Telecom

Busy and Sick

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Got one of the 2 circuits we were going to cancel taken care of. our provider is working on canceling the other line. The new bigger circuit for my office is on order now.

Jayson is working on finishing up the hardware for our VMware GSX server. We had issues with the poweredge we bought so we won’t have 4 gigs of ram. We will settle for 3. That means less VM’s we can run. I need to cofigure GSX when I am in the office Friday.

Jay is off next week to goto sell his house. he is going to fix it up and put it back on the market.

I am working to get hardware for our Biztalk 2004 deployment. I need to buy a server for QA and 2 for production. Working out pricing issues now. Hope to have them by next week.

Can’t Get Enough Bandwith

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I just finished the paperwork on getting our office more bandwidth. We currently have 1 T-1 (and its redundant shadow twin). That amount of bandwidth is just not cutting it. We are maxing out our circuit several times a day. With the price drop on bandwidth we just ordered a 4.5 megabit link and are going to drop our redundant pair of T-1’s. Since we don’t have a call center in our office anymore we don’t need the extra redundancy, and the 4.5 meg link is actually cheaper than the 2 redundant T-1’s we currently have.

Save money and triple our bandwidth, that was worth the trade off in redundancy. Since there is such a lag in order time to delivery we won’t see this bandwidth for several weeks. I estimate it up and running by May 1. Sounds like a long time, but it is worth the wait.

Allot To Write About

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I have allot to write about, but for some reason don’t feel that up to writing today. So here will be a quick recap of the weekend.

I continued to throw stuff out of my apartment in anticipation of my move next month.

I am also getting ready to ebay a bunch of tech stuff I have. I realized that allot of my crap is not worth that much anymore used. So it is easier to just keep it and or give it away.

Had dinner with Carrie, and my grandmother tonight. Morgan also! My grandmother was in to visit my cousin who is sick. She took us to dinner. it was actually pleasant. That is not always the case with my grandmother.

Got a hair cut on Saturday. My regular barber wasn’t there. Not sure what his deal was. His father did my hair. Didn’t do a good job. it is ok, but he didn’t listen to me when I gave him instructions. That may be the last time I go to that place since I am moving. I need to find a new place in the city for next time.

We had an issue with one of our Call Manager Servers Saturday that caused it to fail. The second machine in the cluster took over fine, but we had about 15 seconds of down time while that happened. Kai is working on getting a patch for it. I spent allot of Saturday working on the phone system because of that, and other issues.

The plus side is I did some more work on our IVR. I even setup our own for Support, to prove the concept. An IVR for support is overkill but we had extra 800#’s and it shows that they system can work.

This blog entry was written while listening to Machine Head by Bush

Friday Tasks

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Jayson and I went to our data center today to bring up a server we just built. Man a 2U server is more than twice the weight than a 1U. Even though it is only double the size.

I hurt my wrist on a disk array we were mounting. It got stuck under the array as I was (trying to) holding it up. I didn’t realize it hurt until I tried to lift some metal rails later back at our office.

i was successful at creating a phone for the first time on our Avaya switch. I did it by myself. It was not so bad. Lets hope the next time I can figure it out again.

I also began to map out all of our phone ports. Looks like keith never bothered to do that, so I am going and mapping physical office location to the port on the phone switch that that location is hard wired to. I am slowly building a nice DB of everything.

Jayson left early today so he could hang out with his wife gretchen and friends that flew up this weekend to see him. I am catching up with them tomorrow for dinner.

The Magix Is Dead!

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For the first 2 and a half years of its life, my company has used a Merlin Magix phone system to run our call center. It is an ok little phone switch. It was never designed to run a call center, but the price was right when we got it.

As of last monday we finally stopped using the Magix. We transfered our last 800# to our new call center in Kingston NY. After a week of verifying that everything is good, Keith and I finally shut off the old system today. We unplugged all the ports, and pulled the old thing off the wall. Our computer room looks much neater without it.

Now we need to see how much we can get for it and 50 or so phones.

Wrong Numbers

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Someone is beginning to piss me off. Some person keeps calling my cell number thinking it is someone else’s. I think it is just some stupid person not knowing they are making a mistake. The problem is that I got 3 wrong number calls from the same number last night. It is starting to drive me crazy.

There has to be a way to block 1 number from calling you. I have to look into that:)

VOIP Rocks

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I tested our VOIP link between offices today. I was able to get 12 or so people on the phones in our NYC office connecting through a VPN tunnel to our call manager in our Kingston office. I only had 1 complaint about quality. I need to do a test like that a few more times, but the results look promising.

Keith was out sick today, so I was busy with helpdesk issues. I also have to continue to evaluate our monitoring system to make sure we get notified of any server problem. I think we do a decent job of it now, but whenever anything falls through the cracks it is really bad. Also there is always room for improvement.

I had to spend allot of time reconfiguring VOIP phones today to get our test to work. We are compressing calls, so I needed to associate the phones with the compression scheme we are using. I also had to setup the phone extensions for when our customer service rep’s start using them.

Plenty of other things going on, but my head is not focused right now to remember them all. I will write more later this week.

All in all things are good, and that is all that counts!!!

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.

Busy At Work, What Else Is New

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Work this week has been challenging. I got nothing I planned on doing yesterday completed. I was busy fixing other issue that crept up. Kai from our Kingston office was down for a meeting and also to just work for a day out of NY. He never did that before so we wanted to bring him down.

We are in the midst of several major projects. Remote recording of voice calls, creating a beta test for remote agents, move a mail server, upgrade NYC’s domain controllers, evaluate SMS, build a new service domain, and oh yeah we had 4 people get hired in the past week. My team is just a bit busy. Don’t get me wrong, busy is good. Overwhelmed is not. We are currently busy but quickly moving to overwhelmed. Hopefully we can get everything done without a problem.

Other Updates

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Today I ran through some test upgrades to see if a DB upgrade I am going to do tomorrow will work ok. My problem is that I have been unable to truly simulate the current environment so my tests failed. I am working to correct the problem tomorrow.

I am also trying to get a fix for some phone monitoring software we had installed last week. we got this software and it just doesn’t work. thankfully we haven’t paid for it yet.

I got install dates for my new voice T-1 that we are getting. I also got final pricing on new data circuits we need for our VOIP traffic.

Tomorrow will be a late night to run software upgrades at work.