Web/Tech

Standards, Standards, Standards

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So today and tomorrow we deal with standards. Our hardware standard, the basis for how we buy and configure our Database Servers has been in place for just over a year. I have been getting complaints about no space, and some speed issues from others. I have called the brains together to get what is required for a standard over the next 12 months. That way I can buy them what they want and then tell them to shut up when they complain about it. Well, not exactly. But we need a blue print for how we do things for the next several months.

Also tomorrow I am meeting with our development people (well some of them anyway) to discuss our build standards for web servers. Same concept as hardware standards, but we talk about how to configure the OS on our web box’s. Once done we will refresh our web servers and set them up fresh.

As I left the office yesterday we had a problem with an apache web box we are using for a small project. turns out that this is considered important to our call center management. Now we need to fix the problem, and then take this applicaiton and make it redundant. We probibly will need to put it on 2 linux machines and place them behind our local directors. A local director is a device that splits the load of a web site amount multiple servers. Cool device.

On another front I have tons of outstanding quotes to get approved. Hardware requests just pile up. What is crazy is most of this stuff is not even related to our new office build. This is just normal office stuff that needs to be taken care of.

I haven’t yet found someone to run our new office’s helpdesk. Most applicants are not from the region. We need someone near by. Also most don’t have the skills. People do not read online job postings. They apply for jobs that don’t meat their qualifications at all. It is just a waste of time for everyone.

We spoke with our Project Manager and team for our phone system build out. The hardware is almost all in. We are sending them some network diagrams and stuff. Then we stage the system. I am excited. This will be awsome if it works out well. I think it will. Brand new systems can be designed without having to factor in old problems. We shall see… In the tunnel now. More later.

Mothers Day

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Mothers day was nice. I went over to my parents house. My sister, brother in law and his family were over. The only no show was mikes sister. We had a good brunch, and played with the baby. it is very funny to see grown ups going all crazy over a baby. Of course I am included in that group of crazy people. I can safely say I do not like it at all when Morgan cries.

We fixed some problems with our Barbados flight. They did stuff to our seats so my sister got all pissed at American Airlines. I actually had inporved seats so I wasn’t pissed.

I also did some more work with VMWare. I got red hat to install fine on my laptop. The only thing now is to install the vmtools onto the red hat partition. That requires some config changes so I am working on getting that done soon. I also need to get the network card working properly with the vmware.

I got up at 4:30am today to catch my flight. I made it. I am writting this blog at 30+ thousand feet. I meet Gus at the airport, but he was flying standby on my flight. That means I don’t know if he actually made the flight. I hope he did. I will walk around and look after the drink cart goes by.

Lazy Saturday’s

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I am being lazy today. I need to get a mothers day gift for my mom, but that is all I have on my agenda today. I slept late, and I am just hanging out now. My idea of laying low is very geeky. I am installing VMware 4 workstation on my desktop computer. I want to get red hat 9 on it so I can use windows xp and red hat on the same machine. If it works it will be awesome. Right now it is installing red hat.

My mom instructed me that she wants some pocket book or something. I will give her money and she can go get it for herself. That way I don’t have to get the wrong thing. I was also instructed to get flowers. I just love the surprise involved in this day.

Since Gus fixed my linux box I now have a choice. Should I leave my site on Red Hat or move it back to Windows? As of right now I have a copy on both. My friend jayson is letting me use his box to host my site, and I still have a copy on my Red Hat server. I am thinking I am going to leave the blog on red hat and have the rest of the site on windows. That way I don’t have to mess with taking the front page extensions out of the site. I was trying to deal with that for a few weeks and so far have gotten nowhere. I just don’t have the time. For now I will leave everything in both places. Unfortunately I don’t have the photo site up at all during this transition. it is 800+ megs and I don’t want to deal with it right now.

I have been following the apple music store since it was announced last week. I have a mac. I like it allot. I also find I use iTunes over winamp 99% of the time nowadays. I also went out a few months ago and got an ipod. That also kicks ass. So I am in a position to use this new music service. 99 cents is not bad for a song. I am still unsure if it is worth it. I saw an entire album I want to maybe buy and see if the service is any good. Limewire and the gnutella clients, and kaza are tempting. I am on the fence right now. The file format is supposed to be better, but I still like MP3’s. I was not sold on Microsoft’s windows media format, and now I am skeptical of this new AAC stuff. What is weird is that Microsoft comes across as more evil big company like, and Apple is the underdog hip company. In fact they are probably both just as evil. Right now for work I of course an clearly a Microsoft guy, but for home I am a apple guy. All this rambling boils down to eventually will buy stuff on this music service. If anything I want to know if I am missing out on something really good, or just saving my money.

Lots to learn about linux

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Gus is the linux master. Well, he knows allot more than me. That may not make him a master, but he knows his stuff. My red hat server has been serving up web pages really slow for weeks. I had no idea what it was. Gus got into it and found a line of code trying to find a dns server that is not in existence. Once that was fixed, it served up pages nice and fast.

No major plans set for this weekend. I am spending time with mom on sunday. I am going to wing Saturday. I am going to check and see if we are going drinking after work.

I am also going to play with Microsoft office 2003 beta. Howard got it and he says it is stable and nice. My cousin wayne also said the same thing last week. I will give it a try on my laptop. I also want to try out VMware. It looks great. The problem is it is expensive. I am going to see how long the trial is for. I probably would buy it if it works like I think it will.

OK, today is the day we sign the telecom contracts. I have said that allot over the past several weeks, but today is the day. I think we have ironed out all the problems. Now all I need is for Gus to say ok, and put pen to paper. We are starting to slip on the schedule. That is the unspeakable topic though. Of course it is May 9 and it takes 30-45 days for a T-1 to come in and we haven’t ordered 4 of them yet. You do the math. Will we be live on June 6th? The plus side is that construction is just as delayed, actually more so. It feels good not being the reason something is held back from completion.

We had a stupid outage this morning for work. I got woken up by Justin (Help-desk guy) that the call center site was not loading. Turns out that a database job failed taking everything with it. It is back up now, but I need to see what checks we have in place to prevent this. Also why they didn’t work. This is the third outage in 3 weeks related to a release of new code. I am very pissed about this. Gus says he is very disturbed by this. I want to bash people’s heads in at this point. I need to think happy thoughts.

I setup a new application server in our Corporate DMZ. A DMZ for people who don’t know is a place on a network that is isolated from the internal company computers but allow to be “open” to the internet. You make it so you can web browse to it, or ftp, or whatever you need it for. The point is to isolate it from everything else to do this. Well this new box is finally running the mail server I setup. Our QA mail system is now working fine on it. I also setup a small admin website for internal use. It is only one page for now. Also on deck is the Norton Anti-virus setup. This is big. I am also thinking if I need to move our chat server to kingston this can serve as the local chat server. I don’t want to move the chat system though. Probably will need to discuss with Gus on that point.

Keith is slowly working on our Layer 3 switch for our data center. He has the design concepts down. I laid out what I wanted to do, and he seems to be picking stuff up quick.

VoIP Day T-Minus 0.5

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Completed work today without a stroke. This deal making is stressful. Up until now I have been very vague at what sort of hardware deal I am talking about. My company runs a call center. We are opening a new call center in upstate New York since our current office is at capacity. We have been shopping around since like January for a solution that will work for us. We needed a phone system, network gear (switches, routers, firewalls) and a software solution that will run the call flow for the call center. We wanted to do this with as few vendors as possible. In addition to the above listed items we also need server, desktops, laptops, cabling for the floor (that is not done by itself:), setup and testing of the gear, etc.

Because there was so much stuff we looked at no fewer than 6 vendors to do this for us. Each offered a variety of options. We narrowed down the call center software package that we will use to 2 products. this we did early on. we had a new product produced by Cisco, and the current one we use by a company called zeacom. We built our configuration around either of these products. Now months later we are almost at the final choice. We have narrowed down the playing field from Avaya magix or difinidy PBX switches. We looked at NEC VoIP switches, and also a few lower end systems that we didn’t like. Now we are down to the wire. We have 2 vendors we like, one more than the other. I can’t say specifics because things are not done yet.

In a nutshell that is what has been going on as far back as december 2002. I have a background in data networks. That being said I am a fan of the Cisco hardware. It is Cisco, support is good. They make (or buy companies that make) good hardware. I work for people that are VERY cost aware. Being the best does not fly with these people. We have to justify what we spend. At first it drove me crazy. It still does, but I appreciate it, and it is now a challenge to do everything we want and spend small amounts doing it. As much as working a deal sucks in my opinion (i hate sales people), it is nice to shave off $17,000 off a quote in 20 minutes of a phone conversation.

We meet tomorrow to finalize and hopefully sign contracts. I await final paperwork tonight. I just hope all we asked for is in writing for tomorrow. This is the biggest decision I have ever made for a company. Yes, I am nervous. I think we thought it through and are making the correct decision. It was a collaborative effort. Keith, Gus, & I reading up on the technology. Gus working the deal. I hammered out the design and worked the deal a bit. But even after that, you still are nervous until you take that first call, and that 100,000 call…

Once this is done I can focus on actually building what up until now has only been a concept written on my white board in my office. That and quotes piled 3 feet high on my desk.

The big remaining obstacle is lease terms. We don’t want to pay tons of money cash to pay for all this equipment now. Being a relatively new company we need to work on getting good terms. That is ongoing but I don’t want it to affect our deal.

OK, stressing still. I just want this to be over. As I write this I got emails with some revised numbers that I don’t like. Working on correcting. Dam sales guys…

VoIP Day T-Minus 1

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This year my company is trying out a softball leagure. It is a place where people with no athletic skill get together and compete in softball games with other out of shape people at other companies. Generally I am told this is done while consuming large amounts of alcohol. I got arm twisted into joining the team. I don’t like softball, and I am not very good at it. We will see how many games I actually make. Especially since we are in the middle of prepairing a new office. We got our tee shirts yesterday. I don’t even know if it will fit me, but I got the number I wanted. Lucky #3. I still have to fill out the release form to play, but don’t tell paula that or she will kill me. Guys from work went out yesterday and hit some balls at the batting cages. Today is their first official game. I am still working on hardware quotes so I don’t know if I will make it.

T-minus 1 day for our hardware decisions for the new office. We decided that papers need signitures by friday on our telecom purchases. We need to order T-1’s, and get a hardware intergrator picked. We are narrowing down things now, and hopefully will be putting the finishing touches deals friday. Of course we have said this before and things have slipped. This time feels different. I will know tomorrow.

I spent almost all day yesterday dealing with planning for kingston. We also had our weekly technology staff meetings. Those are always interesting.

I got some nice unexpected words from David yesterday. Dave is our call center manager, and an all around good guy. After our meeting with our CEO on our project plan he took me aside and said he was very impressed with how I know and explain correctly what I do to people. He was like he does not think that about most people. I was very touched. Dave is a hard guy to please, and to get those words from him was a welcome surprise. That goes to show you that I cannot read people, since I thought I fumbled a bit durring our planning meeting, but according to him it was well done. He said he has seen our CEO rip people appart for not having answers, but I got him to go along with almost all our proposals. Feels good, now all I have to do is make things actually happen.

On another note as I said in an earlier post this week, we were having problems with some database transfers throughout the night that killed our internet connection. Well, it is still happening. We are nowhere near close to stopping it in my opinion. Sometimes I get the felling that some people could not navigate themself’s out of a paper bag. Those are probibly the same people that would over engineer a wheel if you know what I mean?

Well I am train tunnel bound so I will close this entry out. Hopefully today brings most of these deals to a close, but I am not sure just yet.

MRTG never lies

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As you may know or guessed by these posts I actually work in the technology field. More specifically I deal with network & server operations for my company. Because we do that we monitor lots and lots of things on our systems. Anywhere from network traffic to temperature of equipment, to performance counters. This gives us an idea of what is going on when we are not watching the systems. Some of this is manual (stuff gets logged but to understand what is going on we need to look at it) and some things are automated (something is not working we get paged about it). That being said late this morning I took a look at our network monitoring pages for the weekend. I was surprised to see huge utilization between two of our sites. More specifically a database server in one site is sending data to two servers in another site. We use MRTG to watch bandwidth. It is a free linux tool. It is great. I for one am just getting into linux, but stuff like MRTG gets me wanting to learn more. So I bring the problem to everyone’s attention. Now here is the problem, half the people dealing with our database servers are saying nothing is going on at the time we see a problem. The other half agrees something is wrong but not sure what. Turns out, oh yeah we run some stuff late at night and an anomaly happened to cause it to send out 600 meg files and not 20 meg files, or something like that. So some of these same fun guys are saying that nothing is going on, but our T-1 pipe is flooded for 4 hours with traffic because some servers are trying to transfer well over a gig of data.

The moral of this story is that tools like MRTG don’t lie. We knew (well, Gus, Keith and I knew) from the first second we saw this what was causing the problem. We just didn’t know why it was happening. If it wasn’t for some sherlockian tactics from the man “Gus” we would be shooting in the dark. Never doubt the tools you use to figure out problems. When you doubt their ability it is time to get new tools, or test them. MRTG has not failed us yet, but we still have skeptics claiming “everything is ok”. Wake up and smell the coffee. Or wake up and drink some coffee to stay awake.

This whole problem boils down to a sherlock holmes type mystery. That is how I think of it. You have a problem, and you have to logically deduce what it is, and why it happens. Don’t ignore the obvious. Coming up with a complicated explanation as to why something is going on is stupid when a simple one fits the same criteria. There is a term for that, that I cannot spell so I won’t mention it here. I sometimes think that is all I really do when it comes to fixing problems. I try to use deductive reasoning. Probably why I like sherlock holmes so much.

This blog may seem like a rant, but it really is not. it is to say pay attention to the obvious, and think things through. Some people forget to do that, or just never think.

In other work news, we are still working to get a deal for voice service in our new facility. Dealing with telecom people is a nightmare. I thought dealing with routers was hard. And I remember when I thought programing a switch was a daunting task. Boy was I naive.

I spent the entire day dealing with telecom quotes or the above mentioned bandwidth issues. What is crazy is I know we have tons more in monitoring to deploy and watch. Right now we are finding tons of stuff. I wonder what we are letting slip through the cracks? Maybe nothing, but you never know.

I am left work at like 7pm tonight so I won’t get home till like 8pm. I need to make dinner, and relax a bit. today was very stressful day.

Frontpage site fried!

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While trying to relay traffic from my apache server to my IIS server I caused IIS to stop responding. It probably just needs a reboot. I also realized that by pulling out pages from a front-page web and putting them into an apache server causes behind the scenes problems. Even after stripping out lots of frontpage code, more html remains that tries to reference the frontpage extensions. I knew that frontpage wrote bad html, but not this bad. It is not a big problem on my main site. I am working on my photo site now. That is a bigger problem. I have tons of pages, and hundreds of megs of images. I decided to do it from scratch even though I have a backup of the site. That backup has all the frontpage code. I am now generating page templates out of iphoto. Each category is exported separately and all I need to do is tie all the pages together into a cohesive site, and I have a new photo site. Sounds easy, but it will take some time.

While I am making these changes, I took it upon myself to clean up my photo album images. While doing this I realized that I have been taking less pictures over time, not more. I thought with a digital camera I would be taking more, but I guess I have not had much travel or stuff to take shots of.

I also need to learn how to do virtual sites in apache. that way I can keep the photo site name of photo.sitename…

Computers, do they suck up or free up time?

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From the title you may think I am pondering the usefulness of computers. Not true. I think they are great. So much so that I made a career out of working with computer networks. But, sometimes I think they can cause tons of wasted time. I think that today because I needed to spend hours yesterday and today rebuilding my computer. Last Wednesday I blew my desktop away and re-installed windows xp. tuesday night I put the machine in a new case and during the move I physically destroyed a hard drive. Out of the 4 drives that I had I lost the one with the important data on it. The good news was that I made a backup of it that morning. The bad news was I didn’t get everything. I left off some less important stuff. you don’t realize how important it is until you don’t have it. But ok, there I was with a bad drive and a backup. I was feeling dam proud of myself for making a backup. Well try importing the data back off the dvd backup I had was a pain. At first I didn’t think it would work. I kept getting major bad errors when copying. I ended up throwing the dvd in my mac and restore it from there. At this point I may just leave the “personal data” like word doc’s, pdf’s and images on the mac. I didn’t want to do that, but it is turning out to be ok. Yeah, I am just grumbling. Everything seems to have turned out ok, but it took a day and a half working on and off to get things restored. That does not count all the programs I still need to reinstall on that XP machine. I will be doing that for weeks. So this week, computers have been a drain on my time, not a savings. next week hopefully will be different.

On the flip side, I am sitting here with my handy offline blog editing tool writing this blog as my trusty powerbook is taking my photo album I had backed up and sucking it into iphoto. It places them in nice categories. I have very few complaints about the program. I was also able to hack together a non-frontpage enabled version of my website on the apache server. the photo album site of 1gig of my images will take allot longer. Also not up is what I used to call the edata site. it contained data out of an access database. apache can’t read ASP files so I need to figure out PHP & Mysql to do the same thing on apache. that will take some time also. I honestly am not sure if I will take that plunge. I would have to export a bunch of data into mysql and I don’t know it that well yet to be the sole location for that data. I am so crazed about screwing up my apache server and the content that every change I make I am backing up the directory to my windows 2000 server. I just need to get comfy with everything.

Today was another lazy day. I got up late (11:30) and just bummed around all day. worked on the website and cleaning up my desktop computer. Tons of fun stuff:) I also made a ghost image backup of the desktop OS just in case. Also got the TV watching down. Trying to catch up on things I missed this week on tivo. I also watched harry potter II last night on DVD. it was ok, but they leave so much out of the book. I totally understand they cant put everything in the movie, but it is just a let down. that is probably why I didn’t see it in the theater.

My parents probably will call and want to do the traditional sunday dinner. Not sure if I am going to opt in tonight. I had pizza for lunch and that is what they do every sunday.

I am also shopping around for a new handheld PDA. everyone who knows me knows that I go through stuff like that and cell phones relatively quickly. I do a pda about once a year. This year I went through them like every 6 months. The reason I do that is because I have not yet found the perfect device for me. If I did I would stick with it, but alas I cannot find it. also my requirements change as my needs change. what I need now is totally different than what I needed when I was traveling all the time. I am thinking of a pocket pc. the palm I have is nice, and does almost all I want it to, but it does not do everything. the problem is if I switch to a pocket pc I will probably have to give up something. Either weight, wireless ability, allot of $$$ from my wallet, or a combination of the 3. I probably will go to bestbuy tomorrow during work to take a look.

Apache, Moveable type lives! IIS, Frontpage are on life support!!!

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Ok, after less trouble than I though (but with some problems) I am now hosting my own blog on a linux server running moveabletype and apache. My boss was awesome in giving up time to help me configure this. I had alot done by myself, but it still didn’t work right. So I called the man who knows linux. this is the same person forcing me to learn it, but I needed the swift kick in the ass to do that. Thanks, enough but kissing since I know he reads this!

The nity gritty of it all is I installed Red Hat 9.0 on an old dell desktop I have. Pumped 380+ megs of ram into it first of course. and then downloaded movabletype. that program kicks ass. I just finished importing all my old blogger.com entries into the new system. All I have to do is figure out how to properly back this thing up. I also got the offline posting app on my powerbook to work. I am writing on it right now. It is Kung-Log. I also downloaded w.bloggar to do the same thing on my XP box if I need to.

The next major step is to port my website over from IIS & frontpage to apache. that may be time consuming. I did have a copy of my site running on a win32 install of apache a few weeks ago as a test. seemed to display the current pages fine. I will just have problems with the indexing and other frontpage centric features.

As much as it was painful I actually enjoyed tinkering with red hat. I have ton’s to learn, but I learned it is not impossible to do.

Now that the technical stuff about this setup is written I can write about the past few days in the next post!