Work

Service Observe And Phone Stuff

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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.

What Do You Do For A Living?

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So what do you do for a living? That is a question I get allot. Most people probably do when meeting new people. For some it is easy, and not so much for others. My brother in law, has it simple. He is a doctor (MD). My mom’s a teacher. Their are more complex answers to those questions, but you get the idea of what they do by that simple statement. Now I have a more difficult answer. I tell people I am a Network Engineer. Sounds good, sort of descriptive. Not really what I do anymore. I have found it is close enough for most purposes. If pressed for more information you have to figure out how much someone knows about computers and technology. For Mike, he is a doctor in emergency medicine. Still very descriptive. Technology jobs still have this stigma of oh, you do that. You must be a computer geek. Now I don’t deny the fact that I am into technology, but it is sort of a bad way to think.

These thoughts come to my mind now, since I am dating, or attempting to do so. That is one of the first topics of conversation. Now you don’t want to talk to a date about computers. Trust me you really don’t. But work is such a big part of someone’s life, especially mine. It is an interesting dilemma.

The next big question is “what does your company do”? Yet again, for me right now it is a difficult question to answer. I have not been able to give a one sentence answer to that question yet, that accurately explains what my company does. We just had a meeting last friday at our presidents house. We discussed that same problem. We got a laugh about it. It is just one of those things that can be difficult to answer, but be a really simple question.

On The Way Home!

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I am done with my 2 days in our Kingston office. Things are very busy up there, but everything is shaping up. I got a lot of issues cleaned up yesterday and today. We still have some things to finish, but we are moving along at what I think is a satisfactory pace.

Justin takes my place up in Kingston tomorrow for the remainder of the week. We are starting to ramp up that office and need people up there to make sure things are done at a quick pace. Justin will also accompany me up in Kingston next week, when we move a large amount of traffic to the new facility.

Joe is doing a good job of keeping things updated. Their is just allot of stuff to do, so I am happy we got a second person for the next two weeks. I hope to have some one up there permanently soon. I am working on that also.

I went back to the hotel last night and went to check my mail on the Treo. I ended up falling asleep till almost 9PM. I woke up and decided to just “officially” goto bed. I did nothing but sleep at that hotel yesterday. I felt a bit better today because of it. Travel takes allot out of you. Even if it is short distance travel. If I am in a hotel it is considered travel for me!

Off On The Road Again Tomorrow

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Tomorrow I am off to Kingston again for 2 days of working up there. It is not that I don’t like the office or the people up there. I just like being near home. Sitting here tonight writing this, I think I have kicked the work travel bug out of my system. Of course I won’t turn down working in barbados or something if the office said they needed to send me there!!!

I am catching the early train up. Hopefully I only have to be there for 2 days. I want to be back for poker Wednesday.

I have grown used to packing extra clothes just in case I end up staying longer than I planned.

Their is just so much to do in both locations, I sometimes wonder if it will all get done? Someone else from work is now reading this blog. Whenever I hear that I get worried, then I realize that I A) don’t care if they read this, and B) would say pretty much all this stuff to people anyway so why should I care if they read it. It is posted on the internet.

Meetings On The Road…

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Friday I went with about 12 others from my company to our President’s house to talk about stuff on our minds. We meet every week, but this week the powers that be decided to take us out of the office. it was a nice change of pace. We talked for a few hours then hung out and had a BBQ. I lost at pool, won at air hockey, and installed a Wifi card on a PC.

We got to play with night vision goggles also. Dean (our president’s) friend who is a next door neighbor is an FBI agent and had a pair of night vision goggles. they were really cool. Gun conversations are also interesting, I don’t talk about them much since I left Baton Rouge.

All in all a good day. I am also vindicated in my opinion of Dan’s driving. Thankfully the return trip I went with Glenn who drives normally.

Two Late Nights In A Row

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I just found out that I need to be around tonight at 1AM for a software release. This will be really fun because I will be up till the same time Wednesday for a hardware release. Needless to say I am not happy about the situation. I hope I am awake tomorrow. I have a meeting filled day from like 10AM through 2PM. Meetings are never fun.

Unfortunately Keith cannot do this hardware swap by himself tomorrow. I don’t think he can mount the gear with one person. if he could I would seriously thinking about letting him.

The Long Reach Of Voice Over IP

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Today was a momentous day. We finally received power supplies for 2 Cisco VOIP phones. With 1 entry into our DHCP scope we turned the phone on and it saw the Cisco Call Manager. Call Manager is like a PBX or phone switch. Within 2 minutes we were making calls to my cell phone to test. It worked great. The only minor issues we have are making calls to different extensions on the same phone system. Small routing issue that we are working through.

The next step is to be able to use our call center software in NYC connecting to the servers in Kingston. We are having some minor issues with that, but we are slowly working through them. If that works we will be able to take calls in two facilities using one phone system. This is big if we have capacity issues in our new space down the road.

I now have a cisco phone at my desk in NYC. I hope to fix all the problems this week. I am very excited about getting this working.

Training For A Call Center

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Yesterday a new class of trainee’s started at our Kingston Call Center. We have 24 customer service reps who will “hopefully” start taking calls full time on 9/22. The class was so big that we had to put the working reps in the training room and the people to be trained sat in the call center. Joe our Tech guy in Kingston is overloaded right now. Justin went up for 2 days to give him a hand. Justin was eager to go up, so it worked out ok. I need to get up there one day next week. I will also need to be there on the 22nd.

Besides the ongoing call center build out I have hardware swap out’s to deal with in our Data Center Thursday morning. Tomorrow will be interesting since it will be a long day.

I just received my first Penguin Computing Server. These guys make cheap linux servers. The joy of it is, I can put Windows OS’s on it without a problem. The Super Micro servers I have been buying for windows will not handle Linux. I have some issues with the hardware, but for the price we will deal with it. A decent server can be had for around $1600. I can get a really cheap one for under a grand. We are actually looking to get some cheap windows box’s and may actually use these guys.

I am still awaiting a heat sync for a Super Micro test server we are testing. I got a trial of a serial ATA server. Actually we had the financial ok to buy it but instead of buying a regular server we got this to test. If we like it, we will keep it. If we don’t like it, we will send it back and get a normal IDE server. Serial ATA looks good, and this machine can do hot swappable drives, where IDE RAID cannot.

I need to also start working on our Exchange 2003 test server. Gus and I want to get one working for the Information Systems team and see if it is easy to admin and troubleshoot. If it is we may want to make a larger scale deployment. The difference this time will be we don’t outsource it and we do it ourselves. In December of 2002 we outsourced our mail and put it on Exchange 2000. It was a horrible failure. Too much latency with accessing exchange over the WAN. We abandoned that option and returned to our original mail provider with just POP/SMTP mail. We have been happy since.

Tired

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The week is finally over. It has been a good week, but the weekend is here. I am yet again tired after a long work week. You may say I had off monday, but the week was still long and full of stressful work. Fun, stressful work yes. Stressful none the less.

I got almost no sleep last night. Got home late and then didn’t sleep very well. I ended up taking 2 Butabital’s (fureset’s) before lunch. It helped but I had waking up with migranes. Now this was 3 in 2 months. Not good. I was tired all day, but I still ended up going out for drinks after work. I needed it. I had a personel issue regarding a rep. I cannot go into details, but never yell at someone. Doing that is bad. I was the one recieving the yelling. It was very stressful. The situation was taken care of, but people have to chill out. That put a damper on an otherwise nice day.

Searvers, Software, And Stuff

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Every day it seems like we need another server to do this or that. I have request for 3 different things right now that I can think of that all will require new server gear. Then when I go ask for the money for the stuff I get the traditional “what do you need that for?” speech from Gus. Or the “you want to spend how much money?” speech. I know he is kidding most of the time but it highlights the tight rope I walk between what we need and not spending too much money.

With that said I need to begin testing an Exchange 2003 server within our Information Systems department. We are attempting to see how difficult it would be to use and administer an exchange server. I think it will be good to use in a small workgroup environment like the IS department, but not for a full company deployment. We will see.

Along with evaluating mail packages I want to find a good LDAP product that will allow me to share 1 address book between two facilities and remote users. We don’t all connect to the same domain, and not everyone is able to access inside servers all the time. I would like our mail system to provide LDAP, but our current provider does not offer it. Looking at alternatives now.

This week has been good because I have been looking at new technologies and software to enhance our infrastructure. Microsoft Operations Manager looks great and we may do a full scale deployment of it. We are locking down users desktops more effectively. I am in the process of deploying a log file analyzing software to digest our web server logs more effectively. The remote KVM system was also killer. Tying everything together into one systems management system will be the tricky part.