tech to bring on vacation???

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So I am getting ready to pack for my island vacation. The question is what to pack tech wise. I will bring my mobile phone. It wonít work in Barbados, but it will work in the airport before and after the trip. No charger is needed for it though. I checked. No service provider has a ROAMING agreement down there so no cell phone would work. I would have to get one down there. Not going to do that, so I am out of luck.

I am bringing a laptop so I can get some work done, and more importantly watch some movies on the plane. The question is what laptop do I bring? I can take the work thinkpad. It has a DVD player, and I can play with vmware on it. I can also take my Powerbook. The powerbook also has a dvd player on it, but it also has all my personal files, and I can download and edit the photoís I take on the tirp while I am down there. It will probably be a last minute decision. Not sure what to do just yet.

Besides that I am bringing my Pocket PC just because it is handy to have around, and my digital camera. My sister is bringing theirs, but I want to bring my own anyway.

Cards, cards, cards, and gifts

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I need to get birthday cards for my dad, brother in law, and my cousin Cerina today. Cerinaís birthday party is tomorrow and I donít have a present yet. Not happy about that. Also my dad, and brother in lawís birthdayís are both next week and I need to get something before we go away. I am going to try and do cards before work this morning.

get ready for vacation!

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It is time to wrap up all my outstanding work and take a week off! I am hoping to get everything I need done completed by the end of today. I just got an email with the DID (phone numbers) list for our new office, so one major check box gets filled.

Also to do is get Gus my project plan for Kingston. I did it last night but wanted to wait on giving it to him in case I think of something to add.

I have to make a bunch of calls before I go to keep our vendors on schedule while I am away. I also have to fill out paper work for our Data Center. We are getting another rack in our cage, and I need to fill out the request form. Hopefully it will be done by the time I get back. Stranger things have happened.

Cerina’s birthday

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Went to Cerina’s birthday party. She is my cousin celibrating her first birthday. I went to my cousin Synde & Waynes for the party. I thought more family would be there, but we had a decent turn out. They had tons of friends over. The house was packed. We hit tons of traffic, and it took like 2 hours to get to their house in south jersey. I went with my sister, morgan, and my parrents. My sister’s new jeep is awsome. Morgan slept most of the trip so it was not bad. Any trip when a baby sleeps is a good trip.

Cerina was walking now, compaired with almost walking when I was out to the house in early may. Arielle and merric were both good at the party.

Synde made some cracker chocolate pieces. They are hard to discribe but they are good. it is just butter melted chocolate on a salty cracker. They are SO bad for you, but so good. I got a doggy bag. They rock. I didn’t have cake. I am not a big party cake eater. We did the trip for the day so I got home like 11pm or later, not sure.

I don’t know if my parents can make that trip again. they both have bad backs and the sitting in the car kills them. Surprisingly they are less comfortable in the jeep than they are in my dad’s accord. I guess the honda is comfy.

I couldn’t think of anything creative to give as a gift. Synde said something about a water raft for Cerina but I couldn’t find anything so I got her a gift certificate at gap kids. I never know what to get for little kids. Bigger kids just tell you a list of what they want.

Computer security in the office, I am a hypocrite

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I got an email from my friend Sean today. He is a good friend from college. He does GIS database work out in Las Vegas. I haven’t spoken to him in a while so it was good to here from him. He is online less now a days because they are monitoring web habits and frown on IM use. I of course gave him some tips on getting around the web police. As far as non IT guys go, he is very computer savvy, so I hope he can get on the internet at work without the corporate police getting on his back. Come on sean, IM me. Remember when you are at work, I am home. Gotta love that time difference!

I admit that I am a hypocrite. Things that Sean tells me that his company is doing are things I am either implementing or talking about deploying at my company. Yet I will tell him how to get around the system, while I am forcing it on others! Oddly I don’t seem to care. He is a friend, and I have a job to do!!!

My company is currently looking at proxy server software that will monitor web habits. We also deployed Jabber to all our employee’s. Jabber is an open source standard for IM. We purchased a windows based server from Tipic. Their are plenty of free distributions on linux/unix, but when we did our deployment I was not (still not) a linux expert so we stuck with a windows based product. With jabber we can limit IM access to internal use only. For some of our corporate staff we allow AIM to talk with people outside, but our call center is locked down. I actually love jabber. I think it is awesome and I use it all the time for talking to people in my company, but it is restrictive to some.

So for my friends not working with me I feel compelled to give them advise to get around security blocks a corporate IT staff may impose. For people in my company, I AM the corporate IT police. And yes it is kind of fun to lock stuff down. Not because you screw over people, but because it is a challenge. Restricting access to something always spawns people trying to break your restrictions. That cat and mouse game can be very interesting. Thankfully (or not) the users at my company are not much of a challenge, except for our development staff. And those guys don’t have many restrictions on web use, so they don’t count.

Robocopy works, well sort of

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I tested robocopy across our WAN link today. I need to build into the script a net send command to force a login on the remote server. The machines I am robocopying to/from are on different domains. Other than that the script sent the files just fine. The only problem is that it broke the web site we were testing in the process.

Turns out that currently our sites have connection information to our DB’s built into files in the web folders. If I am syncing these files between multiple servers this information will be different on all of them. If I do a sync now, it will break that file and thus kill the site. Miguel one of our ASP developers is working on a fix for it. We will meet to discuss tomorrow. We also want to see if we have issues with files being in use, and file locks. That is another test we will run. More information after we meet and discuss tomorrow.

FTP concept finalized

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My selection of vsftpd as our FTP server of choice for our new production system is now complete. We will use it for just passing information onto vendors. We will have another one we use for internal use.

The next step of this project is to configure RSYNC. I am looking into that now. I hope to have some information before I go on vacation, but work is piling up so I am not sure.

I need to coordinate with Keith to verify the configuration for the Local Director’s we will use to load balance the FTP site is almost ready.

Floor plans and other work related stuff

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I saw the final blue prints for our new kingston office. It looks nice. I am waiting for the CAD of the blue prints so I can import into Visio and manipulate it. It will take me tons of time, but I enjoy doing it. I just have to find the time to do it.

Gus is also getting a new laptop. We both just got IBM Thinkpad T30’s in march, but we need to get someone a laptop and he wants a T40. As with any company, the laptops move down hill once you buy them. I have no problem with that, since I take advantage of that corporate phenomenon when I get the chance.

Other flavors of linux

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I am a newbie to linux, even if I have “looked” at it for almost 2 years. I have not done much with it but install it to look at. Well that all changed recently when I was tasked to actually “do” stuff with it. So in the past year I have built a DNS server. it just slaves zones from a windows box, but it is a start. I have built an apache server, and am playing with FTP now. I have done this all with different versions of the Red Hat distribution of linux. I have used version 6 – 9. Since I am new I want to stick with one distribution, and at work we will continue to use Red Hat, but I wanted to try something different.

I downloaded last night the mandrake 9.1 version of linux. I want to put it on a desktop and play with it. I also might put it in vmware and see if it is any good. I don’t want to use it as a server or anything, but to use as a desktop for a while may be cool. I want to see what they do similar and different to red hat. I will let you know.

This may be successful or it may fail terribly like my attempt to install BSD 5.0.