I have to admit, I screwed something up.

A few posts back I had written about a supposedly successful P2V conversion on one of our domain controllers.  I want to be the first (hopefully) to say that I was wrong on this.  After further testing, replication simply wasn’t happening between both DCs, even though the event viewer showed that it was so.

As such, I’m probably going to end up building a new DC from scratch on one of our VMware hosts.  We haven’t got any servers set for deployment at this time, so this will be an opportunity to sysprep a Server 2003 installation and store it off to the side for later.

I mat take another crack at P2V-ing a domain controller in the future, but right now there are bigger fish to fry.

Since I’ve come on staff at NewPointe, the only Macs that I’ve purchased have been for production use (Pro Presenter, Final Cut, etc.).  To this point we only have ONE staff member at NPCC that is a full-time Mac user, and he bought his iBook before I came on board.

I’ve wondered now and then how long it would be before I’d get an actual request to purchase a Mac.  A couple weeks ago, I got my answer.  One of our end users has requested a MacBook to run Final Cut on, as well as ProTools for both offline and live use.  This unit would also serve as their “working” system, i.e. they would be checking email, writing Word docs, and doing everything else they did on their previous laptop, on this MacBook.

Now I don’t know if this request is going to go through or not, but it did get me thinking about support issues for Macs.  When do you actually begin to support Mac desktops and notebooks.  Do you wait until you have a certain number of them deployed?  Do you just wait until your users are so frustrated that you no longer have a choice? 

And what about getting your Macs to play nice on a Windows network?  Do a lot or organizations bind them to the windows domain, or are they just free-roaming machines that wander around on the LAN with no external management?

Let me get this out of the way.  I’m not AGAINST Macs.  Those who know me know that I’ve been editing on Final Cut for a few years now, so I could actually sit on either side of the fence on all the Mac/PC issues (cost aside, of course).  What’s on my mind right now is this:  On a Windows network, how much support time do you dedicate to your Mac users, and where do you draw the line on Mac support (if you have a line)?

I know many of you have different thoughts on this.  Share them if you have time.

[Disclaimer:  This is a long post, and primarily for my own future reference.]

One of the things I’ve wanted to do with our backup server is get it running backups on a network separate from our LAN.  This would allow us to run backups at any time without loading down the network.

I’m no network guru (not even close), so I had a little bit of trouble getting my mind around how this would work.  After talking with my good friend Ed, it made much more sense.  Basically what we needed to do was put a new NIC in each physical machine and give it an address that’s a different class from our LAN.  (our LAN is 10.80.*; we chose 172.16.* for the auxiliary).  After that, I would set the backup server and clients to listen on their 172.16.* addresses.  Thus, all backup traffic should get pushed through the new NICs and onto the auxiliary network, and life would be good.

After installing the new hardware, the next task is to go into the virtual network settings of your VMware host and bridge each of your physical NICs to a specific VMnet.  By default, the VMware server bridges your first adapter to VMnet0.  You’ll need to disable this in your host’s virtual network settings.

I bridged the physical NIC for the 10.80.* network to VMnet0 and then bridged the new NIC to VMnet3.

The next task is to add new virtual network adapter.  You’ll want to select a Custom network connection for the new adapter and point it directly at a specific VMnet (VMnet3 for me).

After you’re done, go into your VM, configure your new virtual NIC for the right network, and you’re good to go!

We use CommVault Galaxy Express for backups, and so changing the client to run on the alternate network is pretty easy.

 

I am by no means saying that “this is how you should back up your stuff,” but this is what’s working for us.  I’ve only been using Galaxy Express for a couple of weeks, but I am already a huge fan of the software.  It is extremely flexible and as far as I’m concerned, quite easy to use.  If you’re in the market for a backup solution, this is definitely a tool that you’ll want to consider.

On Tuesday night I took the opportunity to shut our servers down for the night, clean up the wiring in our server rack and MDF, and move the server rack to the other side of the room.  The moving of the server rack wasn’t super-crucial, but it did line the rack’s exhaust fans up with the air return in the room, so our air flow is now slightly more efficient.

I said on Wednesday morning that I would post some pics… really more for my benefit than anyone else’s.  So here they are.

A picture of the server room before the cleanup.  We’ve got wires hanging all over the back of the MDF/Telco rack. 

Here’s a couple pics of the server room and rack after the cleanup.  The wiring at the MDF is cleaned up, and the CAT5e wiring from the servers has all been replaced with CAT6 and is running to the ceiling through a piece of flex tubing.

The wiring in the server rack was also tied down with velcro ties (just in case we need to loosen it up to run more wires through).  Again, no pictures of the inside of the rack, because some goof (me) forgot to take them.

Why so much trouble to clean this up?  I admit, I’ve got a little bit of OCD when it comes to keeping things neat and orderly (and I’m still learning how to do it better as I go).  But I also believe that if something is hard to look at (like messy, unlabelled cables strewn loosely inside racks and such), it’s going to be hard to WORK ON, too. 

I’d rather make a time investment to get things in order rather than pay the price for it when something goes down and we have to start chasing down a patch to this or that.  We’ve still got a bunch to do in this room (as well as our IDFs), but Tuesday night got us off to a good start, and I’m looking forward to doing more of this in the future.

It’s just coming up on 6:30 Wednesday morning.  I just got home.  Tonight’s work night was a success for the most part.  The only thing that I didn’t get nailed down was figuring out how to run CommVault Galaxy Express on a network that’s separate from our LAN, though I think I might have stumbled onto the answer during the drive home.

I have to say, I really love what I do (duh).  I mean, I could have called it a day at 1:00am and gone home, but being RIGHT on the EDGE of getting something to work the way it should (namely the backup server)…man… that fuels me and keeps me going.  I guess I’m passionate about stuff working properly and looking good, even if it does keep me on task until the birds start chirping.

I’ll post some pictures of last night’s work after breakfast.

One thing I’ve been trying to do once every two weeks is to schedule a work night for IT.  I come in late (usually after 2pm) and stay till around midnight.  This gives me some “off-peak” time to shut down servers and parts of the network if needed.

Here’s what’s going down tonight:

• Replacing all CAT5e server cables with CAT6 (they’re already tied straight onto the core switch).
• Setting up and testing a separate network for our backup server.
• Ceiling repair in the server room.
• General cleanup in the server and work rooms.

After that will be the usual checkup for patches and such.  It should be a pretty quiet night.  Let’s hope so.

I thought it might be nice to mellow out DaveMast.net a little, so as of tonight, the site has a new theme on it.  I’m liking it, and I hope you do too.

Back in January, I sat down with Todd and Mike (my bosses) and we began to discuss what we wanted our goals to be for 2007.  One of the bigger items on the list was the streamlining of our backup process.

Our old process involved rotating 3 external hard drives around and copying our users’ data onto it every night (along with our Exchange store).  Since then, we’ve come very close to outgrowing those external HDs.  In addition, the accumulation of data on our file server and exchange server has caused our backup window to grow to over 8 hours.

After discussing how we needed to address this and looking at what other organizations are doing, we decided that the best course of action would be to set up a backup server and start with disk-to-disk (D2D) backup.  After that is in place and our budget allows it, we will add tape to the mix and begin spinning off full backups onto tape on a yet-to-be-determined basis.

The first thing that needed to happen was the building of a backup server.  I’ve had an AMD whitebox sitting in storage for about a year or better now, and this seemed like a good application for it.  The backup server has a RocketRAID 1740 PCI card that supports 4 500GB drives, with a separate OS drive on IDE.

Now for the backup software.  After asking around and doing some reading, we decided to land on CommVault Galaxy Express to do the work.  This software comes in a few different flavors, and we opted for the Email and Database edition.  This software lets you install on either an Exchange or SQL server, and also allows you to install clients on 3 other file servers, which is a perfect start for us.  The software is a bit overwhelming the first time you dive into it, but I’m slowly getting used to it.

As far as a backup strategy, we are going to rebuild that from the ground up.  This Wednesday, the Mike, Todd, K and I are going to sit down to discuss what we will back up, how often we back up (for each item),  and what shouldn’t be backed up (unimportant stuff, rogue iTunes files, etc).

I’m pretty jacked about this; it’s yet another way that we’re going to be able to serve the staff and make their lives easier.  In addition to that, I’m going to breathe easier knowing that our backup system is not only doing its job, but it’s not going to run out of space anytime soon.

I had mentioned about a week ago that Time Warner had been on the scene to heat up the cable that had been installed in our building during construction.

Well, about 10:00am yesterday, they were back.  This time they were here to install our modem!

The installation tech and I hooked the cable modem straight into my laptop to get a glimpse of how fast the connection was; it looks like it’s everything they advertised and then some.

 

I’m VERY excited to be able to get this new speed to our staff!  Our counting team that works on Monday mornings always suffers the most.  They’re using the Fellowship One contributions module, and it CRAWLS for them almost constantly because of the latency that comes with most wireless connections.  I’m hoping that this will be the fix that they need.

I’ve been getting hit up with a fair amount of spam lately on the blog.  The Akismet spam filter plugin has done a pretty good job of handling the majority of comment and link spam, but every couple of days I have to come in and manually delete a comment that made it through the filter.

I was browsing through my reader the other day when I came across an interesting plugin called Spam Karma 2.  Here’s a description of it as written by Ajay on the Weblog Tools Collection blog.

Description:
Spam Karma 2 (SK2) is an anti-spam plugin for WordPress. It is meant to stop all forms of automated Blog spam effortlessly, while remaining as unobtrusive as possible to regular commenters.

How it works:

SK2 comes feature packed with everything you need to keep your blog spam free. It includes a whole arsenal of filters that incoming comment has to go through. Each of these filters assigns a score called karma. Comments which end up with a negative karma are flagged as spam.

Some of the inbuilt filters include javascript payload, link count, page load time (stopwatch), post age and blacklists.

There are also “sub-plugins” available for Spam Karma.  I went ahead and installed the two that Ajay tried out:  An Akismet plugin that allows Spam Karma to detect anything that’s on the Akismet list, and the Moderate plugin, which respects the moderation settings you have set up in your Discussion Options.

Sounds like a solid deal, eh?  I’ve got Spam Karma installed now, so I’ll be interested to see how it operates over the next couple of weeks.  I’ll post an update later on.