Computer Management

Surprisingly Keeping Time Can be Difficult Sometimes

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Recently there was some communication snafu of some kind at work.  No damage was done but it highlighed the point that people don’t always take into account that we work on a global team.  You can’t just say something happened today at 6.  What day? 6AM or PM?  What time zone are we talking about?  Those are all the questions that come to mind when you make a generic statement like that.  After that my boss suggested people set their computer clocks to UTC.  If you don’t know UTC is basically the renamed version of GMT.  Almost everyone dealing with global locations from the military to most major corporations keep time in UTC.  Otherwise scheduling is a nightmare.  Servers, and other devices are already keeping time in UTC, so my bosses suggestion was that we set our local computers time to UTC.  He offered a way you could setup outlook to display two time zones as well so you could see your calendar in local time as well as keep UTC time.  Both were good ideas.  When I used Outlook on Windows I actually did use the two time zone option but apparently that isn’t available on the Mac version of Outlook.

I thought setting your computer clock to UTC was a good idea but would cause other issues when trying to keep time out of work.  The idea did remind me that I had a clock app that i could run and keep in my menu bar that would list out multiple time zones.  Not quite the same thing but it is very useful.  What I ended up doing instead was set my watch to UTC.  I forgot that I had the option to have two time zones on my watch.  The dial hands can display normal local time and I can have the digital display show UTC time.  That minor realization has already paid off a lot when coordinating calls this week durring the big storm.

I have apps on my iPhone and iPad that also help me with world clock calculations.  I do use them often, but instead of having to do the time zone math, thinking in UTC is a big help.  I have written a bit in the past about keeping time in a global team.  I am writing again because of this minor adjustment to using UTC on my watch had a pretty big impact and I am always amazed at something so simple as keeping time actually can be very difficult sometimes.

 

UTC on my watch

Work using UTC for everything

Scheduling meeting and events accross time zones

Naming Schemes

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I am in the technology field. I think about stuff that not many other people might. Take for example naming schemes for your computers. Until recently most people only had one or two at home and probably had generic names for their stuff. I have worked in environments with hundreds of servers and other devices. Dealing with numbers like that you think about how to name things. For me that got me thinking about how I name all the deices at home.

At Partsearch in the beginning Gus twisted my arm to name stuff with some sort of meaning and avoid a utilitarian scheme. As a history major I opted for naming things for WWII naval ships. Our web servers were battleships. Our database servers were air craft carriers. Our production database servers were all US Carriers involved in Midway. you get the picture. That decision was universally disliked. I was almost pretty happy that everyone wasn’t happy since in the end Gus just gave up and let me name everything with a more formalized structure that I wanted all along.

Before the experience at Partsearch coming up with a standard like that I named my computers at home each as a planet in the solar system. My desktop was always Mars, my server was Saturn. Back then I only had two computers at home (typically) but if i had more i always followed that standard.

After dealing with thinking up a standard I read about how different people did it and I changed what I name stuff at home. I started using names of space shuttles and then generally any space capsule name NASA has used. My main laptop has been Endeavour for years. I have had Atlantis (still do) and Discovery for a while as servers or other extra boxes I have had sitting around. My main desktop was Odyssey for years, now it is Aurora.

I write about this topic now because after I got M a Macbook I have had to deviate from that structure a bit since she gets to name her own machine. It is funny to see how other tech people I know take great care in how they name their equipment and then how non tech people don’t think anything about it. To me this topic was funny to think about.

A Release in Progress

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I am eagerly waiting for one of the guys on my team to finish a software release on one of the applications my team supports. They have been working on it almost all day. I don’t have anything really to do with the release again until tomorrow morning but I know I won’t sleep right until I hear that everything went OK. I am hoping I get that nice all OK email in the next 90 minutes! Fingers crossed.

Busy Day

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Today was one of the two busiest days of the year for the company i work for. That ment i had to be up at work really early last night and work through the night. I got to the office at 9PM or so and worked to 10AM. It was very hectic because we had allot of executives watching everything as well as a few “minor” issues that kept people busy. Over all it was an interesting night and even with our issues it was apparently a successful day.

Last night i went and signed the lease to my new apartment so i am finally squared away with my living situation.

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Looking Forward

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I wanted to write a bit about some of the cool new projects i am working on at my new job. I am not going to go into great detail but it is something.

One of the biggest things i am doing is working on a plan to move an existing self hosted data center to a Co-Location facility. We just need more space. Thankfully instead of physically moving all of our gear we are looking at getting an all new setup built out and retire most of the old gear. The timing works out perfectly for us so we are giving it a try. We will be moving some stuff, but not a whole lot. Another thing we are trying to do is make this data center site the model (for us at least) for Virtualization. We are going to build out as much if not everything with the exception of SQL server as Virtual Machines running on VMware’s Virtual Infrastructure 3. If all goes according to plan it will be really cool setup. The TCO will also be allot less than doing it physically, it will be quicker to build out and deploy, and it will consume allot less power! The way i think about it is if we get a request for new servers to be build we just see how much Virtual capacity we have and just provision a new machine. If we don’t have extra space, we just purchase an additional node and more SAN storage and add to our VI3 cluster. The goal is to stay far enough ahead in available capacity (minus the N+1 for redundancy) that we always can accommodate even the largest provisioning requests. I can’t wait to see how this turns out! It will be interesting.

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Novell Zen

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I am not new to Novell’s Zen product suite. I used Zen about 10 years ago at one of my first technology jobs. Looking back I would consider myself to have been closed minded about technology. I was all about Microsoft OS’s and discounted Novell’s NDS. That was difficult for me since at the time I worked for a company who used Novell, and Microsoft was just gaining a footing in the network department. My first real promotion was when I got taken off the help-desk and given the task of dealing with our growing NT environment. As a side aspect of my job I was to head up any special projects that came up. I know that the special projects aspect was just my boss Jeff wanting to be able to get me involved in anything he wanted to put me on. I was one of a few people who he liked to use to just get stuff done quickly.

I bring all this up because one of the first projects I got involved with was Novell Zen. When I was on the helpdesk I got involved in desktop image building, and then projects related to installing applications. I remember spending countless nights with a team of 10 people running around floor after floor upgrading software. I swore there was a better way. One day I was complaining to someone in our network dept and they where like “yeah we have something that would speed that up”. They where talking about ZEN, or Zero Effort Networking. At the time it was a new application from Novell that we owned, but no one wanted to deal with it. My big mouth got me in charge of looking into using it. If after all I had an issue with how we deployed apps, why didn’t I try this out and see if it would work. I remember that most people looked at me funny when I talked about using it. Everyone was skeptical, including myself. But the potential was huge. I ended up leaving that company before we could roll out every application with ZEN, but we had gotten to a few of them, and the fundamentals where down.

The next job I went to ended up having their own packaging system that the put together from an off the shelf app. When you are a group at IBM Global Services you can do such things. The project I was on was a fantastic example of automated application deployment, but I am getting off topic a bit.

In the end after Global Services I really didn’t get to play with any software deployment tools again until recently. The jobs I took for a while where not desktop management related, or where too small of an environment for them. Where I am now has grown enormously since when I started. A few years ago we kicked around using Microsoft SMS, but it never got out of the testing phase. I just wouldn’t do what we wanted. We always talked about how awesome ZEN was, but we thought that you needed a Novell network to run it, and we where all Windows so we never gave it much thought.

That was until last year. My friend Joe who is a big into Novell software said you can get ZEN to work just fine with a windows environment. Our interest was peaked. It wasn’t until Scott (another Scott, not me) started that we had the kick in the ass to look at ZEN. he had some experience with it and finally convinced us to seriously look at it. That was earlier this year. I am amazed at the potential of this application. We are in the middle of rolling out client desktops with ZEN and the Novell Application Launcher. Most of the products we use are packaged, and we are working on the rest of them. What is amazing is that we have eDirectory (Novell’s version of Active Directory, or shall I say AD is Microsoft’s version of Novell eDirectory since Novell has had their directory services around for years before Microsoft’s) getting all its information out of our 2003 domain and it really does work!

As I said we are in the middle of a ZEN deployment at one of our offices. it coincides with a new hardware roll out so it makes life easy to enable all new machines to use ZEN. Next up is doing the same roll out in our larger office. We have only cracked the surface with ZEN. Right now we are using the imaging function that works great. We have the remote control feature setup but as of yet I am not sure if we have actually used it on anyone. That makes supporting people between two offices nice since we can have support staff in either office help just about anyone if they have ZEN configured. We also have the packaging part of ZEN down pretty well. That of course was the driving force to use the product in the first place.

Next up is finishing re-deploying desktops and laptops everywhere in the company using ZEN. Then it is on to inventory control and more frequent updates (allot more) of the software suite. Now that we can package and quickly update images we can make changes faster with less down time. it is amazing stuff. I must sound like a Novell poster child? I sing the praises of products that work. Now it wasn’t all sunshine. We had our setbacks, and it took allot longer than we had planned to get as far as we have, but it DOES WORK!!!

It is weird going from mocking Novell, to being a person looking at other products they have going, hey this stuff may be just what I was looking for. And on the flip side I have come to question allot of Microsoft’s moves recently. Not all of them, but it says allot that I am writing this entry on a Macbook Pro, and I find myself looking at linux based applications more and more.

The moral of this entry (yes there is a moral to this) is that I shouldn’t mock any technology because one day it may be just what you need!

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Projects

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We officially are lease holders in our new office building. Everything was signed and executed Friday. That was interesting because technically we took occupancy of the floor on Thursday. Dan, and I walked over today to get the first keys for us.

I am still dealing with issues with the LEC regarding our phone circuits. We missed every date they gave us, but hopefully we will be ok if they make up time on the second phase of everything.

Our migration of users in our call center is progressing, but not as fast as I would have hoped. The staff up there claim that they have ironed out the issues with the new computer builds and will complete the first major milestone by Wednesday. I am not sure if I believe that assessment but I hope they do finish by then. If they do we will be in halfway decent shape to complete the project by June 30.

I worked all day with Jayson and Scott on Sunday to get ZEN up and running. We made progress but not as much as I originally thought we would. That setup is still ongoing but we still have allot of work to do on it. More updates soon.

Problem Solving Day

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Today was hectic. The morning was spent updating project plans for all the big projects I have going on this quarter. I spent a while doing that and still have more to do. Working with project plans always seem like a never ending task.

I went over some technical policies with my boss, and then began work on a server migration. I actually get to do some technical work on this move. Mainly because almost everyone else is busy and I really need to get the project moving along. We are trying to migrate our data in one office onto a new larger file server. I wrote a few robocopy scripts to sync the data off of our old file servers to the new one. The files are coping since this morning.

I also worked on some fault tolerance concepts regarding our file servers using Windows Distributed File Server (DFS). I was able to setup a replica of the DFS share we use for file sharing. Next I looked at modifying our login scripts to map to the DFS root in Active Directory. That helps if the server with the DFS root fails we can use an alternate one already setup in AD. I also looked at a bunch of other ideas along those same lines. It was very productive.

In the afternoon I had to deal with last minute changes to some security rules in order to complete a project. In the end we found a way to make everyone happy, but it took some time, and a bunch of network design explanations.

I got home a bit late, I ordered food. I was just too lazy to make dinner. Now I can’t believe it is almost 10:30.

Stuff

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I had to deal with fixing contracts for our cage upgrade. Bob finally signed off on them at like 5pm and I faxed them back to our provider. Now we wait for a completion date.

I also worked on moving AD (active directory) roles around on our servers. This will enable me decommission a server and move it into a virtual machine. We have an old Dell 42xx series server that is just taking up space. It barely runs as it is, so it is a good idea to make it a virtual machine and free up precious rack space. Yup, still loving VMware!

Thursday night I stayed late moving print servers, and FMSO roles around. The testing of the log-on scripts with the printer changes took longer than I hoped so I didn’t get home till like 8:30PM.

Danny was worried about disaster recovery issues with moving more gear to virtual machines. I downloaded the white papers on the subject from vmware and will read them on the train to Kingston Monday. I am off to upstate for 2 days for furniture construction.

Call Center Day

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Today I went to Kingston. I had to meet the construction guys for an update. The work is coming along and should be done ahead of schedule. The cable guys still need to come and do their work, and the furniture needs to be setup but it is going along smoothly, so far.

I got an update on the new deployment method they are going to use for desktops. They are going to use RIS from Microsoft. For me seeing RIS actually working in a beta group was nice since I asked about doing this over a year ago.

Took Kai to lunch. I need to work on his review this week. it is late since I was sick this month.

The Kingston trips are always busy, but I never feel productive. I am beginning to think that the feeling of not “really” doing anything is because I am not getting what I want to get done, but helping out or doing stuff for other people.