Hardware

The Friday Before a Holiday

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Twas the friday before a holiday and it seemed like no one wanted to work. A holiday weekend is upon us. The office was kind of dead. I got a bunch of work done. We have at least 3 people starting on Tuesday, and another 2 later in the week. James is keeping busy getting the computers ready. He was out the door right after I said he could go home early. Danny on the other hand seemed to not get the concept of getting out early for a holiday. I thought he felt he was going to miss something if he left.

All in all a good week at work. Busy, but good. I need to tackle some hardware design stuff next week. I didn’t want to think about it after the meeting I had on it Thursday. Just too much to digest. Next week will be interesting…

All Consuming Project

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The move downstairs is taking up allot more of my time than I would have liked. I am on my way home now. Kai and Co. will make sure the cubes are finished and the cable work is done right.

Now that the contracts are back, our data center wants to schedule the move of our gear to our new cage. I need to call them tomorrow. Hopefully we can do everything and have ourselves up in the new cage by mid June. Then all we have to worry about is IPCC.

On other notes I am working on getting a DC into VMware, still. I got side tracked since I had to goto Kingston. I will demote one of our DC’s tomorrow and bring it online as a virtual machine.

Still waiting to run the active directory upgrade at our data center. this will enable us to have 2003 domain controllers. This will be helpful for Biztalk 2004.

Storage

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Jayson is pushing an online disk storage system. He is thinking NAS. This will solve a problem we have with one nights tape backup taking so long is that it gets in the way with SQL server db backups for the next day. We just don’t have enough time in the day to run the amount of tape we need. if we backup to a disk array and then to tape weekly we can increase restore time, and backup times. from an engineering standpoint it is a great idea.

We toyed with it last year, but never got to budgeting for it. Now we think we really need it. I have to see if we can get the money for it. Jay is going to do some more research for me and then we will come up with options.

New Server, Almost

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I took the plunge and forked overs some money to build a “decent” server to run my site on at home. I got a tiny desktop case CPU, RAM, & DVD drive for really cheap. I already had a drive for it. I built it today and I am now trying to put linux on it. I am going for Suse 9 Enterprise or Suse 9.3. Not sure what will end up on it just yet. I put Suse Enterprise 9 on before but had problems so I am trying it again.

Right now I am having media issues with both 9.0 and 9.3 so I am not happy. I am still very new to the Linux crazy so I am very frustrated.

Now that I am building this new machine I have a few decisions to make. Do I keep using Typepad, or host my own blog using Moveabletype or WordPress? I like Typepad, but I am not sure if I want to pay to host when my subscription is up when I am hosting my own server. I liked moveabletype as a program but it is a pain to setup. I proved that today with several attempts at configuring it right. I hear WordPress is good, and they “claim” to have a simple install process.

Not sure what I am going to do just yet. I just want to get Linux installed and working right now…

IDE & SATA RAID

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One of our IDE & SATA RAID card manufacturers is telling us we need to run some sort of synchronization utility at least every month to prevent disks from corrupting. We are having an issue where the disks are getting marked bad, when they are in fact fully functional when we format and try to use them again.

This is disturbing to me. I am continuing to feel that this company (maybe the entire technology) is still have baked. We don’t have these issues with newer SCSI drives and controllers.

Oh and the synchronization utility they want us to use took 3 days to run on a disk array with 1tb of data. These guys have got to be kidding…

Crap Desktop Upgrades

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I am going to my sisters place in a bit to take their 5-6 year old P-III 700 and upgrade them to a 3 year old P-4 1.5 or so. Only for my sister would I waste time on upgrading them from really old crap, to just crap. They don’t want to spend the cash on a new machine and they think this will do what they need. I don’t want to argue with them, but if it was anyone else I would not be doing this. So much crap can go wrong with an upgrade like this. lets just hope for none of them to happen.

On the plus side I get to see morgan!

External Hard Drive

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Ever since I upgraded the hard drive in my new HP computer (like a week after I got it last year) I have had 2 160GB hard drives lying on my desk. I haven’t needed the space since I have 2 new 250GB drives in there now. Since I am using my DVR more and more I decided to put the 160’s to use. I got an addonic’s external USB 2 drive enclosure. It is neat. For $40 you can put a normal IDE drive in it and make it a USB 2 drive. For me this is perfect since I have no more internal drive bays on my computer but I have extra USB ports. I will get another one of these enclosures soon now that I know they work as advertised.

Fresh New Circuits

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We just got our new 3700 series Cisco router today. it will be used for our new 4.5 megabit internet connection we are getting for NYC. This replaces our 2 redundant T-1’s. this connection is basically 3 T-1’s plugged into 1 big router. less redundancy, but triple the bandwidth. We figured our corporate office can have some acceptable downtime. Since our uptime stats have been great on our current circuit it seemed like a good gamble. I hope that once this is done I can use my VOIP phone without getting terrible choppiness sometimes.

We hope the circuit goes live in about 1-2 weeks. Verizon will be out tomorrow (had to cancel for some reason today) to do the smartjacks. Like I always say, you cannot have enough bandwidth.

New Servers

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We got 3 new servers this week. G4 HP Proliant box’s. We got one 2U, and 2 1U. They will be for our Biztalk 2004 deployment. We have 1 box for QA and then the other two goto our data center. Jay was building and testing them earlier in the week. Due to issues with our original quote we are way behind schedule. I would like to thank HP for their great process for securing special pricing if you buy in volume. They even admit they have issues with it recently. We hope to finish the build out early next week.

Mac Mini Twins

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Being single + impulse buyer + tax return = new mac mini for Scott. I was at the apple store Monday. Gus may refer to it as his Mecca! I was looking for a bluetooth USB adapter for my Mini. I happened to ask if the Mini’s were in stock. I wanted another one, but I haven’t wanted to wait for it to show up so I haven’t ordered it yet. Stupid logic, but it works for me. The guy at the store said they had the high end one in stock. In a moment of weakness I said I will take it.

Now I use my mini at home almost excessively. I sometimes use my Thinkpad or my HP desktop, but very rarely. The Thinkpad is only for work emergencies. that happens enough to warrant me taking it home every night. The HP is my DVR and not much else these days. I live off of my Mini. That is why I wanted another one. I spend 10 hours a day at work and allot of it is on a computer. hey I am in the Technology field. So I figured dropping a Mini at my desk would be great. I can do allot (but not all) of my work on a mac. And the mini is portable so I can throw it in my bag and take it with me when I need to. The logic worked for me. As I said I had tax return money. So now I have more computer than I can count. Well that is not true. I have 1 PC desktop, 2 mac desktops, and 1 mac laptop. The rest of the computers I discuss are not technically mine. The Thinkpad is the works. But it makes sense if you look at it a certain way. I need a PC at home, and I need a Mac. Another mac for work, and the powerbook for when I travel. Well in my head the logic worked. I know I am crazy. you don’t need to tell me.

So far I am happy with both Mini’s. I should get my 512 meg ram upgrade for the new mini in a day or so. I didn’t want to shell out the outrageous price for the 1gig chip again. With my new camera phone I can take better pictures of the inside of the unit compared to the bad ones I took when we opened my first mini.

Update, I got the 512 Meg ram upgrade. Jayson had the handy putty knives from the last time we did this and had the memory upgraded on this new mini in 20 minutes. I have it sitting on my desk at work. I was able to use it for more than like 80% of the day Friday. I need to find a good open source SSH client for OS X. I am starting to make a list of business software that I could use on the Mac.

I got the new mini to bluetooth sync with my Treo 650 after about 2 minutes of trying. It worked like a charm. So much simpler than my horror with the 3com PCMCIA card with my Thinkpad, and the Xircom bluetooth card that I never really got to work right.