Computer Management

Projects Updates

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Finally put into service our first Windows 2003 Active Directory server. I demoted an old 2000 box and transfered its roles to the new server.

Started redirecting call center users in NYC to our new mail server we are using for our Kingston office. The end goal is to have the entire call center on that mail system. Once I get all the alias’s and accounts done I can just delete the old mail accounts and tell everyone they have a new email address. It is a slow process since I need to edit everyones profile when they are not at work. I did about 10 people in 2 days. this rate it will take me a month to get everyone cut over.

We upgrade our Pix firewalls next tuesday to enable us to use a VPN tunnel to send large amounts of VOIP calls between offices. when I mean large amounts I mean more than the 2-3 we can now. Probably like 20 at a time on a dedicated internet T-1.

Other things going on are the guys in Kingston are working on Cisco Softphone setup’s to allow remote agents for our call center. Or to allow us to use the phones from outside the office on our laptops. Also in the works is the ability to move your phone number between desk phones if you need to.

Friday

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Friday was a good day. Work was crazy since justin isn’t around, but Keith and I got by. We had to move 5 people’s desks to get ready for a new guy starting monday. We got 3 of them done, and will do the rest Monday. Keith got the brunt of the grunt work. I had to deal with some Kingston issues, 2 meetings, admin work, and I had to free up disk space on our main file server. All while trying to build a new desktop for the new hire and help keith with some of the moves. It was a busy day.

Friday night the president of our company had a holiday party at his house in Jersey. I didn’t go. It is a really long trip, and I had other plans. Last year I got stuck setting up a wireless network in his house.

I ended up going to a pretty decent italian restaurant for dinner. It was nice. Didn’t know what to do after dinner, so we ended up bowling of all things. It turned out to be a load of fun.

If I thought I Was Busy Before

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If I thought I was busy at work before, I am in way over my head now. One of the guys on my team left yesterday. We are now short handed. The big problem is the small issues now slowing down getting the bigger projects done.

I have 1 Windows 2003 Server with Active directory done for our nyc office. it is already in production. I need to finish moving stuff off one other server and then move the AD roles to the 2k3 server. Then I can rebuild the other box, and move on in the upgrade cycle.

A major web site for a customer of ours is launching tonight. Thankfully it didn’t require too much time on my teams part, but it ate up resources.

As I mentioned before I am also trying to merge our mail systems for 1 department. I have 2 call centers who are supposed to interact with each other, but they are on 2 different mail systems. We are going to merge our NYC call center people with our Kingston mail system, since the kingston system is newer and it is cheaper to maintain. Then when that is done we will have all our call center people on one mail system and the remainder of the company on another. The good news is the new mail system (Imail 8.0) is awesome. I have been a fan of Imail for years, since like version 5.0 I think. I never used it at work, but have at home or when I hosted my site with someone. So far I am very happy with it.

Windows 2000 SP4

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I finally began upgrading servers at work with SP4 for Windows 2000. it has been out for ages, but I have waited to upgrade. All new servers deployed since September have had it, but I did my first upgrade thanksgiving. Thanksgiving is after all 1 of 4 days that my office is completely closed. I got most of our internal box’s, but have some more to do. We have been fully patched, but just were using SP3. You should be able to just keep applying hot-fix’s and not need to do the SP’s but I don’t think that is a good idea. Eventually you need to apply the latest service packs.

Thankfully everything went well. I also took the time to deploy more machines to our internal windows update system. This will save time for my team since they won’t have to manually patch every machine. That becomes a real pain in the ass after a while.

This entry was written while listening to Bouncing Around The Room from the album “2/28/03 D1 Nassau Coliseum, NY” by Phish

Busy At Work, What Else Is New

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Work this week has been challenging. I got nothing I planned on doing yesterday completed. I was busy fixing other issue that crept up. Kai from our Kingston office was down for a meeting and also to just work for a day out of NY. He never did that before so we wanted to bring him down.

We are in the midst of several major projects. Remote recording of voice calls, creating a beta test for remote agents, move a mail server, upgrade NYC’s domain controllers, evaluate SMS, build a new service domain, and oh yeah we had 4 people get hired in the past week. My team is just a bit busy. Don’t get me wrong, busy is good. Overwhelmed is not. We are currently busy but quickly moving to overwhelmed. Hopefully we can get everything done without a problem.

Updateathon

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I reinstalled the OS on my ThinkPad last week. I was having some weird issues so I felt it was time to do a refresh. I like to do that every few months. Another advantage of the mac. I never felt compelled to do that on my powerbook unless I was upgrading the OS to a newer version.

With my powerbook gone, and both my home computer and work computer’s just receiving new OS’s I don’t have a single machine that is configured with all my stuff on it. My data is backed up on a firewire hard drive I cannot access since I don’t have a mac. My mail is only on my laptop and almost nothing is on my desktop at home.

DNS

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I spent a few hours yesterday trying to clean up my companies DNS servers. I am a perfectionist so I probably spend more time on organizing things like DNS records than I should, but like I said I am a perfectionist.

I have all but 3 domains now using our own DNS servers. When we first started up we used a company’s gear that funded us. I have wanted to move away from them for some time, but just don’t always find the time to work on the project.

New Servers

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I may have mentioned a project I am working on to build the hardware for our new fulfillment system. Our design calls for 3 servers. We finally got the 3rd one in today. One of the first 2 had a bad drive so keith was working on that today, while I was building out the newest one we received. I have to say the serial ATA RAID 5 setup is just as sweet as serial ata mirroring we did on a previous machine.

Hopefully all 3 machines will be built and ready to goto our datacenter on friday. then we can create a domain and finish configuring them.

I also got thrown some security documentation that I have to do. it was a last minute thing that is going to be a pain to write. I am told I do documentation well, but I don’t like doing it all that much.

Automatic Updates

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Tonight we try our second wave of automatic windows updates for desktop computers. We (keith & I) finally got the Microsoft windows update server working. This server replaces Microsoft’s own windows update site for your company. you can pick and choose what updates your desktops get and when. It saves us from downloading patches we have no idea about. It is a great idea. I looked into this service back in August, but had trouble with programing the client machines to auto update. I then didn’t have time to finish the project. A few weeks ago keith took up the research into the auto update server. He did everything I did and then learned out how to program Active Directory to tell computers in the domain to look for the auto update server. We took the existing server I had up and running and made some changes in active directory and now we have an automatic update system. no more running around to each computer for patching security wholes.

Last night we ran a small test. Tonight we do 1 department. If all goes well again, we will do another department tomorrow, and the rest of the NY office next week. So far all looks good. We will know for sure tomorrow morning.

A VMWare World

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I have spoken often about the wonders of VMWare. I will keep doing so. I finally got my desktop at work configured with a larger hard drive and have been busy setting up Virtual Machines. I have several deployment projects that are benefiting from VMWare. I can take 2 physical machines and make them into many virtual machines.

Howard finally started using VMWare with Red Hat 9 on his laptop. It is funny that I am getting him to use it more, when my cousin and howard were the people that got me hooked on the idea of virtual machines in the first place.

I am using VMWare on numerous projects currently. I have a test domain controller running windows 2003. That is a physical server. I then take my desktop and attach servers and client machines running VMWare to it to test all sorts of things. Today I created a sub domain on my test domain using a windows 2000 server virtual machine. I then was able to test destroying active directory without worrying about rebuilding a server. I just saved the Win 2000 virtual machine and I can restore it if I have problems.

I have done the same thing with SMS 2003. I am busy now and cannot work on it so I just backed up the virtual machine I was trying it on. I don’t have to take up a server testing with it. it is just 5 gigs on a hard drive.

I was also able to test some security changes we made to my companies active directory without affecting anyone. I just added a windows XP virtual machine to our domain and ran tests on it. I just restored from backup if I messed up the virtual machine. it is great technology.

Keith and I also used a virtual machine of XP to test windows update services we are deploying. that also saved us from creating ghost images of desktops and tying up several in this test.

My next challenge is getting a working FreeBSD 5.1 workstation as a virtual machine.

Microsoft just announced a new version Virtual PC. I will see if it is anywhere near as good as VMWare.