I said that I’d write about backups yesterday, but the backup saga continues into today, so I’ll give you updates on that and fantasy baseball, maybe some movies…

Work, the backup:

Like a good, responsible IT department, we have a backup system in place. Backup the servers and few peoples shared folders. We were using Veritas Backup Exec 9.1. Our old tape drive was an Ultrium LTO-1 , which has a 100GB/200GB, only getting 200GB if the data is completely compressed. Our company has added three new servers since I’ve been here and there will probably be more, in addition to 6 existing servers.

So, to accommodate all of the new data, we got an LTO-2 tape drive 200GB/400GB of storage. Now I had to get this to work with the old software. Background: Symantec bought Veritas in late 2004. I tried the handy dandy steps of turning off the OS and the backup tape enclosure, switching cables and turning things. Voila! (I thought) Windows Server 03 recognizes the new hardware and the Backup Exec software can see it too. Problems arose, as I assumed they would, when I had to write to new tapes in the new drive. It wouldn’t work, and gave no hints in the error message.

So, call support, which is now done by Symantec. I get routed through the phone tree to ‘legacy’ Veritas support, leave my info and wait. Problem is, backups run every night, as they should. Now I get to switch the hardware back right before I leave and hope that it works, and it does. In the mornings, I switch things over to the new hardware and wait for support, when no comes, repeat the process.

It takes THREE days for ‘legacy’ software support guy to call, and then I have to boot people from the server so that I can reboot the server at will. We try some steps: 1) uninstall drivers 2) shut down hardware 3) switch hardware 4) reboot 5) install drivers 6) reboot Doesn’t work. I email application and event logs, wait for his call back. Takes two more days, that means more switching to the old hardware for the backups to run. During the wait for his call back, I suggest upgrading to the newest, fully supported version of Backup Exec, version 11d.

We get the software, install it, switch hardware, reboot, now the hardware doesn’t show up, hmm. Was it the new software that isn’t working or the hardware? I investigate on late Friday night and Saturday and discover that with all of the cable switching, a pin has bent. Try to repair the pin, it breaks. Now I have to find a 6 ‘, external SCSI cable with 68 pins to 50 pins. There are none in Eugene, or Salem, so I drive to Fry’s in Portland, 2 hrs away, buy two cables, drive two hours back, replace the cable, the hardware shows up again.

The new tape drive still won’t write to the new tapes, so I wait for more Symantec support. Support tells me to try the same steps as before and change the backup jobs’ configuration, it works! Well, sort of… I can now back up the local server and some shared folders, but not other server’s drivers. Hmmm. I call support again, they tell me that you have to have a ‘Windows Systems Agent’ to backup remote server drives!?!!? With the Veritas version, there was an unlimited remote agent license, but now each server needs a license, and there are specific licenses for Exchange Sever, SQL, etc. This means that the backup saga will continue until we shell more money.

Fantasy Baseball:

This week I play Blernsball All-starts and go head-to-head with MAN Morton Dexter Beals, aka Oculon. Last week I barely lost to the place team, but still moved up to 7th place. The Blernsballers are in first, but statistical evidence (Joe Morgan’s most-hated words) shows that I should have done than I have- see dsjoonation. Let’s make it one for the ages and meet again in the playoffs Oculon!

Movies:

I haven’t been watching much of the Netflix with the long hours and new episodes of Entourage, but I finally got Pan’s Labyrinth in the mail and was I glad. Guillermo del Toro directs this Spanish civil-war fairy tale and it is easily my second favorite movie of last year, only beating out Cuaron’s Children of Men. Cuaron and del Toro are two of three famous Mexican directors, along with Alejandro González Iñárritu, making movies today.  del Toro seamlessly blends Ofelia’s fairy-tale world of fascist escapism with the brutal reality of Franco’s dictatorship.

Set in a mountain village, Ofelia and her pregnant mother come to live with Captain Vidal, her mother’s new husband.  Resistance fighters are living around the village and Captain Vidal is trying to starve them out with a strict rationing policy.  Ofelia is about 12 years old and is still full of curiosity of fanciful thinking.  As she wanders into the woods and the labyrinth behind the barn, her imagination takes over and she sees fairies, a faun named Pan, a magical toad and a pale monster.  As the movie progresses, Ofelia’s fantasy world feels more and more real and the resistance fighters come to a head with Vidal.  Multiple times I heard myself saying, why doesn’t she does do X.  But, the story is true to the characters and doesn’t change their actions or thoughts just because it might be more logical to a grown-up.  On top of the great story, direction and acting, the special effects feel perfectly in place.  Overall, 4.5 out of 5

It’s Monday morning and things are relatively slow on the IT front, so I’ll get you up to speed on the technologies I’ve been working on/at.

Team Foundation Server:

This little gem is an MS server application that acts as a companion to Visual Studio desktop applications. The TFS allows developers to store and share code on the server with a TFS plugin in Visual Studio. Our developers are spread out between England and the US, so this was a logical upgrade from Visual Source Safe, where outside developers had to VPN in order to share code. TFS has a SQL back-end and Sharepoint Services reports and document storing area, which means you have install about 4 programs and 5 upgrades before actually installing TFS.

The problems:

1) The application had to be set up before a consultant got, but the dedicated hardware for the application hadn’t arrived yet. So, I had to set up the TFS on a server with another SQL back-end application already running. This other application was not production yet, thank goodness, so I could back it up and run TFS.

2) Day one of transfer: Once the consultant left and the new hardware arrived, it was time to back up the TFS and move it to the new server. Let me tell you, it’s not as easy as you would think. The MSDN forums were fairly helpful, in that other people had the same problems as me, but were unable to solve them.

3) Day two of transfer: MS documentation has faltered and I end up calling MS TFS support. They responded fairly quickly and were very helpful. Three days, two remote assistance sessions and nine hours on the phone later, it was fixed and ready to roll. Oddly enough, the application that ‘had to be ready’ a week before, could be down for three day without any complaint.

4) Now that everything was working we still had the problem of VPNing for outside users. The main reason that TFS is pretty good is the HTTP(s) access works and there are instructions, but it still had to be setup. Having never set up an SSL certificate website for IIS, I had our friendly ISP walk me through it. The MS instructions for HTTPS/SSL setup were pretty darn good, so once I had the certificate, it went smoothly. Now all I had to do was open up ports in the firewall for the new SSL ports.

5) Now that TFS is working, I have to get the old application, an Incident Management application, working. While it’s not nearly as complex as TFS, I still had to call support. This was solved within a day.

Tomorrow: The on-going backup exec server saga…

I have a lot of catching up to do readers (passive post recipients).

I’ve been doing a lot more blog reading since Google Reader came into being. I definitely read more since I’ve been in college, is that wrong? Blog posts are hardly as well thought out as novels, or even short stories, but my attention span is short, hence my love of short stories, articles, blogs and foreign-language films.

Blogs I’ve been reading more since Google Reader:

Fire Joe Morgan: I first heard of this site about 2 years ago, but I only took a fleeting interest in it. Now that I consistently watch Sunday Night baseball with Joe Morgan and Jon Miller, I have a new appreciation for Ken Tremendous’ posts.

The Dilbert Blog: Scott Adams’ Dilbert comic has been my favorite comic for a long time. I’ve never felt a true understanding of the “truth” of Dilbert-like scenarios, even know that I work in an office. That’s definitely a credit to Adams’ humor and that’s why I read his personal ramblings at the Dilbert Blog. Topics include global warming, Iraq, your optimal age, happiness formulas, etc.

Dead Air Space: Radiohead’s new album is being mixed as we speak and you can keep track of all the studio details via this blog. DAS is the official Radiohead blog for LP7 and is usually updated twice a week. Nigel Godrich just posted a sample of the new album’s songs in mashup, mix format. Any reader of dsjoo knows that Radiohead is my favorite band, followed closely by Arcade Fire.

The concert:

Over Memorial Day weekend I went to the Arcade Fire concert in downtown Portland. My third time seeing Arcade Fire was on that Sunday night at the Arlene Schnitzer Concert Hall. The concert hall was great and the opening act was pretty good too, Electrelane. The acoustics, the lighting, the stage and, not the least of all, the performance. The set mostly came from Neon Bible, but there were plenty of Funeral holdovers.

I’ll continue to update you all my super interesting life during the week.