Is The Fleet In?

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I was walking around midtown Manhattan today. Around 42 to 57st and 7th ave. For some reason I saw a ton of Navy and Marine’s in uniform. Not sure why. is the fleet in? Two groups of them were doing interviews for camera crews. it was really weird seeing them all around. Another group was gathered around the “holding area” near MTV. That is all I can call it. it is a police barricaded area where teens usually stand and wait to see if they get on camera outside the MTV studio.

Bizarre day in NYC.

UPDATE: I found out at dinner tonight that it is in fact fleet week in NYC. that explains allot for me about the sailor guy’s in the city.

Office 2004 For the Mac

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I have actually done it. I went out and bought Office for the Mac. Usually I refuse to buy Office unless it comes with a computer or unless work puts it on a machine. I wanted it for my mac though. That presented a problem since this version of office just came out, and I wanted it. It isn’t a work expense, so I had to shell out the $$$. I await going home to install it. Reviews to follow. It better have been worth the money.

Apartment Hunting Continues

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I went apartment hunting again today. So far no keepers, but I found two neighborhoods that I like. I was looking in the high 50’s near Central Park. I thought it would be expensive but it was in my price range. The buildings are older, but I found out an important fact. Older buildings equal bigger apartments. That is a trade off I may be willing to make.

One building I went to looked not so great. the other one was really cool looking. old but cool. I always wanted modern, but I am learning that equals small and expensive. What to do?

The location is great. Right off the N, R, W, or 1, 2, 3, 9 trains. that means I can get anywhere quick. Including work.

Another apartment I looked at was in a decent building that was 8 minutes walking distance from my office. It was a great location, but it was very small. so small that I wasn’t sure if my bed would fit nicely in the bedroom.

I am looking again next week. I will take a half day off one day and see a bunch of apartments. Hopefully I will find something and make final arrangements.

Road Trip, But Not A Fun One

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I went to Kingston Wednesday. I came back from Kingston Wednesday. That sum’s up my day Wednesday.

Not sure when I will do that again. The train was delayed both ways due to track work. That is the second time in a row that happened. I think this may be a summer project or something. I don’t want to deal with that again.

Kai is on vacation in St. Thomas, so I went up to meet with some electricians about some new construction work we are planning. I also wanted to give Brian a hand. I don’t want the guy to be too overworked while Kai is away. I ended up not doing too much work with him. Stuff in NYC occupied allot of my time. From problems with our new fulfillment FTP system that was going live, to VLAN issues with users. I did get some work done on a new computer build (we got a new model desktop in) but I am no where near completion.

I got or thought I was getting a migraine in the afternoon right when I was getting on the train to go home. I took 2 butabitol’s on the train and felt better. I also slept or at least rested comfortably for 30-40 minutes on the train because of them (or so I think).

Network Problem Fixed

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I have spoken about our potential network issue with a file server. Last night we decided to move the old and new file servers over to a different switch. Jayson this morning moved both servers to our core switch. He then began to try and copy files back and forth between machines exactly like we were doing before. Where we got errors before, the files transfered normally. It looks like it was either the port on the switch, or the switch itself. My fear is that another fiber module went bad. I hope it is on the 24 port rack switch and not on our Core.

We are going to test copying files to another server that is connected to the 24 port switch in question. That will help us narrow down our area of concern.

Migration’s And Other Work

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Sunday I spent most of the day working. I focused my time on two things that would never get done if I was in the office. I finished updating and compiling a database of every employee, their email addres, and what email groups they are on. I also decided to join that db with one I was making with every employee’s phone numbers. It went from an email and seperate phone db, to a Employee contact db of sorts. I still have a separate db for the Defined phone systems ports and their corresponding floor ports in NYC. That took most of the day Friday to get information on.

Next on my list of to do’s was to migrate more data to our new file server. We were quickly running out of space on our old one so we got a new disk array on another server. I am moving all the data off the old one, so I can rebuild it and clean it up. Then I can put some data back on the original box, and distribute our files between the two file servers.

Since our DFS(MIcrosoft Distributed File System) share was on the original box that I want to get rid of, I had to create a new DFS share on another box. Then I pointed all our alias’ back to the original server. I then updated the login scripts for everyone to map to the new DFS share.

Once that was done I replicated all package (where we keep our install files to applications we use), and group (team shares that people use to colaberate with) directories to the new server. Once the group shares were mirrored, I went one by one and changed the alias’ in the DFS to point to the new server. I still have one or two shares going to the old box because I had some questions I still needed answered.

Now I have two of the 4 major shares moved off the old server. The next two are the most time intensive to move. Users home directories and the roaming profile shares. Each of those have to be modified in active directory so it takes time to move users. It is easy to copy the data, but hard to move 60 users or so. That project will be next week, maybe.

jayson also moved most applicatons off of another app server. We want to rebuild it so we can put Project 2003 server on it. We have to upgrade that box to Windows 2003 server first. Jay got Norton AV, and Ghost off of it. I moved most of Whatsup, but I need to verify I got everything before we blow the old box away. I hope to get that started early this week. Gus has been asking about project server.

Cari Night

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The local bar we like to goto after work has a special deal it does. They publish a months worth of names. One name per day. If your name matches the name they have on a specific day, and you show up you get free drinks for the night. They give you a special cup and you can get beer on tap and well drinks for free.

Friday was Cari night, so our Cari at work had us all come out and drink with her. It was a good time. Jeff, Dave, and Nick meet me out. They are friends from my first tech job. They work across the street, but we don’t always get a chance to get together. It was a nice night. I drank a bit. Recently I have been feeling the effects of alcohol allot quicker than I am used to. I have always been a light weight, but I haven’t been this bad since college.

I cut out relatively early since I had to take the rail road home. I can’t wait till I am in the city.

Hanging Out

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Saturday night I got together with Rich, and we went over to Alison’s. They never meet before so it was good to get that over with. We went to Chillis for dinner. I like that place, but don’t go that often. Then we went to Jillian’s. Alison beat both rich and I at air hockey. I didn’t mind. At least she beat him! We hung out there for a while. It was fun. Alison likes that place. The only problem is they have a limited amount of games, unless you spend allot more and go bowling, drink, or play pool.

It was an early night. I needed to catch up on my sleep…

VPN Changes, Man I Am Out Of Practice

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I really need to brush up on my firewall rules knowledge. It took me 20 minutes to figure out how to modify a rule. Once I realized how it was setup it was trivial to fix, but that initial learning curve to remember how it was originally configured is the hard part.

When things settle down I need to sit in front of the Cisco simulator software we got and play with some ideas I have regarding new changes I want to make on our system.

Robocopy Is Nice

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I have to move entire directory tree’s from one server to another. I have to do this with keeping the NT security on the tree’s intact. We are talking about hundreds of gigs of data. I also want to copy it once, and then every day replicate only the changes we made that day out to the new server. I want to do this until I am ready to cut over to the new box completely. How do I do it, robocopy. It is a nifty tool in the Windows 2000, & 2003 resource kit.

i just wrote a batch file and put it as a scheduled task every night. it works exactly as advertised. I cut over 1 of the 6 directory tree’s I needed to last night. I will work on more this weekend if I can.