It was nice to get away for a few day. Seems like things have gotten crazy busy since I got back though. Haven’t even had any blogging time the last couple of days. Looking forward to the coming days though. I’m going to see Tony Dye and pick his brain on Friday, Microsoft Launch Event on Tuesday, then leaving Wednesday morning for a beach retreat with all of our Program and Admin staff.
Thursday through Sunday of last week, I was in NC for the Zuwharrie off-road event. I am involved in the planning and financial operations for the event, so there was work involved, but it was lots of fun! Got to hang out with lots of cool people and spend lots of time on the trail. We also had the opportunity to dedicate a new campground the Forest Service has named in honor of one of our fellow off-roaders who was killed while serving in Afghanistan last year.
Lots of fun, but it’s nice to be home also. I’ll post a few pictures later!
I’m all registered to attend the Microsoft “Heroes Happen Here” event in Atlanta on April 29th. We already have a couple of Windows 2008 servers in production, and will be rolling out RemoteApps very soon. Lots of cool new features! This is my first time attending one of their launch events, so hopefully it will be cool.
If you haven’t registered for the one in your city yet, better hurry, looks like they are starting to fill up.
I’ll admit that I’ve never won the award for being the most patient person in the world. In fact, back in my teenage years, I had virtually none. It started to change back in 1998 (wow, make me feel old) when I prayed to accept Christ. Amazing how quickly a total transformation can happen. After working in ministry for over 2 years, I’ve grown even more (definitely need lots of patience and understanding in this line or work). All that to say this: I can proudly say that it takes a lot to get me to the point of being upset or mad, and even more for me to actually show that I’m mad.
Now, on to the story. We have a plastic card printer and software that’s used to print keytags for our children’s checkin. It needed to be moved from one computer to another - no big deal. Well, at least that’s what I thought. I get the software all installed on the new computer, enter the license key, etc. and it notifies me that this software is already activated and I would need to contact support to have the activation reset. So, I called the number provide and got an immediate answer.
I explain to the support rep that I’ve migrated to a new computer and need help activating. She asks for my license key and proceeds to say in a somewhat nasty tone “Looks like you tried to activate this several times.” I did click “OK” two or three times before I called, but didn’t consider that excessive. Then, she says, in the same tone “What is your hardware ID?” I had no idea what she was talking about, so I politely asked where I could find said hardware ID. I’m greeted with another not-so-nice response “On the machine you installed it on.” I still have no clue what she’s asking for or where to get it.
Before I ever even had a chance to explain to her I didn’t know what she’s asking for, she replies “We’ll just do an automatic activation.” She does something on my end and asks me to try again. I do, and it activated successfully. I assume we’re done and proceed to thank here. Now, at this point, I’m slightly irritated, but no where near upset yet.
Little did I know we weren’t done yet. The rep proceeds scold me (in a very incriminating way) for the nasty deed I had apparently done by calling and asking for help: “Now I reset this for you today, but this will be the last time. Next time, you’ll have to buy a new copy.” Keeping my cool (although it was becoming difficult to do so at this point), I very nicely point out to here that the license agreement I’m looking at says that it can only be installed one computer and that I only had it installed on one computer. She comes back, the tone of her voice getting even nastier, “Yeah, but it can only be activated once.”
At this point, I’m getting more then a bit irritated. I very politely asked here to send me a copy of the license agreement stating that the product can’t be transfered to a new computer. She asks for my email address, which I gave here, and she says’s she’ll send it right over (same nasty tone) and then proceeds to hang up on me. Now, I had moved past the irritated stage.
I took a few minutes to cool off and called back and asked the operator for a supervisor. I spoke to a very nice guy who apologized and said he would send out a memo (I wonder if the memo actually got sent). He was great to talk to and seemed to actually be interested in the fact that I was a customer. Why can’t they have people like this answer the phone to begin with? I never did get that license agreement I was promised…
Fortunately, I was able to make it through the whole ordeal and keep cool about it. I guess things like this are put in our path as an exercise to help us grow in our faith. Gods word tells us over and over how to deal with people like this and these type situations: Ephesians 4:2, Colossians 3:12, 1 Thessalonians 5:14, and 2 Timothy 2:24 stand out to me. I’ll be the first to tell you though, dealing with difficult people can be, umm, difficult.
One thing that seems to always be an issue here is getting big files to outside vendors etc. Obviously, email is good for small files, but it never ceases to amaze me how many printing companies have email systems that can’t accept a 5MB file. Then there’s the bigger files that shouldn’t be emailed anyway.
The obvious solution is FTP. However, it requires client software and user training. The training it no big deal, but the software is - another app we have to roll out and support. Windows explorer can kind of do FTP, but it really doesn’t work very well. There’s also the issue of having to maintain passwords (which would have to be separate from internal AD passwords do to outside vendors needing access) or have anonymous FTP, which is not a good idea for obvious reasons.
Then there’s web-based drop boxes, but they have many of the same issues as FTP. There’s a need to not have access wide open, yet allow outside parties access. From the user perspective, it would be easier, since there’s no special software required - only a web browser is needed. Still, not ideal.
I guess what I’m looking for is something where the staff member can upload a file and enter an email address, and the recipient will receive an encrypted link to download the file. Basically, kind of like yousendit, but ideally it would be hosted locally. I’ve searched and searched and can’t seem to find an app to do this. I may just end up writing it myself if I can find the time. If anyone has any ideas on this, please let me know.
I especially like the part about the magic 8 Ball for immediate answers to prayer. Wouldn’t that be nice? This is something I’ve always struggles with. I’m sure many of you can relate also. When I need answers, I want them NOW. But, it doesn’t always happen that way. God works in ways we will never understand.
God does listen… and respond. But, the response may not be quick. We see this in the Book of Daniel when Daniel prays and the Angel comes to speak to him long after his prayer. God will never be one day early or one day late. We must be patient and trust that he will provide.
It seems like every application or OS upgrade creates at least one compatibility issue requiring another upgrade… Sometimes, it seems like it just never ends. What’s worse is it seems like no matter how testing done, there’s still some show-stopping issue that pops up in the middle of deployment. Anyone else feel the same way?
We began rolling out Windows Vista back in February. Of course, I spent quite a while testing various things, even ran it on my machine a few weeks before the first user got it. All of our important apps - mainly Shelby and EMS seemed to work fine.
The first group was at a remote site, which accesses Shelby and EMS via terminal services. Everything worked great there. A couple of weeks later, we rolled out a few machines at our main site and the users began complaining about EMS not working. Turns out you could log in and navigate all the screens fine, but as soon as you tried to actually do much, there were lots of nasty errors. A quick look at the change logs online revealed we simple needed to upgrade from 10.0 to 10.1 - no big deal.
Fast forward to yesterday. It’s spring break, things are pretty slow arround the office, so it’s a good time to take EMS down and do the upgrade. Everything went fine until we tried to run some custom reports and were greeted with a nasty error about DLL’s being the wrong version. The report in question are actually a custom DLL that the software vendor developed for us. A quick call to support revealed that they would need to re-compile the custom app for version 10.1, which will take 7 business days. So, we ended up having to revert back to 10.0 for now.
I must say I’m a but ashamed of this pictures. This rack is the core of our network. What you’re looking at is all the connectivity to our servers and SAN, our internet connection and firewalls, and all of the point to point circuits connecting the remote sites. Fortunately, it’s better than it used to be. I had the opportunity to do a lot of cleanup back in December when we installed the SAN, which also involved replacing our core switch.
As you can see a lot of progress has already been made. Unfortunately, I can’t simply rip it all apart and start over like I would with an IDF closet. All of our connectivity to EVERYTHING goes through this rack, so it had to be done in small steps late in the evenings or on weekends. The goal is to have everything cabled with proper length cables all bundled neatly with proper cable management in place. Cables are also being color-coded so that we can identify cables that care general LAN traffic from SAN, voice, Wireless and DMZ connectivity.
I enabled HA on our ESX cluster today and was greated by a nice big warning messages that I don’t have enough resources to satisfy the HA requirements. So, it looks like if one host dies, I don’t have enough RAM/CPU to run all of those VM’s elsewhere.
We do have licenses for a couple more CPU’s than we are actually using currently, so I guess it’s time to add another physical server to the cluster.
Tony’s post Where Did Those Days Go got my mind going. What has accomplished so far in 2008 and what’s in the plans for the rest of the year? Well, the short answer is LOTS! Here’s a short list of things that come to mind:
So far in 2008:
Began initial rollout of Window Vista (about 15 machines running Vista now, and being deployed on all new machines)
Implemented VirtualCenter into our VMware environment
Continued our big virtualization moved we started last year - moved several physical machines onto VM’s
Created virtual file servers using SAN storage and began data migration (Still a work in progress)
Deployed several new Virtual Desktops (more on this later)
Began implementing Sharepoint (work in progress)
Began initial rollout of Windows Server 2008
Began rolling out OS X Leopard to our Mac users
Replaced quite a few old workstations
Upgrade our wireless network to correct some major density issues (work in progress - more fe
In the plans:
Implement Apple Open Directory linked to Active Directory for better Mac integration (more details coming on this)
Meet with Dell/Equallogic and our local Equallogic partner to discuss SAN upgrades for out next budget year, which starts Oct 1
Deploy Windows 2008 RemoteApp for our remote Shelby and EMS users (in the testing phase
Upgrade Active Directory to Windows 2008 (with lots of research and testing in advance)
Major wiring cleanup in several of our IDF’s
Replace some old switches and possibly began deploying gigabit to the desktop (we already have gigabit in a few places, like for our video people, but not widespread)
Plans for upcoming building project
Implement an easier remote access solution for users without church provided laptops (possibly SSL VPN or a TS Gateway server)
Wow! Lots of things going on and lots of awesome things in store for the future!
Feedburner reports I already have 2 subscribers. Cool! And I haven’t really even promoted this site yet. I’m still tying to figure out exactly how to use Feedburner. Haven’t figured out how to get any kind of detailed stats such as where the subscribers are coming from, or if that’s even possible. Maybe I’ll have to use something like AWStats for that?
Awesome Weekend in NC
