It’s about 2AM right now in Northeast Ohio, and earlier this evening I started the task of taking all of our virtual servers down so that I could defrag the host machines that they live on.

For taking care of large virtual disk files, I use Contig, which is part of the Windows Sysinternals software lineup.  Basically Contig is a tool for defragmenting large files.  It can take wildcards and even recurse subdirectories if you want it to.  This makes it pretty simple to go to the directory where your virtual machines are kept and defrag all of your .vmdk (virtual disk) files in one sweep.

I was nervous for a good while this evening, because the Contig utility was taking an EXTRA long time to defragment a piece of the virtual hard drive that is part of our Exchange server, and perfmon was showing little-to-no disk activity at the same time.  About halfway through the second paragraph, however, the virtual disk finally finished up and Contig continued on to the next file.  WHEW!

Looking at our file server’s disk usage, I am amazed at how our storage needs have skyrocketed.  When I started in 2005, our dinky little file server had a 30something-GB SCSI drive on it, and it was enough to hold everyone’s information.  Since then we’ve moved to a 425GB RAID array, and we’ve managed to fill over 80% of that space.  Safe to say we’ll be looking for another storage solution sooner than later.

>> I took some time earlier this week and upgraded my Wordpress installation to version 2.2.  I was expecting a possibly a small face lift and some more features, but there really isn’t much to note aside from my theme getting whacked and RSS icons getting plastered all over the top of the header.  I upgraded to the latest version of the theme and that seems to have fixed it, and all my plugins seem to be working as well.  Just for good measure, I added Digg icons at the bottom of the posts.

>> Has anyone else ever dealt with credit card readers on their network?  We’ve got one set up in our cafe area at the moment, and we are getting quite a few read errors during transactions.  It’s a pain because any read error totally voids the transaction and it has to be restarted.  We’ve tested this reader on various locations in our network with the same results (which actually makes me breathe easier).  The only thing I haven’t tried at this point is putting the reader on a separate VLAN, but I haven’t had time to get that far yet.  If anyone has any experience with credit card readers, I’d love to hear any advice you have.

>>  This Thursday the Video Department received some much-needed help!  Mr. Jeff Conn has come aboard for a summer internship and will be working mainly in video post-production.  Jeff has already lent quite a bit to the video team with his editing skills.  It’s going to be a tremendous blessing to have him around!

>>  On Friday I entered into some new territory (for me, anyway):  SSL certificates.  Though it’s a little embarrassing to admit, SSL implementation has been on my to-do list for some time now but had never made it to the front burner.  Between Friday and Saturday, I managed (with some how-to advice from John Dolan) to get a CA set up and get a certificate set up on our Exchange server for OWA and OMA.  OMA wasn’t a huge deal, because we only have 2 Windows Mobile devices checking mail on our server, but it’s still nice to know that it works.  Thanks for your help, John!

Next week my primary goal will be getting SSL-Explorer up and running for our non-notebook-toting staff.  I’ve been having some issues with the community edition, such as the WebDAV URLs not opening correcting on the client end.  Hopefully by the end of the week things can get smoothed out.