Work

Friday, Kingston Trip

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Friday I went to kingston for the day. Most of the trip was uneventful. That is good when traveling. I worked on the Group Policy Objects with Kai. I think we ironed out the kinks in what we want to do. For some reason our old profile we made would crash when we modified the security settings, but the new one I just created didn’t. Of course there is no major difference between the two. Go figure.

The trip home wasn’t that good. It took an extra hour or so to get home. Not sure why. the train was late. They said it was due to engine problems. Then we went slow and stopped allot along the way. I tried to sleep a bit on the train. I never do that so it was different for me. I used all my laptop battery power during the day and forgot to charge it. That wouldn’t be a problem if I sat on a window seat with a power outlet, but I sat on the aisle and couldn’t use it. The van wilder dvd I have been meaning to see will have to wait.

People on the train pissed me off. Like 4 people around me were either talking on their cell phones the whole time or one guy was playing a game on his phone with the stupid sounds turned on the whole time. People need to learn some etiquette.

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 Updates

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Finally put into service our first Windows 2003 Active Directory server. I demoted an old 2000 box and transfered its roles to the new server.

Started redirecting call center users in NYC to our new mail server we are using for our Kingston office. The end goal is to have the entire call center on that mail system. Once I get all the alias’s and accounts done I can just delete the old mail accounts and tell everyone they have a new email address. It is a slow process since I need to edit everyones profile when they are not at work. I did about 10 people in 2 days. this rate it will take me a month to get everyone cut over.

We upgrade our Pix firewalls next tuesday to enable us to use a VPN tunnel to send large amounts of VOIP calls between offices. when I mean large amounts I mean more than the 2-3 we can now. Probably like 20 at a time on a dedicated internet T-1.

Other things going on are the guys in Kingston are working on Cisco Softphone setup’s to allow remote agents for our call center. Or to allow us to use the phones from outside the office on our laptops. Also in the works is the ability to move your phone number between desk phones if you need to.

Friday

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Friday was a good day. Work was crazy since justin isn’t around, but Keith and I got by. We had to move 5 people’s desks to get ready for a new guy starting monday. We got 3 of them done, and will do the rest Monday. Keith got the brunt of the grunt work. I had to deal with some Kingston issues, 2 meetings, admin work, and I had to free up disk space on our main file server. All while trying to build a new desktop for the new hire and help keith with some of the moves. It was a busy day.

Friday night the president of our company had a holiday party at his house in Jersey. I didn’t go. It is a really long trip, and I had other plans. Last year I got stuck setting up a wireless network in his house.

I ended up going to a pretty decent italian restaurant for dinner. It was nice. Didn’t know what to do after dinner, so we ended up bowling of all things. It turned out to be a load of fun.

If I thought I Was Busy Before

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If I thought I was busy at work before, I am in way over my head now. One of the guys on my team left yesterday. We are now short handed. The big problem is the small issues now slowing down getting the bigger projects done.

I have 1 Windows 2003 Server with Active directory done for our nyc office. it is already in production. I need to finish moving stuff off one other server and then move the AD roles to the 2k3 server. Then I can rebuild the other box, and move on in the upgrade cycle.

A major web site for a customer of ours is launching tonight. Thankfully it didn’t require too much time on my teams part, but it ate up resources.

As I mentioned before I am also trying to merge our mail systems for 1 department. I have 2 call centers who are supposed to interact with each other, but they are on 2 different mail systems. We are going to merge our NYC call center people with our Kingston mail system, since the kingston system is newer and it is cheaper to maintain. Then when that is done we will have all our call center people on one mail system and the remainder of the company on another. The good news is the new mail system (Imail 8.0) is awesome. I have been a fan of Imail for years, since like version 5.0 I think. I never used it at work, but have at home or when I hosted my site with someone. So far I am very happy with it.

Windows 2000 SP4

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I finally began upgrading servers at work with SP4 for Windows 2000. it has been out for ages, but I have waited to upgrade. All new servers deployed since September have had it, but I did my first upgrade thanksgiving. Thanksgiving is after all 1 of 4 days that my office is completely closed. I got most of our internal box’s, but have some more to do. We have been fully patched, but just were using SP3. You should be able to just keep applying hot-fix’s and not need to do the SP’s but I don’t think that is a good idea. Eventually you need to apply the latest service packs.

Thankfully everything went well. I also took the time to deploy more machines to our internal windows update system. This will save time for my team since they won’t have to manually patch every machine. That becomes a real pain in the ass after a while.

This entry was written while listening to Bouncing Around The Room from the album “2/28/03 D1 Nassau Coliseum, NY” by Phish

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.

Updateathon

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I reinstalled the OS on my ThinkPad last week. I was having some weird issues so I felt it was time to do a refresh. I like to do that every few months. Another advantage of the mac. I never felt compelled to do that on my powerbook unless I was upgrading the OS to a newer version.

With my powerbook gone, and both my home computer and work computer’s just receiving new OS’s I don’t have a single machine that is configured with all my stuff on it. My data is backed up on a firewire hard drive I cannot access since I don’t have a mac. My mail is only on my laptop and almost nothing is on my desktop at home.

DNS

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I spent a few hours yesterday trying to clean up my companies DNS servers. I am a perfectionist so I probably spend more time on organizing things like DNS records than I should, but like I said I am a perfectionist.

I have all but 3 domains now using our own DNS servers. When we first started up we used a company’s gear that funded us. I have wanted to move away from them for some time, but just don’t always find the time to work on the project.