48 Hour Work Night? Follow-up

After my recent post about our 48 hour work night Matthew Irvine asked what was the ‘Plan B’ I mentioned.  I have to admit we didn’t have a pre formulated ‘Plan B’.  When we realized that the recovery of the backup to a new virtual disk wasn’t going to work we put things back as they were and stopped the SAN expansion so we could go home and sleep on our problem.  Jeremie remounted the iSCSI volume and we left the file server in its original state.

Now for the later contrived ‘Plan B’, we used DFSR (Distributed File System Replication) to replicate the entire file server’s iSCSI drive (drive e:) to another new clean and healthy file server. 

Note that the R2 variety of DFS is much much better  in what it can do and how it is configured.  DFSR actually allows for file replication without the creation of a Namespace first and the replication is much better that the previous version.  (From what I have read and Chris Green tells me). 

Installing DFSR requires R2 being installed, and in our case the file server required us to install DFSR from the W2k3 R2 disk 2.  Even after the install our file server didn’t display the management console, but lucky for us you don’t have to have the management console functional on both servers to replicate the data.  After we installed DFSR on the new server we were able to set up a job to replicate both servers.

So our ‘Plan B’ is currently to use the newly replicated file server as our primary server while we work thru the expansion of the SAN.  One great feature with DFSR is that it not only replicated the files but also the permissions (albeit the permissions we inherited from years of previous use and we will be cleaning up the permissions mess in the future weeks).  Our plan is to remove the replication job, power down and decommission the old file server and name the new file server with the same name.  We have decided to keep the same server name because our laptop users use offline synchronization and changing the server name is easier than reconfiguring the offline sync configurations on each laptop.

After our SAN is in its newly grown state we can replicate the files back to the SAN from the virtual disk with the same process all within the same Virtual server….

One interesting feature we must research a bit more is using a namespace for the file server…  maybe DFSR is a potential topic for Chris Green to ‘present’ during a future CITRT Podcast.

That’s the plan, and maybe we’ll stick to it.

More Bandwidth for LE$$ ???

I got a call from one of our attendees to alert me to some recent price changes with Comcast Business internet and television services.  He indicated that there was some significant price changes, so of course I had to check this out.

After a couple minute call to Luci at Comcast I learned that we could be saving some serious cash on our two cable modems.  You might recall, none of the local ISPs have any available fiber within 4 miles of our location so last fall we elected to add bandwidth with two cable modems.  Since our service was installed prior to the conversion from Insight to Comcast we are eligible for Comcast’s new pricing… Sweet.

Effective June 1st, our modems will now be a combined 32mb down and 4mb up for a combined savings of $350.00 per month, including basic television service.

If your using Comcast Business give them a call its worth asking the questions…

Thanks for the heads up Rich!!!

Another Chevy’s Birthday Party

Its become a bit of our staff’s tradition to celebrate birthdays at Chevy’s restaurant… Primarily because of the free sombrero and dessert. We celebrated Jeremie’s birthday a few days early, on Thursday afternoon.

On May 11th, wish JK a Happy Birthday!

"Its’ My birthday…."

"Must eat quickly, two spoons are better than one"

"Mmm, my belly’s Full!"

"I am so glad my Pink hat matches my striped shirt!"

Tearing out walls… great fun!

We have lived in our house for just over 15 months, while it is a relativly new house there has been alot of work needing to be done since the previous owner basically did no work.  Last year my father-in-law and i installed 700 sqft of hardwood flooring and Natalie and I finished painting the main floor last fall… so finally the house is looking good… well except the basement.  We have our family room in part of the basement so we spend a fair amount of time there.

Well my parents and in-laws are in for Easter weekend so what a great time to start a project.  We have always wanted to change the layout in the basement so this weekend was the start of the project.  We didn’t like the fact when you go downstairs you imediatly stop at a door and wall… so I started practicing my hammer throwing. 

The work continues…. more photos of the progress to come.

No Blackouts on NCAA MOD

CBS Sports has been providing web streaming of the NCAA B-Ball tourney for several years.. but alot of games were blacked out.  This year not the case… No games blacked out.

“This year, for the first time ever, you’ll be able to watch every game* of the NCAA Championship live online for free. All 63 games, from the First Round through the Final Four including the Championship Game, will be available with NCAA March Madness on Demand — so you’ll never have to miss a single shot.”

Sign-up now for “VIP” status , and enjoy.. While I am not a huge basketball fan I do like the tourney… and the cool factor is even higher on a webstream.

Latest Speet Tests

I have complained recently about the service from Comcast… and I think its only fair to complain when it takes 2.5 months to get a couple of static addresses processed… but a new contact, Mohammad has called me several times this week and is putting our install closer to the top of their list… and we get to be the guinea pig on their corporate roll-out with multiple IPs in our area… I have to say Mohammad has been a great support person, and has gone the extra mile to get things moving in the right direction… and apologized about 8 times about how long it has taken… that goes along way in my book.  If a vendor can say they screwed up and apologize that can go along way…

I have to say if they keep the bandwidth speeds improving like I have seen at home over the past few days I can put up with a little lacking customer service.  The speed seemed to be up a bit tonight but I didn’t expect to see the connection at 10mb faster than normal.

Keep the love coming comcast!!!

Funny Phone call…

So recently I have been ‘helping’ our campus services guys remove the snow from our parking lots.  I say ‘helping’ because I think it has been helpful, but I enjoy the snow, and I enjoy trying to assist these guys since they have worked really hard over the past few months keeping things clear during all the snow.

A little background, while plowing yesterday in the Skid Steer (pictured above) every time I tilted the bucket down and lifted the front wheels to put pressure on the bucket a little beeping would start… when I dumped the bucket it would stop.  Mark, or Campus Services Director told me when I asked that was the low fuel alert… Duh, sure enough the Fuel gage had just two bars remaining…

  Fast forward to today….I get a call from Mark and he tells me he is out of fuel in the Skid Steer..I said “Ok… we’ll then why are not refueling and calling me”… he then tells me that the arm for the bucket was up when he was scraping the parking lot, and he couldn’t get out.  What you have to know is the bucket lifts in front of the door, and (by safety design I am sure) you can’t open the door to get out when the bucket is in the air.  Well engine off, bucket up in the air, no get out.  So I came to Mark and Isaac’s aid only after snapping a few photos.

Makes me think… what if… You didn’t have your cell phone, it was 10 pm and you run out of fuel in the Skid Steer… the roll cage would not let you crawl out the windows… Note to self when plowing always have your cell phone charged and in your pocket.

Quotes of the Day

Kirt Manuel, our Communications Director asks “So how was your weekend?”  The funny thing he was dead serious, he was thinking it was Monday already. 

Linda Cleveland “I hope I am prophetic or anything, but I had a dream you passed out today… in some random room.”

Well with that I am wondering if we had a little more than snow falling from the sky last night.  It is going to be an fun day!

Buckeye game is a bust…

Well another Buckeye National Championship game goes bust….While the food was good, the chocolate buckeyes were great our team didn’t do so hot…

We watched the game with a new crowd (Guys from the SharePoint Training stopped by to watch) but another ugly result… Mel and Bill your off the hook for the loosing record at our house.

You know your with a bunch of IT guys when everyone watching the game has a laptop connected to the wifi…

Midwest Winter

Well I didn’t get the ‘Tony Award’ for the first winter weather post but you know its cold when there is frost on the inside of your car window after you have started the car, turned on the defrost and scraped the outside of the windows.

The Handy Compass/Thermometer showed 4 deg this morning when I got in my car… If only we could take all that cold and store it in our DataCenter…  Hmm… could you make a snow powered DataCenter cooling system?