e-commerce

Remote Agents And Terminal Server

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While I was awake and not sleeping last night, I thought about my remote agent design issues. Currently we have schematics of different electronic and home appliance parts on CD’s we use to look up stuff. The problem is they take up a huge amount of drive space. We get updates every month that need to be added to the existing data. This is fine when a computer is on our network, we just run the update from our file server. What do you do when you have remote computers over a VPN WAN link trying to get the same update? Pushing out 500 megs to 2 users is possible, but what about 20, or 200? It becomes unfeasible due to bandwidth limitations.

One option is to not give the remote agents this software, but they rely on it. My thoughts then turned to Terminal Services. What if all the updates are on the central server, and users just connected to the server via terminal services. That way I don’t have to worry about anything on the local machine except for an IP address and terminal client working.

This is contingent on our phone control software working with Terminal Services. I believe it does, but an answer to that question is easy enough to get.

The next problem is cisco soft phone. I doubt it would work through terminal services. We may need to go with a physical cisco IP phone at a person’s house. It adds cost per user, but it may be necessary. Also going with a hardware VPN solution is looking better than a software solution. If anything goes wrong with the remote computer we would be responsible to manage it. We cannot troubleshoot software issues like vpn over the phone, and we are not equipped to send someone onsite to fix problems like that.

A hardware VPN device that we can remote into and verify it is working, along with terminal services is looking like a good solution. it is not the cheapest but maybe the most feasible. We would require someone to have their own computer, and all they would need to put on it is terminal client. That takes 5 minutes to setup. Wire up a VPN router from cisco or linksys plug in a phone and they are up and running.

Now all I have to do is sell everyone on the solution and make sure it works from a technical standpoint.

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Work, It Was Hot

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I got allot done at work today. I setup 4 websites. I configured IIS, our Cisco Local Directors, etc. now all I need to do is get the SSL id’s for them. Jayson got cracking on the 3 new servers we just got in. 1 is done, and another is partially done. We also got through a bunch of support tickets. All in all a good day, except for the heat.

We fled the heat to the server / telecom room for allot of the day. it was just too hot, and I couldn’t sit in my office all day knowing AC was 20 feet from me. I still ended up out in the heat for at least half the day.

Most of the office left early to play softball. We stayed and finished up some work. I am not ready to play softball yet.

Check out the Mo-blog. One of our developers, James went out and bought a portable pool. They filled it with water and I got some pictures of people sitting in the office with their feet in the pool. it is really funny. yes it was that hot…

The Site Launch

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Throughout the trip to Foxwoods I was always in touch with the office since they were launching a new website product on friday. It wasn’t that bad since most of my work was done before I left, or else I would not have been able to make the trip.

It only got interesting when the site actually got turned on. Keith was calling me and I was at the blackjack table. I wasn’t going to answer the phone there, and I found out later that it is against the rules to do so. I ended up handing the phone to dari. it was funny to hear her try to explain to keith why I couldn’t take the call.

In the end the site launched. We had our share of small complications, but it went out.

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.

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.

Ongoing Work

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Last night it looks like we got a ton of pages about 1 drive being out of space. Not sure why we didn’t get a low disk warning first. I just tested that dam warning system like a month ago. No one (myself included) woke up to the pages. that is not good.

Justin is out again. He has more dental problems than anyone I know. Keith is coming in late. he did work on our VPN last night. I don’t get him. We discussed the work, but he never asked to take some time off until the last minute. It drives me up the wall when he does that. If I knew that bit of info, I wouldn’t have said ok to the work last night. I needed people this morning since I knew justin was out. I need to teach these guys how to prioritize time. Spending an hour on a minor problem that doesn’t need to get done right away is not worth it if you can be spending that time on something else that people are waiting for results on.

All that being said, today is not starting off very well. At least the Database guys are working on the error we were getting. it doesn’t look like our sites were down, but getting errors is bad.

Yesterday I did more research into using Microsoft Operations Manager for our data-center. I like it, but I also have some issues with it. In our test, I was unable to get historical reports. I also sized the database wrong so I ran out of space. I needed to extend the db. I also don’t know if some of our new internal network security will cause the Operations Manager server to stop receiving data from our production database servers. For now this is all theoretical, but I am trying to hash out a working course of action.

On another project I ordered 2 out of the 3 servers I need for our new MSMQ system. It is a messaging system we are going to use for order processing. I need to order 1 more database server and then I will be done.

I am also trying to find time to work on ISA or a linux proxy server. No time has yet to be found.

Upgrades Complete (Mostly)

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I did my Mailflow upgrade. Keith and I also patched more than 50% of our servers. we will try to get a bunch more done after 12AM when the office officially closes for the day.

i ordered my extra data t-1 for our office finally. we will use it to send VOIP traffic over to our Kingston office. It should take 30 – 45 days to get it up and running.

We spec’ed out a design for our Biztallk deployment. We will be putting a new fulfillment system in place in the next few weeks. We will deploy Biztalk server, MSMQ, and some other neat products. I have concerns because MSMQ needs to be loaded on a domain controller in its 2.0 version that we will be using. We need to move quick so we picked servers to use that we have onsite already. I had to bump 2 other projects to get the gear but both of them are lower priority. We will just buy new gear and earmark it for those projects. We are pretty much standardized on Supermicro for our Windows servers. If I get these 2 new box’s that brings my total of supermicro box’s to 8 we have gotten in the past 6 months. I really like there serial ATA 1U servers. They make a dual xeon version of it that looks fantastic. All for under 3K. We still use compaq for our high end database box’s and anything we need that uses SCSI. We just got a ML380 2 weeks ago, but nothing beats several inexpensive servers that you can get for the price of 1 bigger box.

I also started relying more on ROBOCOPY utility from Microsoft. In addition to regular tape backups I am replicating using robocopy some specific data on some file server to have an online backup also. I also used it for my first web site deployment. We have a large (300 gig) site that I needed to setup on a 2nd server. One of our dev staff setup the IIS site and configured it, and I am robocoping the contents to the new box. if it works we will do it more frequently. We had a plan to do that over the summer, but other projects took precedence.

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.

Queue This

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So the more I work in the technology field, the more I realize what I don’t know. I learned about a totally new type of product last night. Now I need to become an expert in how it is tied into Windows 2000 Active Directory. The product is MSMQ or Microsoft something or other messaging queue. it is really interesting stuff, but I never dealt with it before. This is one of the many new projects I am learning about.

I am knee deep in setup stuff for our new Kingston office. I have the Active Directory model set. Now I have to build it. I ordered the first batch of 25 desktops today. They wont ship till August but we locked the price and model in. We are waiting on some better deals for flat panels before we order them.

Our cable guy’s finally called us back today. Joe is going to kingston on thursday to meet with them and make sure the plan is set and the work begins and finishes on time. I am still waiting for an install date on our long distance T-1’s. We keep getting the run around from our carrier. I am freaking out that the LEC verizon goes on strike in August. And yes, they will strike. both sides of that argument are no where near an agreement. That will get messy.