Today we are trying out a new support schedule for the Kingston Call Center. We are going to have a support guy onsite from when they open at 8AM to 8PM. Hopefully it will help in keeping things running normally. The change has been a long time coming but we finally have the people in place to do it. The next step is full coverage, but that may be a way’s off since you need more than 2 shifts to cover 16 hours a day, 7 days a week.
Work
Other Projects
Other things I am trying to work on are… I just downloaded Connectix (now Microsoft’s) Virtual PC for Windows. I want to see if it is better than VMWare. It was up on MSDN so I decided to give it a try. I also grabbed the beta for SMS 2003. Gets me wondering when they will release it since 2003 is almost up.
My exchange project is not dead yet, but I have no time to do anything on it, so it sits idle. I am also looking at the new Microsoft Chat Server. We currently use a Jabber server from Tipic. I actually like it allot and it was very cheap. I want to see how the Microsoft one measures up.
Besides projects to evaluate new software I am also working on tons of other stuff. I am scheduling an update to our email ticketing system called Mailflow. We currently use version 1.0 and are getting a free upgrade to 2.0. I am attempting to deploy it next week. It is from a company called Visnetic. They make some neat pieces of software.
To conserve bandwidth we are about to start blocking most outbound network ports from our firewall. That will make me a popular guy with the rest of the company! Also we are ordering a private line T-1 between our two offices so we can send VOIP calls between them in greater number than we can over the internet T-1’s we have.
Still Not Feeling A 100%
I still don’t feel 100% better. I got a MIGRAINE yesterday. I took 2 butabitol’s and I felt better for a while but ended up leaving a little early (5:30PM) and didn’t do much when I got home.
This morning I still don’t feel my normal self. I am tired. I am having trouble sleeping. I think it is stress and weaning off the Tylenol PM.
I am going to try and take it easy today, but that never happens when I am at work. I wanted to be in Kingston today. My company is having its quarterly board meeting up there today. I wanted to make sure everything was perfect. As luck would have it I have an important meeting today at 11AM with our phone system integrator, and the maker of the software we use. We are going to discuss the issues we are having. Thankfully we have no “show stopper” problems but certain things could be better.
I am kind of glad I didn’t have to go today. Like I said I am still not feeling a 100%.
Old Gear & New Gear
I just got a new server in. We are building a Data Warehouse running on SQL 2000. We built one to demo and everyone liked it we have been using it for 4 months on a desktop with allot of hard drive space. The “server” finally showed its desktop limitations, so we are upgrading it to a Dual Xeon 2.4 Ghz server. We are doing IDE RAID, and threw in 2 gigs of ram. For just around 2K it is a nice little box. If you don’t need SCSI you can get server gear cheap now a days. Our dumb-ass vendor forgot to ship us a CD-ROM / Floppy Drive so I have the box open on the floor of my office with a desktop CD Drive and Floppy drive plugged in trying to get Windows 2000 installed. We have been buying Windows 2003 Server since it came out, but for most applications we are just downgrading to Windows 2000 Server. So far today I had no luck getting the OS to install. I think the USB floppy drive I used wasn’t working correctly. I need to cannibalize a floppy drive or buy one for $12 or whatever they are going for these days.
We have some older desktops that we were using as Red Hat web servers that we consolidated to one box. That means I have 2 box’s to use for testing and such. I am trying to demo Exchange 2003 on one and put Windows NT 4.0 Terminal Server Edition on the other. Terminal server will not boot off the dam CD from MSDN. The boot disks we have for it wont work either. I am continuing to work on that. I may give up on NT 4.0 and try 2000 server in application mode. I don’t need it for more than 30 days so I should have no problem with the demo mode it makes you use if you don’t have a key code.
As for Exchange 2003, we are looking to see if it is something we may want to move to. For maybe just the Technology department or for the company as a whole. Howard said good things about Outlook 2003 over HTTP. He said it was fast. I am going to look at how Idealab! did their deployment and maybe segment some users onto Exchange for a trial. Not sure yet.
I Survived My First Day Back
Well, I am tired and things were hectic for a while but I survived my first day back after being out for what felt like a long time. Keith was out sick today. Whatever I had is going around. Justin left early because he felt like crap also. I was left catching up on everything I missed since monday.
I fixed some call center issues. Did some sysadmin work that I don’t normally do. AKA tapes, and updating software versions for some applications we use. I don’t like having to do that all the time. Others are supposed to, but I do like doing it so I keep up on what is happening on my network. I learned that updating IPL’s (software we use to search for stuff) is still not hard, but you need to verify that it works before everyone can use it. I also learned that our new SDLT tape drive is still very cool, but very slow in loading and spitting out tapes.
I also configured Office 2003 Pro to autoinstall with paramiters I set. It is nice. Now if we upgrade (we can thanks to software assurance from Microsoft) I can easliy deploy it to my desktops. The real reason I was playing with the configuration was to get outlook 2003 to work with Exchange 2003 over HTTPS. Not there yet, but I am getting familure with the tools I need to do it correctly.
A bunch of people went out to No Idea for drinks after work. I went and had a coke. I was not ready to resume drinking after being so sick. I saw David P, and Jeff from my Y&R days. We were all pissed at each other since we work around the corner from one and other and I never see either of them. I really do want to see them, so I am trying to setup lunch with Jeff next week.
I am tired and going home. I caught the 7:29PM train out of Penn and hope to get lucky and catch a cab without waiting too long at the train station. It is hit or miss with the car service company, so we shall see.
My plan is to rest this weekend and be normal for next week.
2 Days At Kingston
I did my 2 days in Kingston this week. I am on the train (Amtrak) heading home. Got allot done, and still more to do. We just brought up 10 computers from our NYC call center and are setting them up in Kingston. We now have over 32 stations setup with 10 more for training. We are well on our way to 48, the target for phase 1 of our build out. Then we move up to 85 stations soon after that.
I also just got a new help-desk person in Kingston. Kai started monday for us. He was originally hired as a call center supervisor but he had IT background and we liked him so we transfered him over. Sorry dave. the call center’s loss is our gain.
I will be in NYC the rest of the week, and Keith will be in Kingston Wed, & Thursday. I want all the building out to be done so we don’t have to spend so much time up there. It takes time to transfer the knowledge we have to the new people at the same time as we are deploying so much gear.
We just got 30 new phones. We need to program them. We also had 8 new people start Monday. It is busy, and I wouldn’t have it any other way. Of course a break now and then would be nice!
Been Busy
I was away in Kingston till Wednesday night. I was busy and tired at night so I didn’t blog. Tons to talk about but I just am not in the mode to write that much. As I said Kingston was buys. Tons of issues remain outstanding. NYC is also a hotbed of problems right now. I hope to have things straightened out by next week.
Tomorrow I go with my family to my mom’s friends house for the Jewish holiday’s. I am not a big “holiday” fan, but I do what the family asks in situation’s like this. Why piss off my mom when I don’t have to! I will play next time.
I didn’t go to Gus’ for poker like I thought I would tonight. I had too much to do, and I was really tired. I didn’t really want to be out late tonight while I had problems to work on.
The Phone Traffic Transfer
Last night I successfully completed tranfering almost 50% of our call traffic to our new Call Center. At about 8:45PM Sunday AT&T redirected the traffic and it immediatly came up at the new center. It was actually very painless. Knock on wood nothing goes wrong.
Today I got to work at 7:30AM to reboot the call center software server, and from 8AM on the office was busy. We maxed out all the computers we had setup by 1PM. We even had 3 users logged in from our NYC office using the VPN tunnel. As of 10PM tonight it was still busy and they needed to get people back on the cisco phones because the queue was backed up alot.
Surprisingly (or not) we didn’t have that many major issues after the transfer. We had some computer that had some apps not working. We also had 5 machines that didn’t have Windows XP activation completed. The new computers ran out of the 30 days for activation and some of them coudln’t startup. To make matters worse the microsoft activation servers were not working ok. After some work, we got them online but it was a pain in the ass.
The Power Of Multiple People
Yesterday was the first day in a while that I was the only one around in my department. Keith went off to California, and Justin was in Kingston. I was busy getting the office ready so we can have some people (3-5) be able to take calls using our cisco system in Kingston. I setup the phones and configured the computers to work. Thursday night we tested it with 1 rep. She loved it.
Daniel had to build a new Red Hat 9.0 box because our old secondary name server died. We rushed a new one in its place. We were never down, but I like having backups. He also mounted and brought on line the new ftp server. Now all we need is the second ftp box and we can cut over to the new system.
Otherwise it was a very busy and stressful day. We ran a disaster drill. It worked out ok, but the thursday drill didn’t. We also had a problem with a server running out of disk space, but their was no log entry of the problem.
I didn’t leave work till after 7PM. I get a day of rest and then it is off to Kingston on Sunday.
Service Observe And Phone Stuff
Today I dealt with finalizing a solution for “service observe” in our new call center. We want the ability to listen in on our rep’s calls so we can QA them. Cisco’s VOIP solution does not offer that out of the box. I don’t know why, but it doesn’t. We have a company we are looking at, but we want to be sure things work correctly before we order it.
Also today I configured up 4 Cisco 7940 IP phones to use in our NYC office. We need some in case we are overwhelmed with calls on next monday. We should be able to have a total of 5 phones ready to go if needed.
Configuring the Cisco phones is really cool. They are programable via the Call Manager web site, and you can reboot the phone remotely. To get them to work, all you need to do is set the phone to DHCP and have the proper TFTP server config in the scope. It is not bad once you get the hang of it.
I was using my Cisco phone all day to talk to Joe, Justin, & David in our Kingston office.
We are planning a test of our T-1 redundancy on friday. The work to provide roll over and redundancy was completed and we will test it friday to make sure it works for mondays move of voice traffic. We need 3 voice T-1’s to work together so if calls come in and one T-1 is full, they roll over to the next one. This is also helpful in redundancy in case one circuit fails to work. We won’t need all 3 next week, but we will probably use up one and goto a little on the second one.