Work

3ware vs Promise

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Ok if you are not a tech person you will have no idea what I am talking about, but today I give a new type of IDE RAID card a try. We currently use Promise IDE RAID cards and enclosures for some lower end data storage needs. We don’t run database servers on them, but we do store huge amounts of images and static web pages on them. They perform well so far. We really have not given them a head to head speed test Vs SCSCI RAID. The reviews I read say they are slower but not by that much. My big concern has been swapping drives out if/when they go bad. If that is simple and they are close to the speed of SCSI, I am sold. Why? They are like half the price of SCSI.

We are primarly a windows company but recently we have been doing more and more linux. the servers we are getting that use the promise IDE RAID are having issues with the newer versions of Red Hat. That is a problem with linux. the really new hardware does not work with the really new versions of the OS. Dam read hat is coming out with a new version every 6 months or less.

To solve our problem we are looking at a company called 3ware. They also make IDE RAID cards. Gus said he knows people who like them and run Linux. Since if I don’t listen to him, I get hit I decided to try one out. Well he doesn’t hit me, but he does get my blood pressure up 20 extra points by pulling some sort of prank!

I will have reviews hopefully by tomorrow.

Stuff & Stress

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Have you ever had a bad day? Of course you have. Have you ever had a bad day, but were unable to talk to most people about it? That is today for me. Hectic things going on that I cannot go into. I am bursting at the seams to, but I can’t. It has been a day where I should have been able to give good answers to problems, and was unable to. It was a day where you think you setup something to work well, and then under pressure you find minor errors totally screw up the results you were looking for. Enough self pitty. I am in a highly stressful job. I am dealing. Just some days nothing goes right, and other days things hum perfectly. Today was the former type of day. One thing I keep thinking about is the saying that whatever does not kill you makes you stronger. That may be true, but it is not a consolation prize.

One thing I am realizing is that I keep adding to my list of to do’s and I am not taking things off that list in the same fast pace. Not a good trend. I did get some stuff off my task list before hell broke loose today. I sent out our proposed network diagram to our telecom integrator. They will build our system off that basic model.

I have my Database staff asking for more hard drive space on their development and QA machines. Even though last week they said they probibly didn’t need this space. I need to get money approved for that, and then juggle the new deployment of that hardware. Getting money approved is a chore, but I am beginning to get used to it. Almost lke it. Why you may ask. It sharpens my debate and reasoning skills. If I can explain to my management why we need something, and get them to agree I probibly can sell anything:) Well maybe not, but it is a feat to get the OK to buy stuff at my company. I keeps me honest, and proves the need for anything we do actually purchase.

I showed our CEO the new Thinkpad T40 laptop today. He liked it but had some issues with it. I am going to give it to him for a few days to see if it grows on him. We don’t want to stay with dell.

Vmware & System changes

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So I had this novel idea about VMware. what if I installed windows 2000 pro, or XP as a virtual client. Then put all the dangerous software in that client. That way if Kaza or limewire screwed up my install it would only mess up the virtual client and not my computer. I could have my own downloading system, within my normal system. It sounds good. I am trying it out on my desktop at home. I put windows 2000 pro in a virtual machine. I will see if things work out ok.

Keith had to rebuild Gus’ desktop server yesterday. Not sure what happened to it, but it got fried. We also had some problems with 2 rackable systems servers. They are these really small rack servers with IDE RAID. we got 4 servers in a bundle used for like $800. The worked fine for like 8 months but now we had 2 issues with one box, and 1 issue with another box. We are probibly going to take them out of production.

Our new DBA is kicking ass. He is forcing sweet security changes to our DB design. I think it is great. Besides fixing a lingering problem we have had, it also fixes a mind set. That is more important to me. It gets developers to realize that things are not done for their convience, but for best performance and security of the production systems. If someone is upset about stricter rules in handleing prodction code, there is no debate, they have to deal with it. It is a breath of fresh air for me. Gus has been pushing for this for as long as he has been here. We have seen great strides in this “production is more important that people” pheonominon in the past 3 months. It is no longer me being a pain in the ass to everyone. It is a bunch of us being a pain in the ass to everyone.

Standards, Standards, Standards

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So today and tomorrow we deal with standards. Our hardware standard, the basis for how we buy and configure our Database Servers has been in place for just over a year. I have been getting complaints about no space, and some speed issues from others. I have called the brains together to get what is required for a standard over the next 12 months. That way I can buy them what they want and then tell them to shut up when they complain about it. Well, not exactly. But we need a blue print for how we do things for the next several months.

Also tomorrow I am meeting with our development people (well some of them anyway) to discuss our build standards for web servers. Same concept as hardware standards, but we talk about how to configure the OS on our web box’s. Once done we will refresh our web servers and set them up fresh.

As I left the office yesterday we had a problem with an apache web box we are using for a small project. turns out that this is considered important to our call center management. Now we need to fix the problem, and then take this applicaiton and make it redundant. We probibly will need to put it on 2 linux machines and place them behind our local directors. A local director is a device that splits the load of a web site amount multiple servers. Cool device.

On another front I have tons of outstanding quotes to get approved. Hardware requests just pile up. What is crazy is most of this stuff is not even related to our new office build. This is just normal office stuff that needs to be taken care of.

I haven’t yet found someone to run our new office’s helpdesk. Most applicants are not from the region. We need someone near by. Also most don’t have the skills. People do not read online job postings. They apply for jobs that don’t meat their qualifications at all. It is just a waste of time for everyone.

We spoke with our Project Manager and team for our phone system build out. The hardware is almost all in. We are sending them some network diagrams and stuff. Then we stage the system. I am excited. This will be awsome if it works out well. I think it will. Brand new systems can be designed without having to factor in old problems. We shall see… In the tunnel now. More later.

Home from chicago, back to work

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So I am back home from my chicago visit. I just updated my blog with the entries I wrote while I was out on the road.

CDW was cool. Our sales rep was no different in person than over the phone! I almost walked past him when we were at the meet and great. My blindness shows in situations like that! Dinner was ok. The drinks were free so thus good. They had some tech guy turned comedian also perform. It was actually funny. I never like laughing at geeky humor, but it was funny.

We saw a few booths of items that we will look at once I get back to the office. I found a multi port, com port network device that I need for our data center and our office. We also saw some new headsets we could use when buying for our new call center. What fun, the things we think are cool. Also saw a new HP desktop using AMD chips. I am a fan of AMD, and they are cheap. I am going to look at that closely for our next purchase.

We were bored with allot of the stuff we heard. I can’t stand some conferences. Other parts were good, when you learn about the new tech stuff coming out.

All in all, a productive trip.

We got to the airport really early and caught a early flight. I got home around 4:40pm. Problems at work prevented me from taking a nap. Turns out one of our Development servers had a drive fail. Some people over reacted, but Keith calmed them down. The thing didn’t crash, just make noise that it had a problem. Keith will swap out the bad drive tomorrow with a spare we had on hand. We have a good backup of the data, so no harm done. That is why you build redundancy into things. I only wish we had a hot spare in that box. What can I say, when we built it we were cheap:)

Vendor visit in chicago

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   So Gus didn’t make the flight and ended up on the normal flight he was originally on. Oh well. If I haven’t mentioned it yet we flew out to chicago to visit one of our biggest hardware vendors CDW. They wanted to show off their offices and hawk HP’s warez. We did the whole factory tour, then sat through a propiganda session with a sales guy. Off to dinner and mingle. Then they are supposed to have a comedian. I also get to meet our sales guy. I have spoken to this guy at least once a week for the past year and a half and I have never meet him. Weird. At datastream it was like that. you would speak to people all the time and never meet them. I will fill in how dinner was tomorrow.

Mothers Day

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Mothers day was nice. I went over to my parents house. My sister, brother in law and his family were over. The only no show was mikes sister. We had a good brunch, and played with the baby. it is very funny to see grown ups going all crazy over a baby. Of course I am included in that group of crazy people. I can safely say I do not like it at all when Morgan cries.

We fixed some problems with our Barbados flight. They did stuff to our seats so my sister got all pissed at American Airlines. I actually had inporved seats so I wasn’t pissed.

I also did some more work with VMWare. I got red hat to install fine on my laptop. The only thing now is to install the vmtools onto the red hat partition. That requires some config changes so I am working on getting that done soon. I also need to get the network card working properly with the vmware.

I got up at 4:30am today to catch my flight. I made it. I am writting this blog at 30+ thousand feet. I meet Gus at the airport, but he was flying standby on my flight. That means I don’t know if he actually made the flight. I hope he did. I will walk around and look after the drink cart goes by.

Lots to learn about linux

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Gus is the linux master. Well, he knows allot more than me. That may not make him a master, but he knows his stuff. My red hat server has been serving up web pages really slow for weeks. I had no idea what it was. Gus got into it and found a line of code trying to find a dns server that is not in existence. Once that was fixed, it served up pages nice and fast.

No major plans set for this weekend. I am spending time with mom on sunday. I am going to wing Saturday. I am going to check and see if we are going drinking after work.

I am also going to play with Microsoft office 2003 beta. Howard got it and he says it is stable and nice. My cousin wayne also said the same thing last week. I will give it a try on my laptop. I also want to try out VMware. It looks great. The problem is it is expensive. I am going to see how long the trial is for. I probably would buy it if it works like I think it will.

OK, today is the day we sign the telecom contracts. I have said that allot over the past several weeks, but today is the day. I think we have ironed out all the problems. Now all I need is for Gus to say ok, and put pen to paper. We are starting to slip on the schedule. That is the unspeakable topic though. Of course it is May 9 and it takes 30-45 days for a T-1 to come in and we haven’t ordered 4 of them yet. You do the math. Will we be live on June 6th? The plus side is that construction is just as delayed, actually more so. It feels good not being the reason something is held back from completion.

We had a stupid outage this morning for work. I got woken up by Justin (Help-desk guy) that the call center site was not loading. Turns out that a database job failed taking everything with it. It is back up now, but I need to see what checks we have in place to prevent this. Also why they didn’t work. This is the third outage in 3 weeks related to a release of new code. I am very pissed about this. Gus says he is very disturbed by this. I want to bash people’s heads in at this point. I need to think happy thoughts.

I setup a new application server in our Corporate DMZ. A DMZ for people who don’t know is a place on a network that is isolated from the internal company computers but allow to be “open” to the internet. You make it so you can web browse to it, or ftp, or whatever you need it for. The point is to isolate it from everything else to do this. Well this new box is finally running the mail server I setup. Our QA mail system is now working fine on it. I also setup a small admin website for internal use. It is only one page for now. Also on deck is the Norton Anti-virus setup. This is big. I am also thinking if I need to move our chat server to kingston this can serve as the local chat server. I don’t want to move the chat system though. Probably will need to discuss with Gus on that point.

Keith is slowly working on our Layer 3 switch for our data center. He has the design concepts down. I laid out what I wanted to do, and he seems to be picking stuff up quick.

I get to go on my first buisness trip

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Well, actually I am going on my first business trip for my current company. My last job all I did was go on business trips. I haven’t been on the road for work for over 2 years. This will be a quick trip to Chicago for 2 days next week. Gus & I are getting taken to one of our big vendors for a conference. Unfortunately I have a 7-am flight Monday morning. That is really early. Gus is on a later flight but they said I couldn’t switch.

I still haven’t unpacked from my trip to my cousins from last week. I need to do that before I pack for this trip.

Our CEO is away on vacation in europe for a few weeks. With him goes any chance of getting approval for some hardware I need for our new office build out.

Gus is back today. We need to do something with our voice T-1 contracts outstanding. Not sure what we will do just yet. I also got an email from our Project Manager for our VOIP project. I will call him today and setup a time to meet on friday. Things are shapping up, just not as fast as I like. I move fast on stuff, but I am always held back by something.

I finished moving the QA mail system to the new server. I still need to do the anti-virus stuff on it.

Contracts and interviewing oh my

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Monday was more contracts to look at. I have a 12 page data T-1 contract to look at. AT&T said that their contracts cover all possible options. I can tell, they put fee structures in there for everything. It is crazy.

We did our weekly management meeting. They are not 2+ hours anymore, but some people have to cut out all the crap they talk about. Gus and I only say like 3 things and then move on. We don’t even put half of what we do on the agenda. Some other managers put everything they do, and then speak about every last one of them. I am glad I bring my laptop with me. At least I get some work done. I know it is bad etiquett to bring it, but I haven’t really cared. Sometimes other people bring theirs also. Dan always have me run the daily sales numbers for him so he can see how we are doing for the day.

Tuesday I had 2 interviews. That kept me busy for a while. Keith actually got dressed up for the interviews. It was so funny to see him in a nice shirt and khakis.

Gus is off to indiana with our presendent for a day doing a presentation. he left tuesday afternoon so I didn’t get my weekly update meeting with him. Wow, I sound so offical talking about meetings. it is weird. I still am working on more voice/data contracts for him to go over.

A cool tech thing I actually did tuesday was finish building a new Application server we got. I put a mail server on it and will migrate off of another server we currently are running mail. I also finished configureing a domain trust between 2 Win2000 domains. Now I can slowly migrate people off one of those domains onto the other without loosing security permissions. Still to do on that build out is install Norton antivirus, and deploy the agents. Also need to install the backup exec agents on the servers in that domain. I hope to do that today.