Monitoring

Nagios

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Rob has gotten allot done with Nagios. Hopefully by the end of the week he should have basic system monitoring (up and down) plus disk space checking on all gear at our data center. Once that is done we can roll out more locations as well as add functionality. He is doing great with it so far. I know Danny wanted to work on the project but he is busy with other issues. I also know Danny would have done a great job on the project, but when he works on stuff like this it seems like it takes him forever to complete stuff. Rob is able to churn out product allot faster. For a time sensitive project like this I am happy with the quick response.

Hopefully this program works out better than our old whatsup system. I can’t wait till the end of the week.

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New Technologies

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We have been really busy recently. Normal day to day work has been keeping some other projects on hold. For one is our replacement of some servers in our data center.

Other projects include trying to clean up our notification system. I need a day or two of just doing that, and I cannot find the time.

Jayson, Kai, and I also have several “new technologies” that we want to try out and see if we can use them for the office. Many of them we think would be great, but are months if not a year or so away from seeing the light of day. Because the lead time may be so long, we don’t actually look at some of this stuff. We need to because that is how we advance our office. I want to find time to make sure we all can test what we think will be helpful. On that list we have sharepoint portal services for an intranet site, Novel eDirectory for a possible Active Directory replacement, ZEN Works to use to deploy software, SMS for the same possible reasons, several Suse based projects, and more.

Projects

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I am now short handed in NYC. Ironically I fill a slot in one location a slot opens up in another locoation. The hunt is on for a new support guy. Until that happens allot of projects are being put on hold. Or at least their completion date is on hold. Yesterday’s workload was not bad, but it was the calm before the storm.

I finally got my server to build the new FTP system. That is on hold until I can find the time to work on it.

Our upgrade to the notification system is on hold since I won’t have time to do the documentation or the work on it for the short term. The list goes on and on.

This blog entry was written while listening to Bed of roses from the album “Keep The Faith” by Bon Jovi

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.

Projects Going On

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We are still working on our monitoring phone call system. The company that makes the software thinks they have an idea of what is wrong. I should have more information today. I always love buying stuff that just does not work!

I think I finally am motivated to look into Proxy server software. Too many things are going on that I say if we had a proxy server we could figure this out, or we could prevent this. It is a pain to know a tool will work, but you just don’t have the time to set it up.

I found a flaw in the Windows 2000 Pro VMWare image I am using. I built it when I was learning about VMWare so I made the partition size too small. When I try to download large files to it, I get out of disk space warnings. I need to build a new one today. Howard also is trying to get a Red Hat 9.0 VMWare image. I found one I did that works, but I need to see if I configured it properly.

I want to do a VMWare image of Free BSD 5.1 also. I am not sure what to call the OS installs in VMWare. I guess an “image” of a disk is a close enough description of what it is.

Service Observe And Phone Stuff

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Today I dealt with finalizing a solution for “service observe” in our new call center. We want the ability to listen in on our rep’s calls so we can QA them. Cisco’s VOIP solution does not offer that out of the box. I don’t know why, but it doesn’t. We have a company we are looking at, but we want to be sure things work correctly before we order it.

Also today I configured up 4 Cisco 7940 IP phones to use in our NYC office. We need some in case we are overwhelmed with calls on next monday. We should be able to have a total of 5 phones ready to go if needed.

Configuring the Cisco phones is really cool. They are programable via the Call Manager web site, and you can reboot the phone remotely. To get them to work, all you need to do is set the phone to DHCP and have the proper TFTP server config in the scope. It is not bad once you get the hang of it.

I was using my Cisco phone all day to talk to Joe, Justin, & David in our Kingston office.

We are planning a test of our T-1 redundancy on friday. The work to provide roll over and redundancy was completed and we will test it friday to make sure it works for mondays move of voice traffic. We need 3 voice T-1’s to work together so if calls come in and one T-1 is full, they roll over to the next one. This is also helpful in redundancy in case one circuit fails to work. We won’t need all 3 next week, but we will probably use up one and goto a little on the second one.

The Cool Side Of Network Administration

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Today I played with, I mean setup some cool new tools for our network. Joe finally got up our Avocent Switchview IP. It allows us to securely view the console of remote machines hooked up to our KVM. It was cool and very helpful to look at the bios screen on a server as we rebooted it 150 miles away.

Another cool tool we are looking at deploying is Microsofts Operations Manger, or MOM. I don’t like the name. Any software called mom gets me worried. It also makes me think about Microsoft Bob. MOM is actually interesting. It is not as nice a network monitor as Whatsup Gold, but it is a good windows tool to keep tabs on the health of a windows server. Whatsup and Mom are complementary in what they do. I can even have MOM send SNMP traps to a system like Whatsup. Of course doing that is easier said than done.

Next up is an automated Symantec Ghost deployment scheme. To be able to click on a button and update a desktop computer image would be fantastic. I thought we should have a system like that when we reached 50 desktop users. We are well beyond that and we have nothing in place yet. Windows 2003 Server also has other options you can use to do remote deployment and software package updates. I have never tried anything with 2000 Server, but I hear that the 2003 implementation is much better. Now I just need to find the time to do a test.