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Been a good week – Windows 7 and Engineering Update

Sorry I haven't been posting as much as usual. Last weekend, I had some free time, and ended up re-installing one of my desktops at home with Windows 7. I liked the OS so much I ended up doing the same on my laptop. The OS is very responsive, and although I do like Vista, I agree that Windows 7 is a major improvement in many areas. The new taskbar took some getting used to, but the search and overall responsiveness are welcomed.

In more fun server news, I have been working on lots of different issues/engineering tasks:

  1. Tape backup drive is hosed, and I've been eating lots of time with Dell on this issue, I wish they would just swap it out. Annoying, but the service is much improved from what it was before when I was dealing with them previously.
  2. Redoing a bunch of stuff on the netapp to get ready for the new product release, its all coming together now J
    1. Having some odd issues with multi-protocol permissions and such, also having an issue with some of our NFS exports not showing up in the web gui (Filerview) but showing up on the CLI. Strange one.
  3. Put up a MSSQL cluster, but had a strange issue. Debugged it with Microsoft for a few days.
    1. Issue creating failover cluster - Getting Event ID: 1570.
    2. Tried to turn on the firewall as per microsoft's recommendation. I don't see why this matters, but we did it anyways. I had to make some custom ports for UDP 3343 and TCP 3343.
    3. Ended up having a user in AD with the same name as the computer account. This was giving us the access denied error. Renamed the user, and the cluster was fine.
    4. Was on the phone and email for too long with the engineer, but happy it got resolved.
  4. Getting a new conference calling solution for cheaper calls than what we pay now with BT. We use the conference calling internally since we have offices in Europe and Asia. We prefer and try to use Skype as much as possible.

Have to head back to Geneva next month for 3-4 weeks, which should be a good useful trip! Looking forward to working with my company over there, my main engineer has been there for a week, and will be there for another 2 weeks. He has been really fixing things up in the office, which are all much needed improvements.

Last item… Go Celtics! Go Bruins J

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