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I Survived My First Day Back

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Well, I am tired and things were hectic for a while but I survived my first day back after being out for what felt like a long time. Keith was out sick today. Whatever I had is going around. Justin left early because he felt like crap also. I was left catching up on everything I missed since monday.

I fixed some call center issues. Did some sysadmin work that I don’t normally do. AKA tapes, and updating software versions for some applications we use. I don’t like having to do that all the time. Others are supposed to, but I do like doing it so I keep up on what is happening on my network. I learned that updating IPL’s (software we use to search for stuff) is still not hard, but you need to verify that it works before everyone can use it. I also learned that our new SDLT tape drive is still very cool, but very slow in loading and spitting out tapes.

I also configured Office 2003 Pro to autoinstall with paramiters I set. It is nice. Now if we upgrade (we can thanks to software assurance from Microsoft) I can easliy deploy it to my desktops. The real reason I was playing with the configuration was to get outlook 2003 to work with Exchange 2003 over HTTPS. Not there yet, but I am getting familure with the tools I need to do it correctly.

A bunch of people went out to No Idea for drinks after work. I went and had a coke. I was not ready to resume drinking after being so sick. I saw David P, and Jeff from my Y&R days. We were all pissed at each other since we work around the corner from one and other and I never see either of them. I really do want to see them, so I am trying to setup lunch with Jeff next week.

I am tired and going home. I caught the 7:29PM train out of Penn and hope to get lucky and catch a cab without waiting too long at the train station. It is hit or miss with the car service company, so we shall see.

My plan is to rest this weekend and be normal for next week.

Training For A Call Center

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Yesterday a new class of trainee’s started at our Kingston Call Center. We have 24 customer service reps who will “hopefully” start taking calls full time on 9/22. The class was so big that we had to put the working reps in the training room and the people to be trained sat in the call center. Joe our Tech guy in Kingston is overloaded right now. Justin went up for 2 days to give him a hand. Justin was eager to go up, so it worked out ok. I need to get up there one day next week. I will also need to be there on the 22nd.

Besides the ongoing call center build out I have hardware swap out’s to deal with in our Data Center Thursday morning. Tomorrow will be interesting since it will be a long day.

I just received my first Penguin Computing Server. These guys make cheap linux servers. The joy of it is, I can put Windows OS’s on it without a problem. The Super Micro servers I have been buying for windows will not handle Linux. I have some issues with the hardware, but for the price we will deal with it. A decent server can be had for around $1600. I can get a really cheap one for under a grand. We are actually looking to get some cheap windows box’s and may actually use these guys.

I am still awaiting a heat sync for a Super Micro test server we are testing. I got a trial of a serial ATA server. Actually we had the financial ok to buy it but instead of buying a regular server we got this to test. If we like it, we will keep it. If we don’t like it, we will send it back and get a normal IDE server. Serial ATA looks good, and this machine can do hot swappable drives, where IDE RAID cannot.

I need to also start working on our Exchange 2003 test server. Gus and I want to get one working for the Information Systems team and see if it is easy to admin and troubleshoot. If it is we may want to make a larger scale deployment. The difference this time will be we don’t outsource it and we do it ourselves. In December of 2002 we outsourced our mail and put it on Exchange 2000. It was a horrible failure. Too much latency with accessing exchange over the WAN. We abandoned that option and returned to our original mail provider with just POP/SMTP mail. We have been happy since.