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)

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 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.

The end of last week and the beginning of this week have been about waiting and research.

The waiting began with the completion of a Windows Server with MS SQL setup. All of the updates and addition to the domain were completed and now the transfer of files begins from the dilapidated Windows NT file/sql server. About half way through the network transfer of about 200 gb of files, the old server decided to crash. Not only that, but it would reboot. Eek! So, we had to MacGyver the old harddrive, put in my workstation and start the transfer process again.

Hint: Using a workstation to transfer tens of gigs of files from a FAT drive to NTFS takes a long time.

Anywho, the transfer continues into day 3 and will be finished by tomorrow morning.

In the meantime, research continues on installing a source code sharing and protecting program, as well as an enhancement-requests tracking program. Both require a server that must be IIS-enabled. This is a constant source of concern for small businesses as security is always at stake with an IIS box. So, the decision must be made to place the software on local servers or farm it out to an ISP. Since there is no official, full-time Webmaster/Network Admin/IT technician, an ISP is the likely solution. This may change in the future, but since I am only a summer employee with one month to go, it’s not best to assume that tons of things will be done in four weeks that require the coordination of multiple managers.

In other news, France just advanced in the World Cup Finals. Vive le France, Vive le Quebecois!

I was still traveling back to Oregon on Monday, so work didn’t start back up until Tuesday. Needless to say, there was a lot of catch-up work to do. This was compounded by the fact that our other IT worker was traveling to Utah in order to train new customers to use FSI software. This left lots of little IT issues, such as switching SMTP addresses on the Exchange server.

In more exciting news, I finished formatting and installing Windows Server 2003 on the new Dell Xeon box. This led to the larger task of mapping out the network architecture. My Computer & Network Security class is definitely being used, as I have to use MS Visio to diagram our local network. There are quite a few servers, hubs and switches, so its definitely a necessary task. The diagram will be even more helpful should the company move locations, a likely event in the near future.

Until Friday, when our main IT guy gets back, I’ll be doing miscellaneous IT tasks. I was reminded of my paper route when I had to package up CDs and upgrade documents to ship out to customers. FSI just came out with a new software release and customers have to get the upgrade, along with instructions for installation depending on their current release version. For internal uses, a little database is going to be set up with all of this information, replacing the MS Excel spreadsheet that holds data about customer’s current version and ship date.

Its back to the grind for now.

Week 3:

I finished setting-up a new user’s workstation and domain accounts. The process started yesterday with discovering that the machine for an incoming employee had an unknown administrator password. This meant that a windows repair was needed. After that was sorted out, the Microsoft updates began and took the rest of the afternoon, no sp2 installed. Thanks to Slashdot, this morning found that more windows updates were on the way and will eventually need to be installed on other users’ machines.

The fun project began this afternoon where I was able to start installing Windows Server 2k3 on a brand new Dell server. This 600GB, dual-processor machine took a little while to finish the initial setup, but now that is finished and all that’s left is the updating and hardening of the server. Once that is done, I can begin copying over files from the soon-to-be-defunked, current windows file server. The new server will also house an MSSQL database server for software testing and development. Hopefully, most of these steps will be completed before I leave for a long weekend.

I shall be departing on Thursday morning from Portland for Nashville, TN. From there, it’s a short ride with some friends from high school to Manchester, TN. This will be our first time at the Bonnaroo music festival featuring Radiohead and many more. That means four days of music, comedy and camping before I’m back to the grind. This will be a much larger festival than last year’s Sasquatch Festival. There’s a few trade-offs. There will be no Arcade Fire or Wilco. Instead, we’ll get Radiohead, Beck, Tom Petty, Bright Eyes, My Morning Jacket, Ben Folds, The Streets, Stephen Malkmus & The Jicks, plus Comedians Lewis Black, Patton Oswalt and more.

-Derrick