Data Center

Friday Tasks

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Jayson and I went to our data center today to bring up a server we just built. Man a 2U server is more than twice the weight than a 1U. Even though it is only double the size.

I hurt my wrist on a disk array we were mounting. It got stuck under the array as I was (trying to) holding it up. I didn’t realize it hurt until I tried to lift some metal rails later back at our office.

i was successful at creating a phone for the first time on our Avaya switch. I did it by myself. It was not so bad. Lets hope the next time I can figure it out again.

I also began to map out all of our phone ports. Looks like keith never bothered to do that, so I am going and mapping physical office location to the port on the phone switch that that location is hard wired to. I am slowly building a nice DB of everything.

Jayson left early today so he could hang out with his wife gretchen and friends that flew up this weekend to see him. I am catching up with them tomorrow for dinner.

Tuesday Late Night, Wednesday Work From Home

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Tuesday was a late night for me. I stayed up late to finish adding Backup Exec agents to some servers that could not be brought down until after midnight. I then did some troubleshooting on some other backup issues. The goal was to get a good backup tuesday night. I was able to do so. I finally finished work at like 2/2:30AM.

By the time I got up and dressed Wednesday morning. it was already almost 11AM. It was then that I decided to work from home. Some people like to do that. I always think I like to do that, until I actually do it. News flash, I don’t like working from home. On one hand I do get allot done since less people bother me for stuff. On the other hand it is lonely sitting in an empty apartment working on the computer. If I lived closer to the office I would have been in.

I finished working on some more backup related issues Wednesday. Also worked through an issue with Kai & Jay related to some phone problems. Dan and I also tracked down an AT&T rep to discuss a bill we have issues with.

I also worked on cleaning up some ACL;s on our firewall’s. Most if not all of our restriction problems have now been resolved.

Work Update

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Here is what has been going on at the time sucking void I call work. Kidding. It may be a time sucking void but I wouldn’t be doing anything else…

Fixing our monitoring system. It seems like I am always doing this, but I am spending time tweaking our monitoring system that listens to all our computer systems and pages us when something is wrong.

Keith just finished setting up the VPN link to our Kingston office. Now we have a dedicated link between our offices for just VOIP traffic. We can use an entire T-1 for voice calls. We hope to get 15-20 calls over it. We will test it this week.

We are busy building and configuring new servers. it feels like we are doing this daily. We deployed 2 new box’s this week. Something to QA stuff on, and a new data-warehouse machine.

My mail migration goes slowly since I am busy doing other things. This is not a problem except we are paying for pop accounts on our current provider still when I would like to offload these users to our own hosted mail system. That is the end result. Hopefully when done I will save a few hundred bucks a month on mail hosting.

Gus has been away on vacation and now CES. He returns Wednesday. The rest of our upper management return Monday. No joke it has been quieter without them in the office. it is not them, it is just there is like 10 less people in the office. Back to normal on monday.

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.

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.

The Power Of Multiple People

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Yesterday was the first day in a while that I was the only one around in my department. Keith went off to California, and Justin was in Kingston. I was busy getting the office ready so we can have some people (3-5) be able to take calls using our cisco system in Kingston. I setup the phones and configured the computers to work. Thursday night we tested it with 1 rep. She loved it.

Daniel had to build a new Red Hat 9.0 box because our old secondary name server died. We rushed a new one in its place. We were never down, but I like having backups. He also mounted and brought on line the new ftp server. Now all we need is the second ftp box and we can cut over to the new system.

Otherwise it was a very busy and stressful day. We ran a disaster drill. It worked out ok, but the thursday drill didn’t. We also had a problem with a server running out of disk space, but their was no log entry of the problem.

I didn’t leave work till after 7PM. I get a day of rest and then it is off to Kingston on Sunday.

Two Late Nights In A Row

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I just found out that I need to be around tonight at 1AM for a software release. This will be really fun because I will be up till the same time Wednesday for a hardware release. Needless to say I am not happy about the situation. I hope I am awake tomorrow. I have a meeting filled day from like 10AM through 2PM. Meetings are never fun.

Unfortunately Keith cannot do this hardware swap by himself tomorrow. I don’t think he can mount the gear with one person. if he could I would seriously thinking about letting him.