Meandering Chatter

Tuesday -

• Tape Inventory
• More EmuMail Migration work…  Updated the list of valid LDAP users (2462) w/ EMU Mail folders (776) that have been accessed in the past year (225).  My initial count was 295 but that was from an old list of valid LDAP users that included 3268 users in all; before the deletion of last year’s class, back from September of 2007.

Wednesday -

• Backups
• NISC8 reboots – NISC8 wasn’t cleanly coming up after its reboots.  I converted its daily reboot schedule to a weekly one to minimize the amount of attention we spend on it every morning.  A weekly reboot should be suffice to clear its memory leak and return it to normal service.
• AHT & ASD Images on bootable USB keys.  Apple has a new procedure to use external USB drives for its Apple Hardware Test (both OS & EFI versions).  We purchased a few 8 Gig USB thumb drives and I was able to get the new AHT on them, but I still need a fairly recent computer to test them on.
• RAM Upgrade for an old PB G4 (12″, 1.33 GHz)
• EMUMail conversion – We ran another EMUMail conversion (our 2nd since announcing our phase out plan).  Things went well except for the fact that EMUMail will sometimes fail to update the number of messages in each folder after message deletions.  It makes accounting a bit of a pain.

Thursday -

• Replacing a SuperDrive in a MacBook (13″)

This week has flown by.

One of the disks in my Mac @ home has died a horrible death, making all kinds of grinding noises and the like.  It is not allowing the other drive to show up so, either the bus is dead, or its a single drive that is preventing the other from showing up.  I should pick up a 500 Gig ATA drive before they become extinct.

On the homefront end of things, Mali and I will be working on the kitchen this weekend.  I’d like to get the the countertops installed, the dishwasher prepped for installation, and the end panel of our cabinets (to hide the dishwasher) figured out.  If we can manage all of that we can probably begin to do the plumbing and install our new sink on Sunday.  We’ll see how much progress we make.

Laters,

–Raf

Okay,

Thursday - 

• Haiku on a VM
• Checked out Boxee as an alternative to cable
• More EmuMail Migration work
• Worked a bit on my Performance Review

Friday –

• iSCSI Setup for Admin Retrospect box on 2nd D2D iSCSI box
• More EmuMail Migration work
• Replaced a HD in a MacBook Pro
• Dinner w/ Daniel @ Dock St.

Saturday –

• Left for Baltimore around 11, arrived around 1.
• Lunch @ Golden West Cafe in Hampden.  While we waited (1 hour) for lunch we sought out thrift stores and stopped at the new Squidfire storefront.  Antiquing was fun, although there are plenty of places to go there we stopped in at Avenue Antiques and got a tea kettle.
• 2nd Chance Inc. was amazing.  Purchased an awesome lamp shade and some tiles.  5 warehouses of stuff…
• The Book Thing was fun.  Tons of free books…
• Dinner @ Thai Landing was yum.  Try the Drunken Noodles…
• Returned home by midnight.

Sunday –

• Mali and I made French Toast for breakfast, yum.
• Carcassonne & billiards @ Gabe’s w/ Daniel & Erik
• Dinner @ Fergie’s w/ Gabe & Mali
• Nightcap @ APO

Monday –

• EMUMail failed to restart this morning, notified Sarah.
• After troubleshooting our Wireless DNS & DHCP Server for some time this morning, Aaron realized that we ran out of IPs.  So, I added a few more in the config file which returned things to normal by noon.
• Swapped tapes.

Just keeping you updated.

Laters,

–Raf

I’ve been neglecting this blog for far too long.  I’ll try to make up for it somehow.

This one is going to be brief.

In the last months of 2008, I was busy dealing w/ various SAN issues, mostly hardware and service level issue.  By mid-January, upon my return from Winter Break, I’m happy to report that those problems are behind us now.

Winter Break was great.  Christmas in LA and then New Years in Seattle.

I’m spending much of my time catching up on a few projects, and starting a few new ones under the radar.

We’re pushing forward w/ our EMUMail migration as well as IMAP and Mail Spool Quotas.  It took me a while to figure out the EMUMail migration script, but once I was able to identify the date formatting issue, the rest of it just fell into place.

We setup a quick Nagios install to monitor some services and I need to sit down w/ Sarah to rewrite our Morning Check procedures.

I spent a few hours hashing over printing issues on a new HP LaserJet P4015.  Its just a demo unit but it seems pretty nice.  I simply reminded folks that they needed drivers in order to take advantage of advanced printing features (like duplexing).  It is pretty easy on the PC since the drivers are provided by the NT Print Server however on the Mac end of things you need a PPD.  There must be a way to update the PPDs w/o having to install the entire 80MB printer software.  I installed the whole thing on my 10.5.x laptop and I found the PPD package to try installing it on my 10.4.x desktop but I only ran into additional CUPS problems that were beyond the scope of the issue at hand.

I will be working w/ AdminCC on getting them connected to an iSCSI NAS for their Retrospect Backups.  That tasks has been around for quite a while.

Beyond that not much has been going on.

At home, I’m working on getting our new kitchen in order.  We’re not totally redoing the kitchen, just give it a major face lift.  The cabinet fronts have been painted.  The counter tops have been cut and half of them have been sealed.  It is truly amazing what a layer of finishing oil does to the tone of the wood.  I need to make some modifications to the other two pieces before I begin to seal them as well.  Once I get the counter tops sealed and ready for installation, I can begin on the electrical for the dishwasher and garbage disposal unit.  This will probably also lead me to do the sink, although we still need to purchase a faucet, which will absolutely require shutting down the kitchen for that time.  Once all the major work is done, we can install the new floor and finish off any details.  Not a complete redo, but pretty close.

Laters,

–Raf

Google’s new Chrome Browser is really freaking fast.  I like its minimalism.  I like its design.  I like the fact that its blindingly fast.  I like its Task Manager, and the “About:Memory” page.  It appears as if they borrowed a couple elements from Opera on the UI front.

Its looking as if we now have a 5th contender in the Browser Wars; that is if you’re counting the Opera Browser.  Its unfortunate that they don’t have a version of their browser for the Mac; I have yet to see if they have a Linux version…  Nope, they don’t; I just had to check…  There are still a few things that Google needs to implement if they plan to compete in the war, mainly versions on the Mac & Linux.

Somethings are a bit slow.  After loading 10+ tabs, switching to earlier opened tabs seems slow.  There is a bit of a lag while the page gets kicked back into memory.  I’ll have to mess around with it some more to findout if there are any additional quirks that could prove to be trouble.

–Raf

I spent the last week in June working to rack and configure three servers.  Most of the time was spent tinkering with an HP DL360 G5, trying to get it to boot from our ‘el cheepo’ Promise VTrak M310i box.  I also have to get back to trying to make a Dell PowerEdge 1950 do the same thing, if its at all possible.  Additionally, there are two more DL360’s that I need to get an OS on and try to make boot off of iSCSI.

I was on vacation from June 30th., through the 4th of July.  Mali and I finished installing the basement windows on Sunday and Monday of that period.  I came into the office on Thursday, July 3rd. to apply a hard drive firmware upgrade to our HP DL320s that are a part of our SAN.  Joe and I were here until about 2 AM.  I then went home, got very little sleep and got up the next day to go to Rodolphe’s place in Millbrook, NY.  That was a fantasic weekend getaway.

Upon my return to the office I was working with Joe and Bill to get two SunFire V210’s reassigned to become LDAP servers.  I spend two days Jump Starting them and getting them on-line for them to go into immediate production.  Wednesday was probably the worst because we were working until 10 PM to get them up and running.  I still have some problems with the bonding of the interface on one of them, and its iSCSI connection at boot time.  I’ll have to wait until Joe gets back from vacation to reboot and troubleshoot further with out impacting production services.

The last couple of days, I spend properly configuring that VTrak M310i box and getting it on the network, oh Aaron is also away on vacation.  I needed to get that on-line ASAP because I’m working with the Swarthmore ITS Staff to provide backup iSCSI volumes for our BlackBoard Failover Servers.  We’ve completed one, I’m just finishing up with the 2nd.  I hope to have this done today or tomorrow.  We’re performing a failover sometime later this month so that the Swarthmore ITS Staff can upgrade the OS / hardware on their end.  Once complete, we’ll fail back, and upgrade the OS on our failover servers here.

Lets see, what else…

Oh, I have to coordinate several SAN upgrades very soon.  We’re going to upgrade the SAN/iQ software on our DR site to 7.0.  I then have to setup and configure two new NSM 2120’s and coordinate the migration of our production data over to them.  We’re then going to upgrade our production SAN to 7.0 and reuse its disk for more production purposes.

Additionally, we’re supposed to be getting VMWare to come and provide “knowledge transfer”.  I believe that we’re going to implement a VMWare cluster before the school year begins.

There is a ton of other stuff going on, however those are the things I’m currently focusing on.  Sorry, won’t be able to talk about house work cuz its still a work in progress, however I promise that I’ll have some updates on the homestead soon.

Gotta get back to work.

–Raf