Life, Kids, Technology & that move to another continent
I finally broke down and bought Roxio Toast Titanium 7 today. I really wanted some of the advanced features it offered over the plain old burning of disks of the Apple finder. I am now able to take MPEG-2 files I DVR and back them up onto DVD’s. Not just as a file, but playable dvd’s in any normal player. My digital archiving and clean up continues. I probably should clean my apartment, but physical cleaning is less interesting!
Technorati Tags: dvd
Today was hectic. The morning was spent updating project plans for all the big projects I have going on this quarter. I spent a while doing that and still have more to do. Working with project plans always seem like a never ending task.
I went over some technical policies with my boss, and then began work on a server migration. I actually get to do some technical work on this move. Mainly because almost everyone else is busy and I really need to get the project moving along. We are trying to migrate our data in one office onto a new larger file server. I wrote a few robocopy scripts to sync the data off of our old file servers to the new one. The files are coping since this morning.
I also worked on some fault tolerance concepts regarding our file servers using Windows Distributed File Server (DFS). I was able to setup a replica of the DFS share we use for file sharing. Next I looked at modifying our login scripts to map to the DFS root in Active Directory. That helps if the server with the DFS root fails we can use an alternate one already setup in AD. I also looked at a bunch of other ideas along those same lines. It was very productive.
In the afternoon I had to deal with last minute changes to some security rules in order to complete a project. In the end we found a way to make everyone happy, but it took some time, and a bunch of network design explanations.
I got home a bit late, I ordered food. I was just too lazy to make dinner. Now I can’t believe it is almost 10:30.
I was busy yesterday and today. I just don’t think I can write about it here. All good things, but busy things.
On a topic I can discuss I started reading bits from O’Reilly’s RT Essentials. I already have some big changes I want to make to how we use Request Tracker. I have always been a huge fan of using this system. Reading what little I have of the book has got me thinking of enhancements we can make to our ticketing system. I like the fact that the changes I want to make will allow for better metrics of what we do, and help us isolate recurring issues. Now all I have to do is get everyone else like the tool and not just use it!
Technorati Tags: sysadmin, request tracker
Today was the first day back from a 4 day weekend. It always sucks getting back into the routine. To make the day even more fun, I had a bunch of meetings planned. Thankfully a few of them got canceled so the day wasn’t so bad. I got caught up on some work, but then got side tracked by some systems issues that took up most of the afternoon. I hate issues that you cannot find the true root cause. The fix or what people call a fix is not really a fix but a putting the problem off for another day. Can’t really go into details, the symptoms go away, but the problem is still out there somewhere:(
I just noticed that VMWare has a free public community of VM’s. You can build and publish VM’s of free OS’s on the VMNT. I already downloaded several to play with. They are already added to my growing collection of OS VM’s. I think this is a great idea. The first VM I want to look at is the Asterisk PBX VM. I have wanted to setup one up for a while, but haven’t had time to deal with it. This may be worth a look.
More little (and free) mac apps that I am trying. Playing with Growl. it is a simple unified notification system for multiple mac apps. If it is as cool as what I have seen so far it is a nifty notification engine for several apps I already use. if it is not, it can be an annoying pop up window. So far it is good. Actually half the reason I am posting this now is to see what Growl does when I post using Ecto.
Today I decided to do some Spring Fall cleaning. I did both physical and virtual cleaning. I moved around some components and moved a piece of furniture. I am trying to move my computer gear into a place where I have easy access to it, but it doesn’t make my living room look like crap. I pulled out a huge pile of wires that I don’t need anymore. or I hope I don’t need them, but everything seems to be working without them so far.
What started the whole day of cleanup was my powerbook not performing as well as it used to. I have put allot of crap on it, and tried some stuff out that I probably should not have put on my main computer, but I did anyway. I had been pondering wiping it and reinstalling everything for over a month. I was going to do it over the long weekend next week, but I woke up this morning and felt daring. I backed everything up and took the plunge. The majority of the rebuild didn’t take anywhere near as long as I thought. In under like 2 hours I had most of the main software I use on the computer, and I was well on my way to getting all my custom settings back. I know I will be customizing everything for a few weeks but the majority of what I use is back up.
While the powerbook was rebuilding I rearranged the furniture and pulled the cable. I also went to best buy and bought myself a wireless mouse & keyboard for my DVR computer. I also got a 4 port USB PCI card for the machine since I ran out of ports. I put that together (in 15 min thankfully) and my TV setup is basically done.
Feeling even more daring now that I moved the DVR functions to a dedicated computer I decided to wipe my Presario desktop and put a fresh copy of Windows XP on it. I am in the middle of the updateathon of windows patches now.
Once I am done with getting Windows on the Presario I won’t be putting any programs on it except for VMWare Workstation. My goal is to put all applications in a virtual machine. that way I can easily remove or revert back to old setups. I am trying that at the office also. In theory it is a sound idea. I will let you know how it goes in a month or so.
While working on something today (i honestly can’t remember what), I got side tracked. I am so happy I did. I have been slowly playing with the unix shell and ports for my mac. Today I found a bunch of cool (and free) tools that make life and my job much easier. I am so loving the power of this Powerbook!
First I found Xutils‘ RDP Menu program. it lets me launch multiple windows remote desktop connections at a time. Microsoft should make that work out of the box, but at least 3rd party developers are doing it.
Rawr-jour is a cool utility that lets you browse all the Rendezvous Bonjour networking. it is really cool. If found it really easy to mount volumes on other mac’s.
The 2 products listed above are by far my favorite of the bunch, but I also found 2 SSH & Telnet connection managers that both seem really cool. Saves my lazy ass from typing in all those switch and firewall host names when I want to connect to them. I also found a random password generator, but I honestly think the one I have on my XP machine is much better. The difference is the mac one I have was free and I actually paid for the Windows based password generator.
At work I am deploying a growing number of servers for both production use and development & testing. One of the things we are doing is paying more attention to replicating our production environment at every step of the development and deployment environments. That means allot more servers. How much is allot? We added 25% more gear enterprise wide in the month of August. We have been busy, and we are not yet done. I have filled one computer room at a facility and we are bringing online another at that location sooner than originally planned. We also moved into a larger cage at our data center earlier this summer. Then we added cabinets to the new cage to accommodate the larger growth. In yet another office we added a cabinet, and are working on beefing up the power in the room to accommodate yet more gear. Then we need to look at more HVAC. I never had to deal with ancillary issues such as not having enough power to run gear. 5 years ago I would never have thought I would be in a situation like this. It is very interesting to me to look at how many rack U’s a server takes up when quoting them out and determining what to buy based on the cost of a 2 vs 4U server and how much it would cost to just add another cabinet if you got the bigger gear. As a plain old engineer I would just recommend buy this server because it did the job. In my current position I need to look at the entire picture.
The next few months will bring another burst of server sprawl. One of the things we are looking at is the cost of buying hardware for every server role we need to fill, or the cost to do the same amount of computing power in virtual machines. I must sound like a broken record talking about one of my favorite software companies, VMWare. Our GSX server has served us well, and is a great proof of concept to show how we can expand the use of VM’s. I don’t think we will deploy VM’s en-mass at our data center to do production work, but we have plenty of other uses for the technology elsewhere that makes looking into GSX or ESX server a viable alternative to buying more gear.
To me it boils down to 2 factors. 1 is of course cost. How much does it cost us to buy and deploy a dozen servers, power them, get KVM’s, and rack space for them, vs purchasing hardware for a VM server (or 2) that can handle the same amount of work load.
The 2nd factor is ease of use. How quickly can we get build a physical server for use? Restore it from a preset level of configuration for use in dev and qa? How fast can we buy and deploy hardware when a need comes up for a new server? The same questions apply for virtual machines.
I am a bit biased. I want to virtual machines. The flexibility they give you is amazing. I also know that I have SLA’s to keep, and costs to consider. So if the per server (or server instance) costs are too high we can’t do it. For now I spoke with my boss late this week to identify what applications need homes in what environments. The next step is to crunch the numbers to get all of our options. The VMware user groups have been helpful in figuring out realistically how many VM’s you can get per GSX and ESX server. More news as the project unfolds.
This week I actually am working on a technical project, not just managing them. I built a test environment to put up a windows 2003 terminal server. I used VMware’s GSX server to do it. I was testing what ports i would need to open up if i wanted to access a terminal server via the TSWeb client Microsoft gives you. Turns out even if the web server and the terminal server are the same machine you have to open up the RDP port on your firewall anyway. That wasn’t the answer i wanted to hear, so i am looking into Citrix to see if i can use their product and only open up port 80? Waiting to hear back from them.