The latest excitement in my world of IT is that I passed the Microsoft Small Business Specialist exam (70-282 )! I do not know what I was thinking scheduling the test the Thursday before Christmas. During the test there was this jackhammer in the background. And then after you finish the test, Microsoft wants to give you a chance to review the questions to comment on them. Of course on this phase you cannot fix any wrong answers. It was a terrible feeling finding a wrong answer and there was nothing I could do about it. I knew then - this was the question that would have passed me. I could not review any further - the idea of stumbling across another incorrect answer was too stressful. Finally after the question reviews, they post your test result - passing was a great feeling! From here I hope to get the business qualified as a Microsoft Certified Partner.

The last few weeks have been pretty crazy with some of the systems I have been working on. Dioptics - a sunglasses company has a $40,000 router - it also doubles as the PBX for the Cisco VoIP system they have as well. In all the router, switches, phones, and wireless access points easily exceeds $400,000 and I got to play on it! It started about ayear ago when I first helped them monitor bandwidth with MRTG. They have a dual T1 pipe and the funny thing is, their Internet is slow. So they asked me to come by again and take a look. At the same time, another client's exchange server had a degraded RAID5. That is supposed to be trivial to fix. You call Dell order a replacement drive, drop it in and you are done.. right? Not in this case. The RAID refused to rebuild - I attempted to upgrade the RAID firmware - when that did not work I called Dell support. As soon as they heard that I upgraded the firmware they told me I was screwed. The server still booted up - so I could back up the data. They suggested a complete backup - destroy the RAID and build a new one. Reinstall and then restore. Instead I build a second RAID array and used a disk copy program. Of course I did a backup but no restore was needed. It is funny, most people start a blog when they are going to have a kid or do something really new and special with their life like travel the world. I finally start bloging to list the major achievements I have accomplished in business. Expect more soon. I also hope to post memories of previous experiences from my first tech job. I could write a book about that!