Peter Woods

Another one in the collection. I'm now a VMware Certified Professional for VI3 (Virtual Infrastructure 3). 

Nagios Replacement: The Nagios replacement project is entering it's final staging and will soon be running in parallel.  The Unix and Windows teams are creating their service checks and adding issues to the list when they do not exist. The new Nagios will be running in parallel at the end of the month.

ITS Website Redesign: Development on the new ITS website is still continuing.  My involvement in the project this month has been relatively minimal. Once the test web site is completed, the server will be cloned into two production servers.

Diamond IP: In support of the Diamon IP DNS project, I have install several Perl modules on the ITS web server for the custom web page component of the project.  This code will need to be migrated over to the new ITS servers.

Web Server Patching: I have patched all of the shared Linux web servers to current RHEL4 standards.  This was done over two weekends, and was done without service interruption.

Web Fixes: Surprisely, some people have found some untested features and content that were migrated over from the Solaris environment almost a full year ago.  Some of the CGI functionality was not working.  CGI scripts that were in the HTML content directory ran without issues; however, scripts in the cgi-bin directory were generating file not found errors.

Backup Support: I have been providing intermittent operating system support to Derek on the backup server and storage node.

Hera Server Crash: Hera has suffered what appears to be a power supply failure. The server has been taken to a local vendor for repair. Migrating the application and data from this server to a standard platform will probably be a top priority once the server is returned.

Redhat Training: I completed the Redhat System Monitoring and Performance Tuning class at the tail end of last month, and I received confirmation that I did pass the exam.

It took us a few hours, but Derek and I (mostly Derek) were able to get the backup server back online. There's nothing like rebooting a server and finding out that it renumbered the SCSI devices. Derek had to rebuild the jukebox configuration. Unfortunately, the tool did not like the existing device names for our tape drives, so we had to tinker with the udev rules to find some device names that it would accept.  Once we got the jukebox rebuilt, we had to re-inventory all of the tapes since Networker thought that there were some tapes stuck in tape drives that were referenced by the old devices names.  This was rather time consuming so I worked on my CGI issue. Once everything finished, Derek was able to restart all of the backup jobs. I also put in another pair of kernel tunes which I hope will address the RPC errors that we are seeing in the logs. The CGI scripts also also working in the test web environment now. (Sorry no audio tonight.)

Here's to something different.  Hopefully I sound a little more spontaneous in the future…

All of the primary web servers (the A group) have been patched up to current levels.  I've only got a few Linux systems left to complete.

Over the past hour I've received five fax calls from St Thomas Hospital.  I got in with their helpdesk, and the tech said something about the ER.  I hope it wasn't important…

I did something different last night after I got home from work.  I did not startup my work laptop or my personal laptop at all to doing any work or surfing.  That's probably the first time that I've done that in half a year.

I got my exam results for my RH442 Enterprise Systems Monitoring and Performance Tuning test.  I managed to get enough points to pass the test.  One down, four more to go.