Data Center

Week Recap

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Meetings took up a large part of the first half of the week. They are necessary but I never like them. I guess I like doing rather than discussing, but discussing (aka planning) is critical before you can do! So I am stuck:(

On thursday a few of us moved a bunch of gear into a new rack in the office. That was interesting. I almost messed my arm up by climbing down from a rack. I was on top trying to clean up some cables and didn’t realize how far the chair actually was. I am getting to old for stuff like that, or better put there are younger people around who could do it instead of me. Thankfully I am ok, and we got all the work done. It wasn’t needed to be an overnight affair so I was happy.

Socially nothing went on thursday. I didn’t get home till after 11. After work was done we went to dinner at this nice diner near the office and then I hopped the train home. It is never fun coming home, changing and going right to bed.

Friday I spent time working on some virtual machines. I needed to get rid of some old test box’s that we had lying around, but we still needed the apps running on them. When I say old I mean like 5 year old desktops hiding under tables in our computer room. I migrated the app’s into a virtual machine running on our GSX server. I feel much better now that things are tidy!

Light Friday

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It wasn’t that we were bored today (i actually got allot done) but it was a “relatively” slow day. Case in point Jayson and I were able to sneak out (not really since my boss knew where we were going) and goto the Outback for lunch. In NYC the Outback does in fact serve lunch.

We also got some time to work on a new cabinet we received for our computer room. I have to say that HP rail kits are the easiest I have ever had to install. I cannot believe that IBM still makes you screw things in and do all this work to get a kit in, but HP you just snap it in and you are done in 3 minutes. Now I have to finalize the cabinet layout before we put more gear in it.

Other than that, today was an uneventful day. And you know what? I don’t mind a few uneventful days every now and then!

Another Overnight

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Last night Jayson and I worked really late. We call this type of work an overnight. We end up going to work a little late, and then working till 2-5AM the next morning. Some work we do can only be done late at night during quiet periods. It is too difficult to sleep really late the day of work like this so I go into the office close to normal time. Basically it is like doing 2 days in one physical day. Due to sleep requirements we end up taking off the following day to catch up on sleep and get back into a normal routine. For me it is getting harder and harder to adjust to normal sleep after work like this.

Today I woke up around 1PM and felt like crap. I did some work remotely and then watched a bit of TV. I was planning on going to John’s for poker. I IM’d him around 3:30 saying I was TBD. I still felt like crap. I went to take a nap, and the next thing you know it is almost midnight. Now I am fed, and wide awake. I hate days like this. Hopefully I can goto sleep sometime soon…

Data Center Move Completed

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Jayson and I finished up our data center move this morning. We have allot of free space that Bob will use up right away. It is also as neat as we are going to get it. We had some interesting moments configuring up the network. We were putting in Gigabit uplinks between all the switches and ran into some problems. The ports were configured weird by Keith. Jayson didn’t understand half the crap that was setup, and neither did i. We cleaned it up and we were good to go.

We also had a problem with one of our servers Promise IDE disk array. this is like the 3rd time we have had trouble with this array, and the incalculable time we have had trouble with these IDE arrays. We spent hours trying to make it work, but it does not seem to have worked. Danny and our DBA staff was working on some alternatives I suggested today while Jay and I got some sleep.

As it stands now that server is still causing problems. Contingency plans are already in the works to replace it:(

The Hard Part

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I thought working nights all week would be the hard part. Who was I kidding? The hard part is now getting back on a normal sleep schedule. I was surprisingly easy to get into a night schedule. Granted being able to sleep from 9AM to 5PM requires some dose of medication. Be it alcohol, Tylenol PM, Nyquil or something stronger. But you do sleep!

I got home today at like 7AM. By the time I unwound a bit it was 8AM, and I called Kai to go over some stuff. I figured hey, he starts work at 8. By the time I was ready for bed it was 9AM. I woke up at like 4:45PM and it felt like 30 minutes had passed. I slept that well. Now of course it is 11PM and I am not tired. I am going to force myself to sleep by the latest 12:30AM.

While being awake and having extra energy I have kept myself busy. I decided I didn’t like how I reorganized my desk, so I reorganized again. I am happy with the new layout, but I am thinking I want to plug an external hard drive into my Powerbook so I can have my iTunes collection on it. I am using the powerbook as my primary machine now a days (and loving it), so I need my tunes with me. The problem is the entire collection takes up half of the hard drive.

I did some cable cleanup behind my desk while I was reorganizing. Man it gets messy and dirty back there. Being the clean freak that I am, I had to do my best to fix things. The cables are still a mess (but better than before) but it is clean.

Data Center Update

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After working all day Saturday, Monday night, and Tuesday night, we are about 90% done with our move to the new cage. We have 3 servers and 3 desktops (don’t ask) to move, along with a core switch and the firewalls. We will do that Thursday night. The new cage looks good. Some of the cable management could be better, but Jayson assures me that it will be cleaned up when we are done. We already started taking apart the old cage. it is/was a mess.

Since Saturday I have done nothing else but deal with this move. Once it is over I will be very happy. The good news is we think we were able to squeeze out even more space savings than we originally thought. that is good news since we are planning on expanding with a bunch of new servers soon.

Sleep

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My sleep habits are all screwed up now that I worked nights two days in a row. Tonight I don’t have to do an overnight. We got allot done yesterday so we didn’t have to go in today. I do have to go back one more time on Thursday night. I got home at 6AM this morning and slept till 2PM. Now it is midnight and I am not tired. I figured I would write a bit and then hopefully sleep would come.

My building’s maintenance crew gave me a new AC unit today. The on in my living room was not cooling. Now I am nice and cold while I sit here and write! When I called they said it would be a while for them to send someone out so I ended up going to the office for a few hours. It was that or goto Starbucks and pay for internet. At work, it is free (for me)!

I went over to Macy’s after work to try and do some shopping, but the lines were really long for the changing room. I decided to try back some other time.

I also went over to the Cingular store. I still think they are an evil company, but I bought a pre-paid SIM card to test out their service. I have been having intermittent reception issues with my T-Mobile phone. So much so that this week I have been using my work Nextel and leaving forwarding calls to that. The pre-paid SIM was cheap, so I will try it for a few days and see if I like it or not.

I also re-organized part of my living room. I had for a while 2 monitors on my desk. They took up allot of space. I had another half of the L of my desk with nothing but piles of crap on it. I cleaned it off, bought a power strip and put my 20″ Apple Cinema display on the other desk. Now I have my powerbook plugged into that and I have more room. I also moved my printer to a shelf out of the way. I still need to clean up my place, but I am lazy since I have been out of it with these weird hours. I keep telling myself I will clean this weekend.

Besides that, I tried to rest allot today. More exciting things this weekend, I hope!

Nights

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I have been working nights all week so I have not been able to write anything. I got home at 5:30AM this morning, and just woke up about an hour ago. The weird work schedule is necessary for allot of reasons, none of them I can discuss here. See the work blog for details. All good things though. I will write more when my head is clear and my living room AC is fully functional!

Data Center Work

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Yesterday I got the call (email actually) that my companies new cage in our Data Center was ready for use. Jayson and I quickly got a Uhal van to move all the new gear from our office up to the new cage so we can stage everything. I ended up doing most of the lifting since Jayson had to stay with the truck. He couldn’t find parking. After dropping everything off at the cage we took the truck back.

Today we (along with Jon) will break out the gear and mount the shelves and rack kits. This will set us up for the server move later next week.

I am not used to being up this early on a weekend. Hopefully I am fully awake for the work:)

Weekly Roundup

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Took a little doing to get back into the routine this week. The week has since flown by. Wednesday was busy preparing for the inevitable colo cage move coming up. Hopefully our provider will be ready with the new cage tomorrow so we can stage things this weekend.

Today was a BBQ in our call center to celebrate the opening of the first floor of the office.

Tomorrow is dealing with the COLO and meeting about our bug tracking system, Bugzilla. Much more going on, but I am tired and will write more this weekend…