Been setting up that new backup server at work the last couple days. Figured since I went in last weekend to clean up the server room and our rack and since we have the backup server put together for the most part I'd put up a few pictures:
Picture of the backup server with the top off - you can see all the case fans built in to improve airflow. I've heard it's pretty loud when it gets going, but we're waiting on a power cable extension before we can power it up. Also shows the two processors with their heatsinks and fans on them in the back.
Shows the front of the rackmount backup server. Each of those vertical slots on the left have a hard drive mounted in them. The two slots on the right are both 80 GB drives for the operating system. The other six slots on the left are all 320 GB drives that when put together will give us over 1.6TB (terabytes) of storage space. The drives are all hot-swappable and redundant, so if one fails, we pop it out, replace it, and everything continues without a hitch or any downtime.
The rack after I shifted all the servers up to the top. Before we had skipped a space here and there between different servers owned by different groups. Hindsight is 20/20 and that was just wasted space, so now they're all up against each other instead. You can also see the rails in the rack where the backup server will go right below the other servers.
A wide view of the rack and the table servers. The backup server at the end of the table won't be there, but we have another group with a tower style server they want to run, so I'll end up putting it there.
We got pretty much everything left to put together our new backup server at work today. Started setting it up and realized that a couple of the power cables inside the case - one for the board and two for some fans - were too short. Extenders shouldn't be too hard to find. Once we have those we can get the server installed and put up in the rack with the others. In preparation I went in for a few hours last Saturday and shifted everything up in the rack to make room and to eliminate wasted space. I'll have to post a couple pictures once it's all finished.
Speaking of pictures, it's time to start saving my pennies. The annual PMA show takes place in February each year and manufacturers debute new stuff there much like auto shows. Well, Canon announced a new lens that is designed for my type of camera. A 17-55mm f/2.8 IS USM lens. Basically, a fairly wide aspect standard zoom that works well in low light and has image stablization and a fast focusing system on it. It's supposed to be on par with Canon's "L" designated lenses, only it doesn't have the red ring on it and the little "L" marking to go with it. However, it's optical quality and price are certainly on Canon's 'pro' level. :)
Here's a shot of the new lens... nothing fancy looking really without that 'pro' red ring at the end, but it's the image quality that matters, not what the lens looks like:
Who says you shouldn't bring work home with you... last night I found a solution that will end up saving us probably two weeks worth of real man hours at work. Found a great utility for people's profiles so that when we do this big rollout they can continue to use the same profiles they are using now on their local machines. A user's profile stores their documents, desktop files, Favorites, etc... basically all of the personalized settings and documents on a computer.
Having to create them a new default one and then manually copy over all of their data would have certainly taken a while for all of our users. Now we just run a file on their computer before we start that takes 5 seconds to finish and their new account gets to use their existing profile. Pretty cool.
On the theme of solving problems, I finally got around to getting my truck a battery the other night. Had to use the jump pack just to get it started to get it there too... it was in bad shape. It had also been blowing fuses (10amp) for the radio immediately when starting up. Went through a handful and I was hoping it was just the bad battery even though I don't know why a low battery would cause fuses to blow. It still happened once the new battery was in there though. Turns out the 12v power lead wire that was run to the back tailgate area for a subwoofer box (previous owners) was not capped off or taped off. It has shifted and it was touching the chassis of the truck. Never a good thing. Taped off the crimped ends and put a couple wirenuts on the two bare wire leads and everything's working again. Now once we get a new set of tires for Christina's car both of our vehicles will be trouble free... haven't been able to say that in quite a long time.
Still, all of these hassles plus how busy work has been hasn't really phased me much the last couple days... too good of a mood the last couple days after finding out that I'm getting a pretty decent raise at work again this year. Definitely deserve it if I do say so myself, however, it's a bit unexpected which makes it that much better. And with Matt having left, I'm certainly earning it lately.
The implosion this morning was great! Cold, but great... I can't remember my hands ever being that cold. Probably because I had to work the camera and tripods while they were cold instead of tucking them away, but it's all good.
Demolition went off without a hitch. Had probably a thousand people out there, but I got there before most everyone. The first shot below is of the Plaza when the sun was just coming up, the rest are of the implosion and the aftermath:
For more pictures and larger versions, click the following link:
A few minor Blog changes. Since I've had this blog for just about 3 years now the "Archive" section on the right was getting so long you had to scroll down a bit for the Links and the Zonkboard where you can post messages. So, I shifted things around a bit on that left hand side. Also changed the Zonkboard so that the newest messages appear at the top.
Now I guess I should sleep seeing as how I'm supposed to be up in 5 hours to go shoot the implosion.
Man, today was a huge breakthrough at work. I finally wrapped my head around SSL certificates for IIS. Turns out the problem with setting up a secure communication channel between people trying to log in to edit their websites and the server holding the websites was pretty simple. A certificate has to be issued to the domain name of the server. So if you're bob.com then your certificate needs to be issued for bob.com for the secure channel to work. Sounds simple, but because of the way our test environment was set up it's taken me a week of pulling my hair out to realize that.
So anyway, now our users who need to work on their own webpages can log in securely... always nice.
That scratches off a major project from my current list and lets me move onto much better things. It also made this afternoon at work MUCH less draining and stressful. I'm not a stressful guy and work hard to keep it that way, but the stuff at work recently had even been leading to sleep loss with me lying there thinking about all the crap I still needed to figure out and get done at work instead of falling asleep. Fun times.
Christina's app for her new position is still under review at Human Resources @ USC... hopefully they'll forward it over even though the position was accidentally posted with 6 years required experience... something she falls a little short of unfortunately. Sometimes our HR department can be picky and toss out apps of 'unqualified' applicants based on how the position posting was worded.
Matt's last day was today, so we're going to end up pretty busy the next couple weeks. Hopefully that lead I've already got on a replacement for the position pans out and we can get the paperwork pushed through quickly. The guy who gave me his resume, Brad, worked for Dave down in Engineering... where I worked as a student for a total of 4 years. I had asked Dave Tuesday when we were at the gym if he knew anyone looking for an IT position. This guy is pretty much the same story as I was back when I worked there and had just graduated and he's familiar with the Active Directory network we're just about to roll out, so he should be able to hit the ground running.
I haven't abandoned my blog, things have just been crazy lately. In fact, I'd say the last 3.5 weeks have been the busiest of my professional life. My boss Robert was out 3 of those weeks and just returned this week. And the woman we work with, Marty, was out most of those 3 weeks also, give or take a few days here and there. And it's the busiest time of the year for us. And we have lots of major projects going on to add to all the usual day-to-day work.
We still haven't rolled out our new domain to our users yet to get rid of the Novell stuff in the School. We're waiting on USC's DNS people to recognize our new servers so that people in our remote sites will be able to connect to them. Until that happens, we can't start adding any remote sites to the new system really.
We're also waiting on getting the parts in for the backup server we're going to put together. We currently pay $35 per month per server to use the University's backup system. Not a bad price considering there's no data limit on backups. But when you back up 15 or so servers it adds up. Instead, we're going to build a new server ourselves with a ton of disk space, back up all the servers to that, then pay them $35/month to back up our backup server, if that makes sense. It'll eliminate 15 or so recurring monthly costs with just one.
The server we're putting together will have two internal hard drives that are mirrored with Windows installed on those. Then it'll have 6 hot-swappable hard drives, each mounted in their own chassis to slide them in and out of the server from the front. Since they're hot-swap capable, we can replace one of it goes bad without taking down the entire system. Also, with 6 total hard drives for the data storage we'll run what's called RAID 5 (redundant array of independent disks). Instead of having an F: drive, a G: drive, an H: drive, etc, you just have one drive. RAID 5 uses one of the hard drives as a parity drive. That just means that one of any of the 6 can fail and you don't lose any data - in fact, the system can stay up and running. Only downside is with 6 disks in RAID 5 you only get the total storage capacity of 5 disks in that setup. Worth the added redundancy though. Since they're 320GB hard drives, we'll have 1.6TB (terabytes) of data storage capacity. Should last us for a while.
We also finally moved the School's web site over to the new web server. It's one of the rackmount servers I had in a picture a while back on my blog. Those are the servers for the new domain that we've yet to roll out. We thought it'd be done over last summer but one delay has led to another. Should be rolled out in the next 2-3 weeks though - we're pretty close.
We're still trying to set up the new web server so that people using Microsoft Frontpage can connect to their sites if they manage one and do edits and updates themselves. So, that's on the project board too now.
A board that's getting larger and larger. One thing after another in preparation for this domain rollout has come up and it's impossible for me to set aside even an afternoon to investigate, read, and learn about whatever it is I need to be studying to get something done. With all the little day-to-day problems people have in the School, there's just not enough hours to go around.
And on top of all of that, Matt is leaving us. He got another job here in Columbia and his last day is this Friday. Which really sucks because he definitely knew what the hell he was doing. Just means more of the higher level stuff will fall to me... course, most of it was anyway lately, but now almost all of it probably will. That's not really the big deal though, it's the fact that it'll take until probably the beginning of March before someone starts as a replacement the way paperwork at USC goes. And that's assuming we find a qualified candidate in the first week of applications after the job is posted.
Adding even more to it, I had a lunch meeting in Christina's department with a faculty member there who used to be the department Chair, Dr. Bayoumi. Their VMEP grant that studies vibration management on Apache and Blackhawk helicopters is looking at expanding and this was a presentation by their database guy about various avenues they could go with their server equipment upgrades. The guy knows his stuff, but I think Dr. Bayoumi just wanted me there as a favor to get my opinion on all of it. After Mech Engr's IT guy lost 8 years of Dr. Bayoumi's data on his computer he doesn't trust him as much with the grant's information technology resources, so he asked me if I could attend. Free lunch... sounded like a good deal!
That may lead to side work with that grant maintaining the new SAN (storage area network - basically vast amounts of storage - terabytes - that is unattached to a server - high end stuff). We'll see though what he has in mind when they find out more about funding for that grant.
The sad part is there are around 100 things going on right now I didn't even mention and this is already a book. So, I haven't given up on my blog, I just haven't had the time to update it as much lately.
I'll definitely post pictures of the implosion this Sunday since I'll still be going to see it that morning. And I'll probably post some pictures too soon of our server room all cleaned up after I reorganized it over the MLK holiday weekend and of it torn apart in a week or so when all those backup server parts come in. Should be fun putting all that together and setting it up.
