up to date list of sites to use while searching for stuff. I finally found how to create a users.js file in everyone’s mozilla profile that points to a bookmark file outside of the mozilla profile directory. Now we can add a line to our login script that will refresh the bookmarks every time a user logs in. With the users.js file we can also customize any other mozilla security or UI feature, but we have to manually copy the file every time we need to make an update so that becomes problematic. The issue is that mozilla creates a GUID for each profile and uses that as the profile directory name. We cannot script an update to copy files if the directory is different for each user.

The bookmark issue thankfully was the major problem with mozilla. We are now waiting to finish up other profile and desktop changes to begin rolling it out to everyone sometime in April or May

With adoption of Mozilla as our browser my company moves closer to the open source community. We still use Windows XP on the desktop. We have to. Our call center software requires it and that probably wont’ change in the foreseeable future. But we use Open office.org 1.1 for our reps. It saves us almost $400 per computer. We also use Jabber as our chat system. Granted the jabber system we use was purchased and it is a shrink wrapped windows application, but it is based off of the open source jabber standard. The desktop clients are all free.

Because of the reliance on the free open source software, besides the OS (comes with the new computers we get anyway) our call center software, and MSFT CAL’s to access the file server, we have virtually no desktop licenses to buy when we add new computers. Norton AV and Ghost are the only other things that I can think of we purchase and that is only $20-30 per computer. Someone explain to me why a phone rep needs a $400 version of office for email and typing quick text and spread sheets? The new math can’t even explain away that kind of costs.

Visio, Is There Anything It Can’t Do?

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Visio is a fantastic piece of software. I have been using ti to update the floor plan of my companies Kingston office. The architect gave me a CAD file of the office when we opened last year. I imported it into visio. Now I am going back and replacing desks and other furniture with Visio objects. I am then labeling all of the cable drops in the office. This way I can print out the file and have a reference of where all the network jacks are throughout the office. I did this for our NYC office when we moved in back in 2002. I haven’t had time to do it for Kingston until now. We are finding it more and more necessary to have this map so I am working on it this week. Visio still rocks, but I don’t see that much of a difference between Visio 2000, 2002, & 2003. I am currently using Visio 2002 standard and it just isn’t that different from Visio 2000.

Work Computers

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I have several computers at my desk at work. Scary as it may seem, I need them all. Ever few weeks I try to get rid of one or more, but only end up cleaning up wires.

Currently I have a computer for running VMWare sessions. It needs to have allot of ram and hard drive space, and I like to keep very little on the OS besides the VMWare.

I then have a machine that has 2 CD-ROM’s in it so I can burn disks. That machine also doubles as a box on a special V-LAN so I can test our softphone and other voice applications. That network is the only one where I can do that.

Then I have an old desktop that I run Linux on. Currently I have Suse 9.0 on that machine.

I have a spot for my powerbook. I have a 4 port KVM and all 3 other machines are on it, so I put the powerbook on the last port. I am finding recently that I am using it as my primary machine for email and office application work. Go Apple.

On another monitor setup I have my company Thinkpad T-40. This is my primary machine. It has all the day to day programs I use, and all my files on it.

At last count that was 5 machines. I have also been known to put a server or other desktops by my desk and hook them up to a kvn so I can build them or work on them. It gets really load in my office when I do that. Add to that Keith’s 2-3 machines and we have allot of heat also during the summer.

The crazy thing is we probably need space for more computers, not less. We are always tinkering with something new. And that is why I like what I do!!!