In the morning I will be flying up to Toronto for my first business trip out of the country. I will be setting up a new datacenter for the company I work for in a Sungard facility in Mississauga, a suburb of Toronto Ontario Canada. Due to Canadian laws, we must keep all our customer’s data in Canada in order to do business in there. So we are putting in an exact replica of our production system but with canadian customer data. I will be putting in 6 physical servers and plenty of networking equipment. 3 are ESX hosts with 4 virtual servers each. This is gonna be interesting to see how virtualizing our system works out. From my experience setting up the servers in our office, I think it is going to work great giving us enhanced performance and flexibility while lowering our equipment costs.
There is one problem with this trip though. We shipped the equipment on the second of July. It cleared customs in the middle of last week, but DHL has no idea where the stuff is now. Hopefully we can find the equipment tomorrow, so that we have time to install before the end of the week. I have another trip planned to our datacenter in Phoenix beginning on Sunday so it is going to be an interesting couple of weeks. Of course my papers and finals for my online classes fall in these two weeks too. But the experience will be good…as long as we can locate the servers.
Sorry about not posting much recently, but I’ve been busy getting ready to go back to college. And after a year, of working I am going back down to college. I am all packed up, and I leave tomorrow morning. I am going down to Clearwater Christian College. I am transfering down there, so I have a lot of work to do to get all the classes I need before I graduate. My sister also goes there and she convinced me to transfer there. Ironically she is sitting out a semester to recover from a wrist injury (she is a piano major). So tomorrow, I will attempt to drive 1000 miles from Philly to Clearwater in one day by myself. Should be fun. After I get settled, I’ll have lots of free time for the beach, weightlifting, girls, video games, and blogging. I guess I’ll have studying to do too, but since I haven’t done that in a while, I probably won’t start that till its too late 
This past week I took part of my vacation time. I figured since I am leaving in 3 weeks, it was a good time to take a weeks vacation. I spent Monday through Wednesday at Ocean City, New Jersey, at the beach with my good friend Dave Grimm and his family. It was a blast; we had great weather so we spent plenty of time on the beach and on the boardwalk. On Thursday my brother Allen and I went hiking at Blue Rocks campground. We had a good time together hiking to the top of a mountain. On Friday my Dad and I went to the Eagles training camp at Lehigh University. That was really cool. It was neat to see the players up close during practice. I took plenty of pictures during the week and here are just a few of them.
Click to see Pictures. Continue reading ‘A Week of Vacation!’
This has been a crazy week! Tuesday night we had a huge storm, with hurrican force winds. I believe it was a part of Tropical Storm Beryl. At 7:30 PM on Tuesday night, some 500,000 people in our area lost electricity. Of course we did too. But now on Friday afternoon, I still do not have power at my house. In fact most of our township is without power. Its pretty crazy, and really annoying. I’ve had a bunch of stuff to get done before I go to school in three weeks, and now I have less time to do it. Hopefully we will get power soon.
But I thought about it more, and realized that PECO (our electric provider) has really shot their uptime statistics for this year. We usually lose power for approximatly a total of 24 hours a year. This is 99.7% uptime. In my work in the IT department with an ASP, this amount of uptime is unacceptable. We have to have at least 99.99%. Well with this 70+ hour downtime, PECO’s uptime for this year will be 98.5%. Ouch. Somebody would get fired in most IT shops for that kind of poor uptime. But there is only so much you can do when trees fall on your power lines. This would make a good case for lines buried in the ground. One good thing this kind of storm outage does is raise awareness for disaster recovery. At least at my company we have already made changes to our plan, and ordered more equipment that will help ensure our office will still function after any future storms may try to shut us down. (We almost lost one important old dev server after a power surge on Tues night. But after several hours on the phone with HP we got it back in order.)
So PECO, turn my lights back on. I want to build a linux server this weekend. (Before I go to the beach next week)
I’ve had a very busy last few weeks, working on some different project for at work, and finishing up finals for my night classes. I’ve learned several interesting things in the past two weeks at my job.
The first thing that I learned was that Dell support people will bug you until you fix your computer. A hard drive went bad in one of our production servers. So I called Dell Gold support (which thankfully has american techs.) to get a replacement. After a lot of discussion, the tech told me to run a firmware update which would fix the issue. So I had to explain to him that it was a production server, and to do the fix he wanted would require me to schedule downtime and then go in to the hosted environment on a Saturday and perform the fix. Continue reading ‘Lessons learned from IT this week’
After my laptop had some major problems, I decided that it was time to build a new computer. I am always reading about what the current hardware is. I wanted to build the best computer I could, however I had to do so on a pretty tight budget. Of course after using my laptop as my only computer for the last three years, just about anything would be faster. I also needed to get a nice monitor since I didn’t have anything but my broken laptop screen. So I did a bunch of research, found what I wanted, and then waited for my tax refund to come in. If you are looking to build a new computer, on a tight budget, I think this one works pretty good.
Continue reading ‘My New Computer Setup’
This past weekend, I took a trip down to Clearwater, Florida. My sister, Bethany, attends Clearwater Christian College, and my dad gave her a car to take down there this semester. So I drove down with her on Saturday, and flew back home on Monday. We left at 9 am Saturday morning, and arrived at our friend’s house on Sunday morning at 1 am. 15 hours of straight driving! We stayed at the home of the Kisskaddons, friends who go to school with my sister. We had a great time, going out on their boat, playing basketball and volleyball, riding bikes, and just talking. Unfortunatly, I had to fly back home Monday afternoon, and go to work on Tuesday, and my sister and our friends have to start going to school. But it was a great trip, and hopefully I can go back some day.
This past Sunday and Monday we got our first snow of the year. On Sunday morning we found about two inches of snow. It was pretty cold all day, and the snow was really hard and icy. It mostly melted away on Monday morning, but around 7:30 pm the snow started again. So Tuesday morning we had about 3 inches of snow on the ground. It was really cold all day, so the snow is pretty hard. There is no ice or snow on any of the roads, but they put an insane amount of salt down. My car is already covered with salt, and it looks terrible. I’m hoping we get lots of snow this year. Check out some pictures of the snow. Continue reading ‘The First Snow of the year!!!’
Saturday afternoon, my dad and I went down to the Family Chrysler dealership, to see Brian Dawkins of the Philadelphia eagles. We waited in line for about an hour and then had him autograph some stuff. Brian Dawkins plays free safety for the Eagles. He is one of my favorite players on the Eagles. He is the third Eagle player that I have met. The other two were Cecil Martin and Doug Brezinski, both of whom don’t play football anymore. Here is some pictures of Dawkins and the autograph we got. Continue reading ‘Meeting Brian Dawkins!’
My yard has quite a few trees in it, and around this time of year, it gets covered with fallen leaves. So this past Saturday (Nov. 5), my brother Allen and I decided to see how big of a leaf pile we could create. Using only 2 rakes, and one large tarp, we spent about 6 hours building a very big leaf pile. We only raked about half the yard, and two days later the yard looks like we never raked at all. (Except for the pile of leaves killing the grass in the middle of the yard.) Here’s how the project went.
Continue reading ‘Building a Leaf Pile’