Repping tech ops at Metro Calvary ABQ

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A few people showed up for service

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Hour two/day 2 of over the phone server troubleshooting.

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Outside lights went up last week, added bush lights yesterday.

--
Chris Adams

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Just finished decorating the tree! Tomorrow we tackle the roof lights.

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New recording setup sounds awesome! No more echo chamber!

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Finishing the week with 48 Help Desk requests remaining, but 47 completed! Awesome job @byrdie!

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Finally replaced my 17" monitor. Full 1080p is much roomier!

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Someone was happy to see @trishadams earlier!

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Just 111 more of these pannels to cut, weed, and tape.

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The web team rocked an iPhone version of calvaryabq.org awesome!

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New backlit plexiglass wall looking pretty nice.

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Joel gets his first taste of fresh steamed and mashed carrots.

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View from the sound booth before #believe879

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Me with the biggest lobster I have ever seen.

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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.

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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!

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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

Total cost comes to less than $4,000 which isn't bad for 5TB of iSCSI backup storage that does file versioning and deduplication.  Now I just need to invest another $600 for 3TB more of usable backup storage.  (caveat: single iSCSI nic, single RAID controller, single power supply... the backup is not redundant, only the live data on our MD3000i is)

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.

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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:

1. Install XP Pro SP3 (ignoring what came from the factory)
2. Disable AutoRun for all drives, XP themes, shadows, animations, desktop cleanup wizard. (I'm a minimalist)
3. Install AntiVirus, Office, IE7, Firefox 3 and any Updates available for any of those.
4. Attach to Domain.

Management Apps:

1. Install Virtual Server and SAN management Clients.
2. Install adminpak (most awesome tool ever for Domain Admins)
3. Install Exchange 2003 Admin Tools (start the Exchange Server install CD, but choose exchange Server Deployment Tools and follow the instructions)
4. Install Group Policy Management Console
5. Install rktools (yay robocopy!)
6. Install SysInternals apps, those things rock!
7. Try to get your employer to buy DameWare NT Utilities then install that.
8. Install mRemote and migrate existing config file or create a new one.

Basic Utilities:

1. FileZilla FTP Client
2. Notepad++
3. PuTTY
4. Irssi IRC client
5. WinDirStat for measuring disk usage
6. 7-zip (the BEST compression utility, bar none)
7. 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:

1. Yahoo! Widget Engine with Weather, Digital Clock, CPU meter, and Calendar
2. BitMeter fortracking network usage
3. Adobe Flash Player, Acrobat Reader, and AIR runtime.
4. Inkscape (best vector image editor available, and it's free!)
5. Blender (sometimes you just need to render stuff)
6. Google Sketchup
7. 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?

How I got PHP Eclipse running in Ubuntu 8.10 The Intrepid Ibex

First off, PHP Eclipse is awesome. (That's probably why Zend is repackaging it and selling it with all kinds of extra features.) Aside from code coloring, collapsing, and function assistance (which gPHPedit does great at as well), it also does some pretty awesome code completion and custom code tips based on your own code!

Basically if you are working on a project with custom classes, it will intelligently recognize your custom class's methods and variables, and will give tool-tips based on them if you have been adding comment blocks.

So, now that I've made you want PHP Eclipse (and I've already made you want Ubuntu 8.10), let's get to installing!

1. Open Add/Remove under the "Applications" Menu
2. Change the "Show" drop down to "All Available Applications"
3. Type "Sun" in the search box
4. Check Sun Java 6 Runtime
5. Click "Apply Changes"
6. When it finishes downloading and installing, click "Close"
7. Head over to the Eclipse website and download the latest version of Eclipse.
8. Extract it to a folder somewhere, then double click the eclipse script. (it should immediately run Eclipse.
9. Click Help>Software Updates
10. Click Add Site, and add the PHPEclipse 3.3-3.4 or 3.2 Repository
11. Check the box next to the new PHP Eclipse Repo and install any available software from it. (Accepting the license agreement, of course)
12. Close and restart Eclipse.
13. Open the PHP Eclipse IDE by going to Window>Open Perspective>Other and then selecting "PHP"
14. That's it!

Troubleshooting:
If you get some obscure message like "An error has occurred. See error log for more details.", that's probably because you are using gcj (an open source Java runtime) or an old version of Eclipse.

My solution to this was to totally uninstall anything gcj related via synaptic, and make sure I was launching the version of Eclipse I downloaded from their site.

If all else fails, you can always purchase and download Zend Studio for Eclipse. It works great and has a few polished finishing touches that makes it worth it for the avid PHP devloper. (I've downloaded it since I purchased it a while back, but I'm going to see how far I get on straght PHP Eclipse)

Rock on, Razzle Dazzle, and enjoy PHP Eclipse!