MAR – Oct 2008
October 27th, 2008 by Daniel Raymer
1. DNS/DHCP
- Initial imports of NetID data into the Production Diamond IP environment was initiated. There has been some hiccups along the way with records having old hostnames with different associated DNS records. The update to the record caused some of the resource records to be changed back to the original names. This was responsible for some outages in the web environment as name resolution between the front-end and back-ends was broken.
- With the inital import otherwise successful, the first of many trainings to allow for Self-Server IPAM/DNS was condicted with the Application Hosting group. Training was very successful and the AppHost team has taken to IPAM/DNS better than I hoped. The first "outside of ITS" training started the last week of Oct with MIS up to bat first. All signs also point to successful training and acceptance. Make up training for remaining App Host personnel, as well as extended invitations to the rest of the DNS/DHCP team, has been scheduled for early November.
- Documentation on the Diamond IP environment was completed and disseminated. Anyone should be able to grab the documents and conduct failover or installation/configuration.
- External authorization against LDAPS was finally completed paving the way for external Self-Serve IPAM/DNS.
- There was some outages with the DNS environement caused by some issues with the firewall. After a weekend of stress, some preventive measures were put into place to prevent this from occuring again.
2. Virtual Environment
- The inital attempt to upgrade VCMS to 2.5u3 failed. The database/application was successfully rolled back to the previous version. The next attempt to upgrade will come during the first week of November. Kudos and shouts out to Kendra Thorpe for not only taking the lead on this upgrade, but kicking butt and seeing it through.
- The Leviathan arrived and was racked up. This server should be in the cluster prior to VCMS upgrade. This will allow us to consolidate some virtual data center and use those assets to extend our capacity in some other virtual data centers.
- An evaluation of VKernel’s Virtual Capacity Analyzer was conducted and immediately paid some dividends in clearing up some misconceptions with the Sharepoint environment. The evaluation was entirely too short but I hope to get an extension from VKernel soon. If you have not seen this product, I would recommend taking a peek at what it can do. Check it out at VKernel – http://www.vkernel.com/products/CapacityAnalyzer/
- An open-minded evaluation was performed on Microsoft’s Hyper-V. Yes, this *NIX guy actually looked at a MS product without immediately dismissing it. I found that it is an great first attempt to seriously take on VMware but still falls short in many areas. I expect MS to push plenty of resources at making the following versions much more robust and capable. I would definitely recommend it for a mostly Windows test environment.
3. RHN
- After a vulnerability was discovered in our old RHN environment, there was added emphasis place into getting RHN 5.1.2 up and running. Re-registration scripts mostly generated and this environment should be active before Thanksgiving.
- We are also taking this opportunity to upgrade the Oracle back-end as well. I cannot wait until RHN 5.2 comes out so we can leverage our more "modern" database environment with RHN and get off these older Oracle versions.
4. MISC other stuff
- I had the opportunity to evaluate some Apple products this month. The iPhone and a Macbook Pro managed to sneak their way onto my desk and I decided to drive Steve Job’s kool-aid for a couple of weeks. I will have to say that getting the Macbook Pro to triple boot Mac OS X, Vista Business, and Ubuntu 8.04 took some effort but, in the end, I don’t think I have been more pleased with any laptop before as I have been with this. Combine a little VMware Fusion within Mac OS X for running Vista in Unity mode and there is really no reason NOT to own one of these. Now, if I could only convince management to let me get a 17" Pro with 4 gigs of RAM, I would be as pleased as anyone could be.
- The iPhone was a bit more of a mixed reception. I must admit that 802.11g was nice as was having a REAL browser in a phone. What really impressed me was the Exchange integration. WOW! I don’t think I have ever been as pleased with a phone based mail client for the enterprise as I was with this product. I REALLY liked it and now look at my Treo 700wx with pure hatred. A couple things did really annoy me though… I can’t believe Apple totally missed the ball on voice dialing. In this age of "OMG MUST BE HANDS FREE PHONE," having to touch a screen to dial is pure… archaric. Strange for such a forward thinking device. Also, I totally blame this on the 1st gen iPhone and AT&T’s lousy EDGE network, service coverage for data services was abyssmal here in Nashville. If I had to get a first gen iPhone, I would pass just for that reason. I hear that the 3G network has greater coverage and I would like to find out if that is true. Lastly, I don’t care what people say… touch screen typing is not made for fat fingers. A slide out keyboad ala Android would make this a absolute WIN in my book. That said…. I miss that phone and wish I had it back instead of this lousy Windows Mobile 5.1 Treo 700wx. I really REALLY miss it compared to this brick.
Next month is BIND Views and ESX Upgrade Frenzy. There is definitely no let-up heading into the holiday season!