Adventures of a Technical MasterMind

Day one - Thursday I got my uverse installed, install went okay, took about 5 hours to get it running. Once the tech left I switched from my Clear Wimax connection to the uverse. Looked good, then I got on the PTPP connection at work, and it started dropping me every 5-9 minutes. I called them and worked with support for 2 hours and tried lots of settings on the router. These included lowering the MTU and upping the timeout. Nothing fixed it at all, they were keeping my case open in case I wanted to call back. Then I was playing with it later on and lowered the timeout and it seemed to fix the issue. The router has a very small connection table which is a known issue, I think with the 1 day timeout there were lots of open connections which weren't being cleaned up. Day two - Saturday Turned on the TV to start setting up some of the DVR recordings, and the DVR wasn't working. I called ATT and the box was dead, we tried to do a factory reset and OS reload several times an...

I haven't been posting becuase I just moved, and I'm also getting married in the next few weeks, but enough of the personal stuff. Lets get into some good tech talk :) I have a verzion wireless card in my laptop which comes in handy when I don't have other ways to access the internet. Its a good connection, and usable for working as needed. The main issue is there is some lag/latency in the connection. We have a clear Wimax device at work which is our backup internet connection if we lose the fiber link. I decided to borrow this connection during my move to deal with my lack of internet. All I have to say is that the connection quality and speed is amazing. The lag is almost non-existant, and the throughput is superb. I can even download a lot on it without an issue. In my new location I can get ATT uverse, which is similar to the Verizon FIOS connection I had back in Boston. I loved FIOS, and was very sad when I had to move down to Atlanta and get on Comc...

I've been trying to move hosts over to 4.0 from 3.0, but i've run into countless issues on each migration. I'm trying to get a good method do this consistently, but its just not really possible from what I've been seeing. When I do speak to support, they keep confusing esxi with esx, and ask me to do things that cannot be done on esxi. I've also been studying on if I should run esx or esxi. For the way we deploy and the lightweight nature of esxi it makes more sense, and I believe its the proper model. They still need to develop a proper CLI/SDK or some way to get into the boxes better in a controlled manner without using the "unsupported" login method that support always asks you to do. That method requires console access which we don't have on lots of our hosts. So far we have 2 hosts upgraded, and quite a few to do somehow or other. I'll keep plugging away. Vmware support is very good, and responsive, good company to deal with, and...

I've been debugging crashes on the print spooler on a Windows 2008 x64 domain controller which is a print server. With all of the advances Microsoft has put into Vista and Windows 7 on the client side to help debug and diagnose issues such as the automated collection technology inside Performance and Reliability monitor you'd figure that they could figure out a way to isolate a fault down to a vendor driver. Thats not the case, I've had to jump through hoops for about 8 weeks to figure out what the causes of the crashes are. I think its partially related to running x64, and x64 drivers, but having mostly x86 clients printing. Its kind of a mess, but its been improving with patches and the countless dumps and other files I've been sending them.

Updated on 7/24: We use the tridion CMS, which is a high end CMS product, we have had a lot of trouble with the product in the past. (www.tridion.com) The content manager is a strange beast which uses a combination of vb, .net, and other technologies. Its always breaking, and is not reliable. We need to debug messed up stuff on it on a regular basis. We have the systems under change control, but it still seems to manage to break easily. The good news is that it spits out generated jsp pages, which seem very reliable running on Resin application servers. The support is always excellent and responsive, which helps us deal with code issues that we have with development. In the last case they actually went out of their way to get our content database and replicate the issue pointing to our code. This is something that few vendors would do for a small customer as we are. It still doesn't make up for the strange design of the system. I am not sure if this is related to our ...

Have been in Geneva for the last 3 weeks now. Been busy over here getting things in order and making sure we are ready for a major product launch over here. I am also working on some staffing and support issues for here in Europe. Our CEO was just on CNBC, and he did an awesome job, yay Mitch! http://www.cnbc.com/id/15840232?video=1169688483&play=1 Upgraded our Vcenter servers up to Vsphere 4. The upgrade of the servers themselves went well, but I tried to do a hypervisor upgrade, which failed. I have a case open with Vmware on the upgrade. I'm also have some strange connectivity issue on one of my physical systems. The new product is very cool, the new alarming system is a much needed improvement. Overall very happy with it so far. I am looking forward to testing the performance with the new hypervisor. Some cool stuff my team has done. Integrated all of our linux boxes with winbind to AD. Its much easier to admin them and control access now, very good stuff...