So last month on October 16th I celebrated the bingeing of my 9th year at Arora and Assoicates, P.C.. When I say I celebrated I mean I went to my boss and told him that I was starting my the year and he said the same thing he says every year..”wow it’s been that long!”

So looking back at the 8 years that I have been at Arora I have realized that I have taken the company to new heights on the technology scale. When I started we had 2 offices. The one in Lawrenceville and a New York City office. The Lawrenceville office had an IDSL line that went down every few days. The New York office was sharing a 56K modem for the whole office. The e-mail server was hosted with the ISP and was unable to handle the small load the company was putting on it.

In 4 months after I started the IDSL line went down for a month..in which time I was able to talk the powers to be to go with a full T-1 line with the argument that the only time a T-1 goes down is when some person with a backhoe cuts a fiber line somewhere in the US. After the T-1 was installed in Lawrenceville I moved the mail server in house and rebuilt the network.

As the years moved on I have installed bigger faster and louder servers. We now have over 8Tb of space total in the Lawrenceville office. We have expanded the company from 2 offices to 5 offices all connected by VPN. All the offices now have full T-1s. There are more advances that were made in all the offices but there is so little time to list them all.

At the bingeing of this month we moved the Lawrenceville office to a bigger brand new space. We had over 46207 ft (8.75 Miles) of data cable installed with over 276 data ports installed. This was a new build so we put in as many drops as we could while the walls were open. We got rid of our old 3COM switches for brand new Cisco switches. With the new office also came with a new server room with the proper cooling and security.

So as I sit in my new cube…yes I took a cube instead of an office because the more space I have the messier I become so I took a cube tucked in a corner and out of the high traffic areas…I can’t help to think of what is in store for me in the next 9 years at Arora….

I know I look forward to keeping the company on the cutting edge of technologie.

I came in on New Years Eve day and ripped all the patch cables out of the switch and patch panel rack. It was a mess as you can see from the pictures I took that can be found here. I have been color coding all the patch cable in the office. Red for Internet connections out side the Firewall, Orange for connection in the DMZ, Green for all server connections on the LAN and Blue for all work stations and printers on the LAN. So my goal was…if it was gray it had to go…. It took me about 2 hours to pull the cables out and move the switches apart for better air flow and re-cable. After I restarted the switches I have now realized that we will be needing new switches next year. The fans are starting to go.

Well as you can see I actually wrote a book review. I read a lot of tech books but “Time Management for System Administrators” really has helped me. I am one of those people who say yea I will remember to do that thing you want me to do but I forget or get distracted and forget to do it. So I figured I needed to write the review so others can be swayed to buy and read the book.

I have been working on getting RT up and running at work so I can go live with it on Jan. 2nd. It took me some time to get the auth part of it talking to our Active Directory/LDAP server. I found this site was a big help with this overlay it is working great. Now I can have my users send an E-mail to RT and it will generate a work ticket that they can track to see the progress of the problem resolution. I also got NAGIOS back up and running monitoring my servers and routers in all the offices.

At home Avery and I got the front of the house decorated and the tree into the house last weekend. Carolyn got the tree decorated this week and it looks real good. I will get some pictures up later once I get the digital camera working again. I still haven’t gotten my Christmas shopping started for Carolyn and Avery, I plan to go on Sunday and get it all done and not have to worry about it during the week. Carolyn took care of getting my folks and everyone else’s gifts that we are giving out this year..not that we are giving a lot we are on a tight budget this year but we are trying to get something for everyone in the family.

Next year I am going to move everyone off of POP3 to IMAP for incoming mail. I want to keep everyone’s mail up on the server instead of on there desktop machine. This will give me a better back up plan for employee mail. It would also be one less thing I would have to move off there machine when I upgrade them and one less thing for them to lose if there hard drive goes south on there desktops.

So here are the specs for the new server:
OS: Linux CentOS.
Services: Qmail, Courier-imap, Apache, MySQL, ProFTP
Case: Chenbro 3U RM31212T-C-650R 650W Redundant (2+1) 12 HDD Tray SATA
Mother Board: Tyan Thunder K8SE
CPU : AMD Opteron Dual-Core 270 2 GHz - Socket 940 - L2 2 MB x 2
Memory: 512 MB - DIMM 184-pin - DDR - 266 MHz / PC2100 - CL2.5 - 2.5 V - registered - ECC x 4
Raid Controller: 3ware Escalade 9500S-8MI
HD Drives: Seagate Barracuda 7200.8 - ST3250823AS 250 GB - internal - 3.5″ - SATA-150 - 22-position plug - 7200 rpm - buffer: 8 MB x 7

I will be doing hardware Raid 5 off the 3ware card using 5 of the drives for data, that will give me 1TB of space and the other 2 drives I will do Raid 1 for the Os off the raid card on the mother board. With 2 Gigs of Memory this machine should scream.

Let me know what you think…..

I have been trying to find a a good client to use for my blogging. What the client needed to do was be compatible with Movable Type and have a good spell checker because I can’t spell worth a darn. It also need to be able to do good imaging importing to the web log. I have used Zempt for a while but it wasn’t updated enough and the cool feature of importing what I was listening to in winamp didn’t work for the newest version of winamp. So I have tried a few others but they either were to simple or they didn’t work well with Movable Type. I just down loaded w.bloggar v4.00 and it seems pretty good and was easy to set up.

Spent most of yesterday at work trying to get a temp server set up for the NY office so I can upgrade there main server to Windows 2003, but when I upgraded the temp server to primary PDC for the NY domain it didn’t reboot I was unable to reconnect to it to keep working. I have to wait till someone shows up on Monday at the office to hit the rest button. One of the many problems of working on remote servers…the motherboard in the temp server doesn’t seem to like Windows NT 4.0. But it seems to like Linux and Server 2003 fine never seem to have a problem with either of those Os at all. I need to get this office finished so I can get the temp server back so I can get it set up to be the temp firewall at the corp office so I can up grade that to CentOS 3 and the new version of Checkpoint firewall software.

Since the server didn’t come back I was able to take some time to get the printing issues I was having with samba and cups on the Linux server that I have on the Active Directory network. It ended up being the samba spool was nonexistent. That is what happens when I don’t pay attention when I compile form source and not install from RPM.