Hello all.

It’s been many days since my last post.  I have excuses, but my best reason is laziness (but you already knew that)

Right now, I’m embroiled in a Microsoft Ticket/Case.  Upgrading Team Foundation Server 2005 to TFS 2008.  Let me tell you, if you have the opportunity to wiggle out of buying this product, then take that opportunity and hold onto it for dear life.  This product also helps prove my adage: “Buy Microsoft so you can get support.  Get support because you bought Microsoft.”  We’ll see if this putting this phrase to print

Back to the present.  I am on call No. 6 (being generous, probably 10) with someone in India (a fine country I’m sure, I enjoy the food immensely), which is the start of call that will probably last 5 hours (35 hours total on the phone, again, being generous).  My case has just been transferred to a new person, who is not very familiar with all the troubleshooting I’ve done with my buddy Vimal.  This case has been going on for 3-4 weeks and we’ve retried steps in teh Microsoft-certified instructions many times over.  Now that I have a new person on the case and we are retreading old ground and getting nowhere.

The problems all started when someone at Microsoft said, (paraphrasing, don’t sue me) “Hey, let’s integrate Source Code Control, Reports and Documents for a Software Project.”  Problem is the TFS designers decided to use all these separate components as is and paste them together.  So, TFS is really: SQL db for source-code, Sharepoint Services for docs and SQL Reporting Services for reports.  Now when you upgrade one component (see previous posts on the subject if you interested in sleeping) other components ‘break’ or don’t work how they used to and the MSDN Forums aren’t much help.  SOOOOO, you get to call MS$ support, which you have to pay for, and then wait for someone in India to remote in and solve problem, give or take 3-30 days.

Thank goodness I decided to use a virtual environment to do a 2005 to 2008 test upgrade.  But, we are still unable to recreate teh working production environment, after 3+ weeks.

And that is where we sit, working on getting a working duplicate of our production server up and running.

I have no faith in the production upgrade, thank goodness for music (next time more fun: Sasquatch Festival ‘08)

Hello readers,

It’s been a while since I last wrote. This is due to teh explosive combination of work and laziness. The new year has seen quite a few new projects at work, some planned, some not. To give you an idea, just in January, I’ve becoming the administrator of a new Incident Management web app, installed a new firewall (with the help of consultants) and am in the process of rebuilding a Windows NT Server with SQL 6.5.

This has meant a few 10 hour days and long weekends, but it’s starting to slow down a little. The next project could be a video-conferencing system or something else, but nothing as tough as recreating this NT box that needs to run a mission-critical SQL db. It all started when I tried to restore a SQL backup and it failed. Apparently a failed restore in SQL 6.5 kills your ability to use the current db, so we tried again and again and ended up going to a 2nd box for a temporary fix. Now we’ve discovered that the 2nd box isn’t going to be good enough either, having to do with limited licenses for NT (10 user limit for an MSDN install). Now it’s on to the 3rd box and hopefully there will be success.

The Australian Open has helped keep my mind off work. I don’t know what was a bigger upset, Tsonga crushing Nadal or Djokovic pwning Federer. I would have liked to watch all of the final live, but with the damn timezone difference I fell asleep half-way through the first set. No matter, Djokovic won even though losing the first set. He looked to have the game and experience to beat Tsonga anyways. Tsonga plays with very flat shots and doesn’t have a slice, but wins with his powerful groundstrokes and serve. Djokovic could handle the pace, so it was just a matter of time.

Podcasts I’ve been listening to:

The Bugle (John Oliver ,a la the/a Daily Show,+ Adam Zaltzman)
Around the Horn
PTI
WNYC’s RadioLab (recommended by This American Life)
The Kong Show
B.S. Report with Bill Simmons
Windows Weekly (I do administrate a Windows network, so I feel somewhat obligated)

The Thanksgiving weekend is almost over and it was a very nice 4-day break. It’s over just in time for me to fly to San Jose for software training, where I’ll be learning TeamTrack, another application I will need to administrate. San Jose is quite close to San Francisco, so I’ll be able to visit Oculon on his new home turf. I may even drive by the Google’s headquarters for giggles.

As referenced in teh title, Arsenal beat Wigan in a very close match to take the top spot from Manchester United. Arsenal were without Cesc Fabregas due to suspension, and it showed, but they still prevailed with a great run and header by Gallas in the 83′. Rosicky finished it off for a 2-0 victory. The win was made even more enjoyable when I read that Man Utd lost to Bolton!!?!? Now Arsenal is 3 points up and still have played one less game than the Red Devils.

In Fantasy Football, my team slipped again and as I watch this week, both of my starting QBs (Bulger and Garcia) have gone down and are out of the game. In a two QB starting league, I will surely lose. By the end of the weekend, I’ll be mathematically eliminated from the playoffs. Now I’ll just get to enjoy the games on TV and wait for the college bowl games.

Readers and viewers can look forward to a new workspace video, as I will be moving   again at work.

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…

One of the nice about web design is the fusion of creativity with functionality. Creativity usually applies to the graphical elements, whereas functionality hinders your design quite a bit. This is good and bad. For example, link navigation belongs on the top or left, if you’re in Latin-based countries, because people read left-right, top-bottom. So, this hinders where your content and links can go and you begin to fall into a rut where you use the same 1, 2 or 3 column layouts.

That’s why graphics are oh so important to the web and probably why people misuse them so much, boredom! But, alas, there is another way: Databases! Databases are what I’ve devoted much of this summer and semester to for work and school. Dbs are the fundamental way to add functionality and still get the creativity out of work. Dbs add creativity in three ways 1)db design 2)db output 3) social interaction
Db design

At the University of Iowa College of Business, Professor Currim teaches the intro and advanced database courses. These courses give a strong foundation for database design and application. Throughout the past year, I’ve learned the value of a well-designed db and the pit-falls of a poor one. Now that we’re beyond the basics, our class has started implementing triggers and complex design models that better explain a db and its constraints and functionality. Databases are the backbone of information systems and a good design will always give you better security, functionality and confidence in your data.

Db output

Once you’ve stored your data, now you want to display for others to see. Some would ask, why not just put in an excel spreadsheet and display as a table? Uh, how about sorting based a column (in a browser) or doing a query to find the users that a last name starting with K and in the Iowa City area. Now run that query manually over 100,000 lines of data. So, since we both agree that dbs are useful, how should we display that data? There are a few ways, first a standard table. Sometimes all you need is a basic layout for your complex query. Second, AJAX! This is all the rage and the wave of the current. Asynchronous db entry and querying allows for users to have almost no lag in accessing and inputing data. Combining Javascript, XML and HTML, AJAX is used whenever databases on involved on the web.

Social Interaction

The database is a key tool for storing information, so the question is: how do we get people to store their information in our database? If you are a company, then you pay your employees to do it so that they can either sell, support or design something that makes money. If you are an unassiocated individual, then you db entry and db querying/viewing needs to be fun. Hence, the founding of facebook, slashdot, digg and other social networking and news sites. These sites are built on the notion of storing lots of information about yourself and selectively sharing that information with others (friends & stalkers).

All of that was written in about 10 minutes, think about all of the things that databases can do for users and the web if you really put your mind to it!

-Derrick

this post was partly inspired by Db II and Bloc Party’s ‘Pioneers’

In case you just crawled out a hole… it’s rivalry week! That means the suckas from Ames are coming to itown (not an apple trademark) for a whuppin’. Our star QB Drew Tate will be taking the field after sitting out week one with an abdominal strain. The Syracuse game was quite a scare with Jason Manson starting at quarterback, but all is back to normal and Iowa will win. There are a lot of staters coming into town this weekend and I’ll be showing a couple of them a good time downtown and elsewhere. The game is at 11 am, only 3 hours away so get ready everyone!

In other news, I don’t like reading. This is not in the literal sense, where I would be opposed to the sighting of words on print or screen and those words’ comprehension. No, I mean that I don’t like books. Books are passe(accent!) and reading them should be optional. In related news, I don’t like humanities courses. Moving on!

My business courses are going well. I especially enjoy my database management course with one Faiz Currim. Faiz is an excellent teacher and we’re just getting to the point where we’ve covered all of the material from the introductory database course. Soon, we will be entering new territory and my mind will be blown again by awesomeness and usefulness and creativeness involved in database work.

I am ready to watch some football people. So, in the words of GOB, “C’mon!”

The last week at FSI went at break neck speed. Coordinating between the UK and Eugene branches, we finally started down the road of implementing the new version of Microsoft Visual SourceSafe (2005) to run over HTTP.

The current system has the UK branch employees VPN into the Eugene network and then transfer files over the LAN. This is definitely a secure method of transferring data, but hardly the most efficient. HTTP would allow users to connect anywhere without the hassle of VPN and its slower connection speed. Also, HTTP access with VSS 2005 allows employees to utilize the Internet plug-in built into Visual Studio 2005. That means that the software developers don’t have to use the separate VSS application to upload data to the server. While VSS 2005 works well enough, we will see how much the use of HTTP is preferred over VPN since I was unable to test the upload rate with a network connection external to the network. If the rate aren’t noticable then the company may require a dedicated cable internet connection for the server running VSS 2005.

All of this remains to be seen, but the documentation goes on. Since this project went right to the wire, I still have documents to write that update the managers on the status of all of the projects that I started this summer. I’d say two main projects were completed and two more are almost finished. All in all, productivity was high and I learned a great deal about managing servers in a small business environment.

All of last week, I was researching solutions for our software developers’ source code and working with legacy DB software. At FSI, we run an internal CRM program called Onyx, as I mentioned earlier. This software has been running on a SQL Server 6.5 and a pretty clunky box. For fear that the software won’t work with a newer version of MS SQL, we have made a new box and installed SQL 6.5 with Windows NT 4.0. Since the server is on an NT platform, I have to be at the server to do any work, no Remote Desktoping. So, I placed the backup .DAT file on the new server and attempted to restore it using SQL 6.5’s internal restore option. This is where the work started.

Since NT is terrible with partitioning drives, the C Drive only had 2 GB of partitioned space and rest was unpartitioned and unformattable using any sort of internal OS utility. Unlike Windows Server 2000 and higher, there is no Computer Management utility in NT. This meant having to get Server Magic, an old program originally made by Power Quest and now owned by Symantec. Server Magic is just like Partion Magic (R) for the server. So, after freeing up the 18GB and formatting it as another drive, I could finally begin working with the database backup in SQL Enterprise Manager without any space issues. While waiting for Server Magic, I entered all of the logins to the database that needed to moved from the old database and server.

Along with research and Windows NT work, we received a big shipment of 19′ Dell LCD monitors. This meant that I became generic IT guy again and had to setup monitors and move old CRTs to anywhere that would fit them. Every department (Sales, Support & Development) got a few new monitors and some people even kept their old CRTs to do a dual-monitor setup. In the mean time, there are boxes and CRTs sitting around waiting for a truck to take them to the computer recycle shop.

I was lucky enough to have two vacation days this week since the Fourth of July fell on a Tuesday. Surprisingly though, it was a productive three-day week. I set up an internal web server for an ER (enhancement request) tracking program. The FogBugz software was quite inexpensive, especially compared to other ER tracking applications. Also, FogBugz’s system requirements matched up very well with FSI’s existing hardware and software. FogBugz requires Windows Server 2003, SQL Server 2000 and IIS, for the Windows like the folks at FSI.  If you prefer open-source, FogBugz works with Apache, PHP and MySQL. So far, no complaints, but time will only tell.

On the client-side, two desktops were formatted and setup as user workstations. Next week will feature a new server hosting Onyx Customer Center, our internal CRM (Customer Relationship Management) software. The old server doesn’t allow for indexing of the database storing Onyx data, so searching on description/note field is nearly impossible. We’ll use a backup of the database to test the indexing component of the Onyx software, as per J.C. (see the periods) Wilson’s recommendation.