Alfred's Ramblings

The next project could be an Exchange 2007 on a Compellent. This is going to be fun!!!

After 3 months of straightening up processes, my work at this charity is done. Along the way I managed to rebuild a Linux server. My first production Linux server, not really setup as I actually wanted it but due to the tight timeline, I went live with it.

Besides the mundane day to day administrative work, the more fun times include, changing the core switch.

Going there to straighten out the processes.

This is much more complicated than what it seems. If you are not careful, you may end up doing a floor by floor audit.

If you need to work on the management server or information server, you might want to export the list of current users, online and offline. This is especially critical if you are doing major version upgrades or moving clients to new servers.

Sometimes you are less than careful and a small change leads to being stuck in a not so nice smelling pool of biologicals.

Well some people have not so good days, some bad days and some worst.

Primary DNS server, usually a Domain Controller provides the necessary name resolution of Active Directory operations. It also required for user computer startup and logon. It is also required for the all important Internet access.

What about the secondary DNS server? Isn't that what it suppose to stand in when the primary is not available?

Domain controllers for Windows rely on the DNS to work and find each other through SRV records. If the DNS is not available, the domain controllers don't work very well.

For member server, the DNS settings are typically any of the domain controllers. For Domain controllers, the DNS server should be set to its opposite partner as primary and itself as secondary.

How many times have you bought something and later realized that is "not supported on this platform" or the famous PCIe x8/x16 or 32/64/128 bit interface comaptibility.

After doing this for the past 4 years, I have come to observe this :

PCI-E or PCI-Express is the smallish version whereas PCI-X is the larger and older cousin. Most definitely not physically compatible. Recently I was asked to install a tape drive and its SCSI card into a server. The server specs lists both PCI-e and PCI-X on the front page. Digging into detailed specs shows PCI-X is an option.

PCI-X is a parallel implementation of the PCI standard, slowly being phased out in favour of the serial version of PCI. That is PCI-Express.

Stuff like this can trip you up.

When a company gets taken over, things really changed. I spend the whole of Friday night supervising moving of a customer's servers to a central datacenter of the new mother company. It went very smoothly, thanks to a very well oiled team. This is the third moving project in two months.

New Year, New Changes, New Challenges. Just RTUed from customer's place. Wonder what I will be doing next.

Bash at the Swissotel Stamford at Raffles City on 19 Jan 07. All onstage activies photos were washed out as the spot lights were too dim.
Sorry about the ugly layout as intended gallery is buggered.

Update 14 Feb 07
Gallery is now fixed and available here

Just finished doing a project for an office. Simple cabling project to run the cables on one day, cutover the users on the next. As in all IT projects, sometimes technical issues are not the problem.