Database

WSUS In Action

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Now that is a really bad acronym. Bad names aside, Microsoft’s Windows Server Update Services is actually a great little tool. I have bashed MSFT recently (and rightfully so on some topic’s) but this product actually works. The older SUS (server update services) was horrible. This new tool solves many of the older ones shortcomings. I can tell one system to update a patch and then deploy it to hundreds of machines at once, or smaller groups I predefine. I can have a desktop test group have patches first to make sure they work ok, and then tell the system to deploy to other machines. I can see what machines need what patch, SP, etc. I can also see errors on patch installs.

Now the I have said WSUS is a great product, I have to ask why it took so many years to get admin’s such a tool? Windows update has been around for years. This is the Windows update that System Admin’s have needed/wanted for years. I could have really used this as far back as 2001 when worms were coming out requiring frequent desktop visits.

Now can I hope for SMS to become easier to configure and deploy to work alongside WSUS? Then we would really be in business.

Can you tell I am happy about a WSUS deployment I ran this weekend? No more sleepless nights worrying about patch deployment. Well I actually didn’t sleep well Friday after I authorized the patches, but it really had nothing to do with WSUS, so I won’t blame it for that!

Late Night Postponed

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The late night I had scheduled tonight has been delayed. I am not sorry about it. I hate staying up till 1am only to start working. Our DB staff needed more time to ensure that our swap of servers we were planning went off without any problems.

With this late night on hold, I can possibly move up my other late night I had scheduled for Thursday/Friday. I am checking with Kai to make sure he can do the work early. We need to upgrade a switch in Kingston and also we want to do some rewiring. that requires us to work at night.

Also by doing the work tomorrow night, I can be in the office friday. Gus is going on vacation Friday so he would rather me be around. Schedule juggling is abound today…

Other Updates

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Today I ran through some test upgrades to see if a DB upgrade I am going to do tomorrow will work ok. My problem is that I have been unable to truly simulate the current environment so my tests failed. I am working to correct the problem tomorrow.

I am also trying to get a fix for some phone monitoring software we had installed last week. we got this software and it just doesn’t work. thankfully we haven’t paid for it yet.

I got install dates for my new voice T-1 that we are getting. I also got final pricing on new data circuits we need for our VOIP traffic.

Tomorrow will be a late night to run software upgrades at work.

Old Gear & New Gear

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I just got a new server in. We are building a Data Warehouse running on SQL 2000. We built one to demo and everyone liked it we have been using it for 4 months on a desktop with allot of hard drive space. The “server” finally showed its desktop limitations, so we are upgrading it to a Dual Xeon 2.4 Ghz server. We are doing IDE RAID, and threw in 2 gigs of ram. For just around 2K it is a nice little box. If you don’t need SCSI you can get server gear cheap now a days. Our dumb-ass vendor forgot to ship us a CD-ROM / Floppy Drive so I have the box open on the floor of my office with a desktop CD Drive and Floppy drive plugged in trying to get Windows 2000 installed. We have been buying Windows 2003 Server since it came out, but for most applications we are just downgrading to Windows 2000 Server. So far today I had no luck getting the OS to install. I think the USB floppy drive I used wasn’t working correctly. I need to cannibalize a floppy drive or buy one for $12 or whatever they are going for these days.

We have some older desktops that we were using as Red Hat web servers that we consolidated to one box. That means I have 2 box’s to use for testing and such. I am trying to demo Exchange 2003 on one and put Windows NT 4.0 Terminal Server Edition on the other. Terminal server will not boot off the dam CD from MSDN. The boot disks we have for it wont work either. I am continuing to work on that. I may give up on NT 4.0 and try 2000 server in application mode. I don’t need it for more than 30 days so I should have no problem with the demo mode it makes you use if you don’t have a key code.

As for Exchange 2003, we are looking to see if it is something we may want to move to. For maybe just the Technology department or for the company as a whole. Howard said good things about Outlook 2003 over HTTP. He said it was fast. I am going to look at how Idealab! did their deployment and maybe segment some users onto Exchange for a trial. Not sure yet.

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.