Last night’s big project was installing a new wireless AP in Origins Cafe.  The AP is a Proxim AP4000, which I’ve had in the box for a few weeks and never had a chance to install, mainly because there was other stuff that needed to get done.

The hardest thing about this project was getting the new cable pulled to the pillar that the AP is mounted on.  Fortunately, our A/V engineers spec’d the building with an abundance of extra conduit during the planning stages.  One of those conduits just happens to go from this pillar straight to one of the IDFs.  NICE!

The second project of the night was getting our backup server’s RAID chassis mounted into the server rack.  It’s been sitting on-end atop the server UPS for some time now, and with a tape library coming down the pipe, this needed to be done soon anyway.

Just for the sake of mention… that whitebox below the chassis is our backup server.  After wrestling with a rack-mounted shelf (which fell apart as soon as I removed it from the rack….grrr), I am most-likely going to be ordering a rack-mount case to transplant the backup server’s hardware into.

Aside from being exhausted this morning (I didn’t sleep good at all last night for some reason), it felt like a productive night, and I like those. ;-)  Hopefully the rest of the week turns out the same.

I didn’t have a whole lot of time to spend on the domain rebuild this week, but I did get it started as of Tuesday night.  Currently it’s in the form of a Server 2003 VM.  AD was installed, and the OU structure has been replicated from our existing domain.

I used the Group Policy Management Tool to make printouts of our active GPOs.  It would be nice if the tool also allowed you to print out a list of OUs that link to each object as well, but a little bit of handwriting never hurt anyone.  I also started a mind map of everything I can think of that will need to happen for this domain migration to go smoothly.

Next week I’ll concentrate on recreating the GPOs in the new domain, as well as moving over any login scripts.  I’m also going to continue mind mapping so I can get my mind around the magnitude of this project… I’m nowhere near done.

I’m just glad I’m not on a hard timeline.

I’m waiting for file servers to defrag.. and it’s a little boring, so I thought I’d dump what’s floating around in my head.

I got word today that Gefen is now shipping a DVI-HDSDI scaler that will also do frame sync as well.  Plus it will scale and extract.  It’s great to see more manufacturers coming out with more HD gear….hopefully we’ll see some price drops soon.

Mike challenged me awhile back with finding a relatively inexpensive way to track phone activity on our phone system.  I’ve got a demo in the works right now that is looking pretty sweet.  I’ll blog more on it later.

I don’t watch a lot of baseball, but I’m genuinely excited that the Indians are going into tonight with 2 wins.  Does that make me a fair-weather fan?

As pumped as I am about about a domain rebuild on our network, I’m still nervous that I’m going to forget something critical.  Thank goodness for VMs and snapshots.

During the summer I got an overwhelming positive response from out staff about having the ability to access the network from home, so one of my projects tonight is setting up an SSL-VPN server to see how our work-from-home users like it.  It’s been a long time coming, for sure.

That’s about it for now… it’s time to start bringing VMs back up.

Last night’s main event involved attaching a new drive cabinet to our CommVault backup server to increase its storage capacity.  This machine already had 1.5TB in RAID5 array mounted internally, and it was very close to being full, so we purchased a 12-bay cabinet and filled it with 750GB drives.  I also ended up buying a RocketRaid 2440 controller and some multilane cables to make the connection between the PC and the drive cabinet.

The installation went very smooth except for a minor detail.  The controller for the internal drives (a RocketRaid 1740) was causing me a little bit of grief when I tried to set up the new controller.  I was able to get to the BIOS settings for the 1740, but not the 2240.  I ended up pulling the 1740 out of the case temporarily and this allowed me to get to the BIOS settings for the new 2440 card.  Once the new RAID array was set up on the 2440, I popped the 1740 card back in and both cards worked flawlessly, giving the backup server roughly 9TB of total storage space.

Here’s a shot of the drive cabinet next to our whitebox backup server.  It will get rack-mounted sometime in the next couple of weeks, I just have to get some other equipment moved around in the server rack first.

Once we get a gigabit switch mounted in our #1 IDF, we’ll begin backing up our video content across the network to this server as well.  Once all that content is in 2 places simultaneously, I’ll be breathing a lot easier.

I was about ready to type up a completely different post explaining tonight’s work night, and I just discovered that none of my permalinks are working.  What gives??

Looks like work night isn’t over… at least not for my WordPress installation.

Update:  After dorking around on WordPress’s support site, it looks like the “Pretty Permalink” structure I was using no longer works.  According to WordPress, this permalink structure requires Apache’s mod_rewrite module.

So what’s up with that?  Did Bluehost turn it off?  Is it malfunctioning?  I guess I’ll find out tomorrow morning when I call tech support.  I changed my permalink structure to at least get it working again, but any link pointing to a single blog post (that uses the old structure) is now broken.  What a pain…

Update #2:  I decided, on a whim, to change the permalink structure back to its original state (”pretty”) just to see what would happen.  Lo and behold… it now works.

This is one of those times where I’m not going to ask why, I’m just going to be grateful.

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.