Work Stuff

Fog Chiller and a lot of Windows work……

Well the month of August and September just slipped away from me. I spent all of it working on getting Windows XP rolled out in the corporate office I have about a dozen to go. Monday I will be installing the first 2003 server in the Woodbury office and get the office machines onto the new domain. Then it will be me 2 servers and 6 other users on the new domain.

On a non work issue…I built my first Fog Chiller and tested it out this evening. I fogged the back yard and it works great. I will post some pictures of it to

It’s been a busy month since last we talked

As I said it’s been a busy month since last we talked. I have had my birthday, Family in town, Picnic Prep, La Vigna Picnic, Working on the XP rollout and Server 2003 testing and roll out ideas.

Birthday
My birthday ended out well. We went out for dinner and then to a movie. We saw the “Fantastic 4”. I thought it was an ok movie but as all first Marvel-based movies it was deep in background short on action and adventure. Then we had a nice meal at Chevies the Mexican place. It was a nice birthday maybe one of these years my wife and daughter will throw me a big surprise party.

Family in Town and picnic prep
The last week of July is always busy. My uncle from Michigan rolls into town and heads to the Jersey Shore for the week with his family. I usually don’t get to the shore when he is there so I don’t get to hang out much but this year I made it a point to take my daughter to the shore and hang out with my uncle and his family. The day went well Avery and I had 2 great meal s and got some sun to darken our skin and a swim in the Atlantic. 😉

The rest of the week was taken up preparing for the La Vigna Picnic. It was a quick hot week. My uncle Dean was under the weather so he was limited in what stuff he could do so I picked up the slack.

La Vigna Picnic

This year’s La Vigna Picnic was great. We had the highest attendance in a long time and everyone seemed to have a great time. the weather was cooler and less humid. Dean was still under the weather so Fran and I ran the games and took care of the MC duties for the day. I ended up selling the 50/50 tickets and making the most money ever in the history of La Vigna Picnics. I will now be stuck doing the selling for a long time…

Working on the XP rollout and Server 2003 testing

Finished the rollout of Windows XP in all the satellite offices and am working on getting it done here in the corporate office. I am also working on testing Server 2003 and Active Directory for the server upgrades. I am in the process right now of building the AD network in parallel with the NT network here in the corporate office.

This week Carolyn and I went to see Huey Lewis and the News on Tuesday night. It was a good show and better then I thought it would be. Huey is a very good showman and very fan friendly. I would go see him and see if he does a totally different show.

We are getting ready to go see Jimmy Buffet next weekend in Philadelphia which is unlike any other concert experience that I am used to. It’s one big party check out last years comments on the show. We are also getting ready for the final big picnic of the summer on September 4th so if you are in the Trenton NJ area on that day drop me a line and stop by….. 🙂

My 38th Birthday

Well today is my 38th birthday just two years away from 40….no big deal to me, growing old is just a part of life.

Yesterday was one of the hottest days of the summer and the AC wasn’t working at work all day. It got up to 94 degrees in my office very hot. The repair guy didn’t get here till 5pm. It was a blown fuse from a grounded fan.

I’ve been busy with server upgrades and getting things ready for the La Vigna picnic on July 30th. The 4th of July party turned out great. We had a clam boil going with clams, potatoes, muscles, lobsters and a lot of old bay We also had the usual stuff as well. Everyone had a blast.

I have upgraded one of our main file servers and our Internet server that runs our mail, web and ftp services at work to CentOS 4 “The Community ENTerprise Operating System” which is an Enterprise-class Linux Distribution that is based on SRPMS provided by a prominent North American Enterprise Linux vendor with the initials of RH. It is a good distro and allows me to load a lot of newer versions of software. The next one is going to be firewall so I can upgrade to the new version of “Checkpoint NG”.

On the home front Avery had her dance recital on fathers day weekend and she did an excellent job. I think she could make it on the dance team in the next few years if she really works at her dancing. We signed her up for Ballet, Jazz and Hip Hop for next year. Right now she is off from dance camp till the first week of August.

Carolyn is doing well and getting read to go on her trip to DC with her sister next month.

Waiting for the family to start rolling in for picnic week and heading to the shore….

Well that’s all I got so far for today will try to up date a little more often then I have been…..

OS upgrade server and dancing……

Spent the day working on little projects and getting ready to build a “temp” server. I have to upgrade 2 servers from Red Hat 7.2 to RHEL 4. So I need a server up and running while I do the upgrade to transfer the data and services while I upgrade the OS. This way I don’t have to rush the builds and can get everything right.

Avery’s last day at Lawrence Intermediate School was today. She got on the honor roll all 4 marking periods and had good report cards all year. So we took her out for dinner at the Chines Buffet after we got some stuff done.

Spent the night working on getting billing done for the business and getting the ticket count figured out for the LUG/IP baseball night.

Tomorrow night starts the beginning of Dance Recital week. Avery has a dress rehearsal and then her first performance is on Friday night and second on Sat. My parents come to town on Sat for it. So it should be fun…

Windows XP and IP Telephony

Spent most of the day yesterday fixing a Windows XP machine. The symptoms were:
Boots up and trys to go into windows and then reboots again. This would happen even when trying to go into safe mode. At one point I noticed that a blue screen would pop up right before the reboot. What had happened was I must have turned on reboot when there is a problem so it was in a vicious circle. Solution to the rebooting problem was: I had to do a parallel install of windows in a a different windows directory. I then booted into the new install and got into the registry of the old install and set the machine not to reboot when there was a problem. The Knowledge Base article at Microsoft is 314466.

So the problem that was causing the blue screen was a corrupted ntdll.dll. This is the DLL that is called by everything so when it is corrupted the windows doesn’t work. So again I booted into the new install of Windows and copied the file from there to the old version of Windows. I then rebooted into the old version and it worked.

Carmen and I were also able to test the IP phones yesterday. Carmen had to go to our Woodbury office to make some changed to there phone system. So he took one of the new IP phones we will be using in this office and we were able to get it working over the VPN. Good sound and no echo or loss of sound. Now I will have to figure out how I am going to set up the system to work from the owners house….

Well moved in….

On Sat night we did the load in of the servers and equipment from the old SMALL server room into the new room. Took 3 of us about 4 hours to get the equipment out and back up and running. Came back Sunday to get my part of the room done. Got my desktop machine back up and running and got some organization on my desk ( that didn’t last long…. 🙂 Have been spending the last 2 days getting unpacked and stuff put away.

Here are the pictures of the room empty and filled…..

New Office and move in time

Well the big cube is now history….it has been turned into the new server room/my office. Here are some pictures of the finished office. The window needs a little cosmetic work but that is to be done today. I will be moving the servers and my stuff back into the room on Saturday night with the help of a few friends. More pictures of the loaded office will be posted after Saturday.

Had another year book meeting last night and got more candid pictures for the book and the kids pictures have been identified so now I can get that part of the layout started. I am still waiting for the questionnaires to be typed up so I can cut and past them in.

Other then those projects things are going well and I am just waiting for the weather to get hotter…

It’s been a long time with a lot of stuff going on….

Since becoming “Geek of the Day” I have been extremely busy with LUG/IP stuff, work, as well as a new project.

The middle of April found my LUG/IP buddies at 2 tables at the “Trenton Computer Festival” handing out the LUG/IP live CD. It was a big success we gave out about 200 CDs and signed up about 180 people to the mailing lists. Our outside table in the flea market didn’t do that well, we sold most of the stuff Chris brought to sell but there wasn’t much of a crowd. The whole TCF was a disappointment, we heard a lot of the vendors voicing their feelings that the pricing was too high for tables and that there wasn’t enough advertising for the whole show.

The rest of the month has been busy working at work on getting the office done. All the drywall has been hung and spackled. I am now waiting for the door and the window to be installed then have it painted and the floor installed. I figure I will be able to get the data cable guy in here early next week and then move the equipment in here by the second weekend of May.

On top of that, I am doing the layout of the 6th-grade yearbook for my daughter school…I haven’t gotten any of the art or pictures yet and I have to have it done by May 25th. Nothing like pressure and a deadline as well the rest of the stuff going on in life…

I am going to try and keep up a bit more on putting up more posts..it’s just been really busy this last month

Documentation is a pain

Spent the day yesterday working on getting restarted on my network documentation. I am one of those syadmins that just hate to document anything. But lately I have been thinking about it and realized that if I got hit by a bus or had to call in some one to fix something if I am out of town or something they wouldn’t be able to do anything. I am also trying to get it done so when I finally get around to OS upgrades it will be easier to know what each server is doing and how I have it set up. So in my research of looking for the best way to proceed with the documentation I found a neat site called rate my network diagram it’s a pretty cool site. I might just up load my diagram when I have it the way I want it.

On a personal note I got squirrel mail up and running on the webmail side of things. Now I have to get it working here on the Arora webmail site.

Tonights the LUG/IP meeting so I will be busy tonight…..

Off to shut down a WINS server……..

Wow first time out

Well it’s been a while going out on a computer repair it felt good getting the modem fixed and getting $45. It was a simple repair and then I cleaned up his machines of spybots and a bunch of viruses. Did make it back to Hoagie Haven to get a cheese steak sandwich with hot peppers on the way home last night. I think they have changed owners because they skimped on everything. It was still good though.

Yesterday at work it was pretty quiet waiting for the wins server to purge all the old address assignments and compress it’s database. Other then that just took care of stuff around the office. Spent last night after getting back working on an e-mail newsletter for LUG/IP. Sent out a test one to the officers and waiting for feed back.