Work

Hooky

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I played hooky from work today, well sort of. I had an early conference call so I did it from home. then it was do a bit of work from home. Then it was the AC wasn’t working again and it was hot, the day before a holiday weekend, so I decided to take the day. After work I went with Jay, & Danny to see War of the Worlds. I hated it. It had good effects, but I hated it everything else about the movie. I compare it to independence day, and that at least had some decent story. This movie was just bad. But it doesn’t matter since it will make millions, and Tom Cruise will continue to be crazy…

I also hit Macy’s for some shorts. it is shaping up to be a hot one at work, so I need comfy clothing that will allow me to say sane. The lines weren’t too bad, so I was happy.

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Cisco Networkers 2005

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Today was the first full day of Cisco Networkers. Allot of cool stuff going on. Way too much for me to go into too much detail. In a recap yesterday I learned what will be happening in the new version of IPCC. Some cool stuff there. I ate not enough food at the expo Cisco threw. I wasn’t hungry for that kind of fare, but it was awesome stuff. I got some information on some products I was interested in. I got some follow up reading to do. Then I got some answers from some engineers at Cisco about some products. I also got some free software that I need to try out. I could have used it a few weeks ago, but what can you do?

After that I meet up with my friend Joe. he is also out in Vegas for the same conference. We met up with his girlfriend and parents (they all came out to hang while he did his conference thing). They wanted to do the Star Trek Experience in the Hilton, but thankfully we just browsed the gift shop. They ended up eating the buffet at the hilton instead of eating at the Star Trek Theme restaurant. I ended up at a little cafe in the Paris. I am not a Vegas buffet person. I NEVER get my moneys worth at one of those. I don’t eat enough. Money wasn’t the reason I didn’t go though. I just don’t like those things. Even the nicest ones seem skeevy to me. Maybe it is memories of the Circus Circus buffet when I was 14?

Today’s keynote by John Chambers was good. He is a really good speaker. This was the second time I got the opportunity to hear him speak.

The first session I went to was overkill for me. They were talking about really high end network design of Data Centers. Cool to be sure, but I won’t be needing to apply those theories for a while. The next 2 sessions were on IPCC. What you can do with VOIP is amazing. I already drank the cool-ade on that stuff a while ago, but it is truly amazing what you can do with VOIP. Video, Soft-phone, Call Routing, Etc.

Tomorrow hopefully I will learn some other cool network stuff. I get to do a class on SNMP. I use it a bit now, but a better understanding of it would be very helpful.

NASA Operations as a Role Model

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I have always been fascinated with space, space travel, the stars, etc. I always wanted to be a pilot, but alas my vision does not permit that. I still have a love for all things fast! Because of my love of space, I have always been interested in NASA, the space shuttle, etc. My dad is also into that stuff, so he partly drove my interest. I would never have thought of making similarities regarding the technical work I do and NASA.

A few years back Gus got me thinking about technical operations. How a data center is run. How a corporate network is run. He always made the comparison of run the network like NASA runs a space mission. Granted I will be the first person to say what I do is not NASA, but it is the process that we are trying to mimic and not space travel!

Now at first I was like how do you compare the two? The answer is it is all in the procedure. It doesn’t matter what you are doing (putting a person into space, or launching a website) it is the operational theory that ensures that things go right. Sounds far fetched? Maybe. Maybe you have to manage some sort of technical operations to understand?

The basis for this theory as I see it is the following:

1. Never assume anything

2. Have a minute by minute plan for all tasks

3. Have contingencies for everything (when possible). Also note points of no return, roll back’s etc.

4. If a mistake happens, isolate it and ensure it never happens again.

There is a ton more things to go over, but sitting here those are the biggest things that come to mind. It boils down to never leaving anything to chance.

This type of thinking got me (kicking and screaming sometimes) to put together firm policies and procedures to keep our network operating. Every time we have an issue come up it is, how do we prevent this from happening again? I am learning that Technical Operations is really a way of thinking, not just a job!

I am thinking about it more today because I am in the middle of reading “Failure is not an option” by Gene Kranz. Gus gave me the book over a year ago. I started to read it but got side tracked. For some reason I sat down to read it today and I finished half of the book. It is a fascinating read. I don’t know why I stopped reading it last summer. It makes me want to continue my efforts at “operationalizing” things at work. And everyone wonders why I am such a pain in the ass about documenting everything. I do have a method for my madness! It is all about the process. No one person can hold any bit of information. That is why the NASA guys would pretend people had accidents during simulations to ensure that if the real thing happened, everything would work normally! Like I said, a fascinating read. Back to the book for me!

Cube Work

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The furniture guys are doing there thing today and tomorrow. I feel like the 3rd wheel, but it does look good that we are keeping tabs on what is going on. Don’t you love obligations? I did get some work done today, but since it is cramped in the IS office up here I was unable to get on a windows box and do some of the work I wanted to do. I have my powerbook only on this trip. I didn’t want to mess with my thinkpad until I get a new one, so I am on my mac only this trip. I have done it before on day trips. I can do most of what I need on it, but not everything.

Tomorrow I hope they finish moving the cubes downstairs. they haven’t started yet. They (furniture guys) setup the offices first today. The cubes are tomorrow.

More later…

Stuff

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I had to deal with fixing contracts for our cage upgrade. Bob finally signed off on them at like 5pm and I faxed them back to our provider. Now we wait for a completion date.

I also worked on moving AD (active directory) roles around on our servers. This will enable me decommission a server and move it into a virtual machine. We have an old Dell 42xx series server that is just taking up space. It barely runs as it is, so it is a good idea to make it a virtual machine and free up precious rack space. Yup, still loving VMware!

Thursday night I stayed late moving print servers, and FMSO roles around. The testing of the log-on scripts with the printer changes took longer than I hoped so I didn’t get home till like 8:30PM.

Danny was worried about disaster recovery issues with moving more gear to virtual machines. I downloaded the white papers on the subject from vmware and will read them on the train to Kingston Monday. I am off to upstate for 2 days for furniture construction.

Call Center Day

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Today I went to Kingston. I had to meet the construction guys for an update. The work is coming along and should be done ahead of schedule. The cable guys still need to come and do their work, and the furniture needs to be setup but it is going along smoothly, so far.

I got an update on the new deployment method they are going to use for desktops. They are going to use RIS from Microsoft. For me seeing RIS actually working in a beta group was nice since I asked about doing this over a year ago.

Took Kai to lunch. I need to work on his review this week. it is late since I was sick this month.

The Kingston trips are always busy, but I never feel productive. I am beginning to think that the feeling of not “really” doing anything is because I am not getting what I want to get done, but helping out or doing stuff for other people.

Disk Erasing Is Boring

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I have a stack of older (and not so old) hard drives sitting in my apartment. I have wanted to sell them or just get rid of them for a while. My problem is I have data on them, or had data on them. I am crazy about security. Sometimes not crazy enough, but when dealing with selling drives that once held my personal data on them, I am crazy. So what to do?

I know the multiple ways of removing data from disks. None of them include just formating the drive and selling it. I have wanted to invest in an electromagnet that degausses stuff. But that just screams Geek! it is also costly. I could do what Jay did and just copy lots of stuff onto the disks before formatting them and selling them.

I settled for a free program that will overwrite disks with random data. It is called eraser. it is a free open source product from Sourceforge.net. It is not a fast solution. Of course I selected the department of defense standard scheme for overwriting data. I don’t have state secrets on those drives, but I figured if it is good enough for the CIA to overwrite disks in this way, it is good enough for me. To be honest I selected the lowest DOD spec, but I figured that would be enough. Now I just wait while these drives get written over.

The Backlog

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Since I am feeling fine today, and I am not in DC (like I planned on) I decided to make a dent in the backlog of work I have piling up. Right now I am taking a break (while my printer is working for me) from going over resume’s. I am still looking for a helpdesk person in NYC. It is a grueling process to go over hundreds of resume’s. I just printed out like 40 for someone else to look at before we call some of these people up.

I am also trying to do some updates to my companies domains. We own way too many of them. The amount of changes I have gotten are piling up. I need someone to do some data entry and make all the changes. It will take days. For now I am doing the most urgent stuff when I have time (like now).

I just finished cleaning out my inbox. I had a few hundred emails to go through and sort. I also went back and cleared out a ton of automated messages I get every day. I am a slave to mail…

Late Night Postponed

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The late night I had scheduled tonight has been delayed. I am not sorry about it. I hate staying up till 1am only to start working. Our DB staff needed more time to ensure that our swap of servers we were planning went off without any problems.

With this late night on hold, I can possibly move up my other late night I had scheduled for Thursday/Friday. I am checking with Kai to make sure he can do the work early. We need to upgrade a switch in Kingston and also we want to do some rewiring. that requires us to work at night.

Also by doing the work tomorrow night, I can be in the office friday. Gus is going on vacation Friday so he would rather me be around. Schedule juggling is abound today…

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.