Adventures of a Technical MasterMind

Over the last week, I was sick a couple days. I used some of that time to build a cool management dashboard based on data coming from various tools: Coradiant – E2E, Host, Status Codes, Sessions, good versus errored Google Analytics – Pageviews ACE – Ticket metrics We are also evaluating the Dejaclick product from Alertsite to enhance the basic remote reporting we are using. The tool is very slick, and the pricing is pretty reasonable for what you get. We are also going to be looking at Coradiant Truesight Edge next week to get more data from our Akamaized traffic (which most of it is). Other than that just ordering a bunch of RAM for some boxes we are turning into ESXi machines, and also ordering some new Dell switches to run 10Gig Ethernet to the new Netapps we are putting in place.

I have been busy moving about 400 domains to godaddy. It's been a lot of fun (NOT) consolidating across our current 14 registrars. Once this is done we can start to do web forwarding and migrating onto our new DNS infrastructure. The new one is fully split, where we have a proper external, internal, and update system running. Good design, and should serve us much better.

I am rewiring a bunch of servers, and reconfiguring a large fileserver on Friday. We need to repartition a 8TB volume into smaller slices. I'm going to use the knoppix CD and some of the tools on that distro to move and recut the NTFS partition so that we can run VSS. Progressing on the Exchange 2007 migration, everything seems to be 100% now, all we have to do is get some of the mailboxes small enough so we can move them over properly. We are shooting for under 500MB, too bad some of our bad users have 7G mailboxes L Pain.

Our site has been having a lot of issues, so we offloading the image serving onto its own 2 boxes. We also added another 15 spindles on the production DB server, which seems to be helping a lot. We are seeing higher traffic volumes on our Coradiant reports, and we are also seeing lower latency. Good work by the whole team to fix the environment.

Working on some licensing for Redhat as well for our new environment. I don't really like dealing with Redhat, but in order to have a good supported OS we have no choice. They are already using it in some places. We were deciding if we were going to switch to CentOS, but figured it was smarter to have the fallback on a vendor.

We've been pushing more esxi here, and we are going to run our remote offices off a single esxi host running a domain controller, exchange server, and vpn server. We did the same setup for both Shanghai and Geneva offices. We are going to ship them with the new firewalls which should be a good setup, and easy to manage.