Thursday, December 24, 2009
Thursday, December 03, 2009
Monday, November 30, 2009
Wednesday, November 25, 2009
Thursday, November 12, 2009
Friday, November 06, 2009
Monday, November 02, 2009
Saturday, October 31, 2009
Friday, October 30, 2009
Wednesday, October 28, 2009
Sunday, October 25, 2009
Saturday, October 24, 2009
Wednesday, October 21, 2009
Meeting with the electrician tomorrow morning for a quote on power for the server room. Tips?
We are looking into the possibility of using a small yet air conditioned closet as a temporary (hopefully no more than 5 years) server room.
We definitely need a more central/larger/ideal room for a permanent location, but this room will be a huge step up on cooling and isolation. (servers are currently in a shared storage room with nearly non-existant cooling)
The current setup does work, so I think we should be okay as long as we can start with what we have now plus an additional 30 amp circuit. Also looking to put a single patch bay in for the whole floor and run 4 x 1Gb Cat 6 trunked between the new room and the primary wiring closet. (until we can afford home-runs of fiber to each wiring closet around campus)
Feel free to comment with advice/warnings/free coffee.
I hear the child check in system test went great tonight!
The child check in system we are implementing at Calvary of Albuquerque is a custom written system that involves a central server, several check-in kiosks, and a touchscreen display in each classroom.
Labels are only printed for visitors, people who lost/forgot their badges, and parent volunteers. The "regulars" just use their plastic bar-coded badges for check in.
Overall it is a very slick system, and TCO is still about the same as a year of service from a few of the vendors we were looking at before. (the other vendors looked great, we just had a few special needs we wanted met)
Awesome job team!
Backup server almost ready for testing!
I subscribe to Alex Lindsay's school of thought that claims data doesn't exist until it exists in two places. Unfortunately that costs money.
We have about 3TB of user data and 4TB of current videos. (We will be expanding the video library to 10TB soon I hope.)
Before we can implement a full backup solution, I'd like to duplicate our data. When talking about this volume of data you have two options: do it right or do it cheap. We're going to do it cheap! (remember, this is phase 1 and our goal is having data in two places)
The correct way would involve a proper backup SAN, tape backup system with off-site storage, and a bit of could based backup just in case.
The cheap way involves any system that lets me buy off-the-shelf SATA drives and keeps track of file versions.
Here's the Phase 1 setup:
- desktop computer
- 2 extra Intel gigabit NICs
- Drobo Pro
- 4 x 2TB SATA drives
- Crashplan Pro Server
The next step will be to migrate all of our physical servers to virtual servers and use Veeam to do live deduplicated backups to the same drobo pro. Then I'm sure there's some way we could set up a simple robocopy script to mirror our entire backup system to another set of drives that get pushed to our colocated server rack downtown.
We will also be looking into cloud-based backups for critical databases and files.
Friday, January 02, 2009
Setting up a Domain Admin workstation
I've been a network admin for only about two years now, and only recently have I discovered the joy of running Adminpak and Exchange Tools from my local computer rather than remoting into servers.
On top of that, I've discovered the awesomeness of tabbed Remote Desktop Clients, like mRemote and RoyalTS. I have also learned to use indexed launch tools to open applications (like QuickSilver on the Mac, Launchy on Windows, or Gnome-do on Gnu-Linux).
Based on all my geeky laziness and the tools that help me remain lazy, I am installing all of my favorite apps on my new work PC. To avoid forgetting what I've done, and sharing with others what I've learned, I'll document the whole setup process in overly-vague steps:
Basic Setup:
- Install XP Pro SP3 (ignoring what came from the factory)
- Disable AutoRun for all drives, XP themes, shadows, animations, desktop cleanup wizard. (I'm a minimalist)
- Install AntiVirus, Office, IE7, Firefox 3 and any Updates available for any of those.
- Attach to Domain.
Management Apps:
- Install Virtual Server and SAN management Clients.
- Install adminpak (most awesome tool ever for Domain Admins)
- Install Exchange 2003 Admin Tools (start the Exchange Server install CD, but choose exchange Server Deployment Tools and follow the instructions)
- Install Group Policy Management Console
- Install rktools (yay robocopy!)
- Install SysInternals apps, those things rock!
- Try to get your employer to buy DameWare NT Utilities then install that.
- Install mRemote and migrate existing config file or create a new one.
Basic Utilities:
- FileZilla FTP Client
- Notepad++
- PuTTY
- Irssi IRC client
- WinDirStat for measuring disk usage
- 7-zip (the BEST compression utility, bar none)
- TrueCrypt (shh, it's a secret)
The Fun Stuff:
I normally don't like junking up my office system with hokey stuff, but here's the few exceptions I have:
- Yahoo! Widget Engine with Weather, Digital Clock, CPU meter, and Calendar
- BitMeter fortracking network usage
- Adobe Flash Player, Acrobat Reader, and AIR runtime.
- Inkscape (best vector image editor available, and it's free!)
- Blender (sometimes you just need to render stuff)
- Google Sketchup
- Google Talk
Conclusion:
While most of this stuff isn't totally required, all of these combined make my life much easier as an IT Admin.
Did I miss anything? Do you use something that makes your life easier? Your network more reliable? Your users more happy?
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