Saturday, December 16, 2006

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!

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