Domain Controller issues

I have to admit, I screwed something up.

A few posts back I had written about a supposedly successful P2V conversion on one of our domain controllers.  I want to be the first (hopefully) to say that I was wrong on this.  After further testing, replication simply wasn’t happening between both DCs, even though the event viewer showed that it was so.

As such, I’m probably going to end up building a new DC from scratch on one of our VMware hosts.  We haven’t got any servers set for deployment at this time, so this will be an opportunity to sysprep a Server 2003 installation and store it off to the side for later.

I mat take another crack at P2V-ing a domain controller in the future, but right now there are bigger fish to fry.

Sooner or later.

Since I’ve come on staff at NewPointe, the only Macs that I’ve purchased have been for production use (Pro Presenter, Final Cut, etc.).  To this point we only have ONE staff member at NPCC that is a full-time Mac user, and he bought his iBook before I came on board.

I’ve wondered now and then how long it would be before I’d get an actual request to purchase a Mac.  A couple weeks ago, I got my answer.  One of our end users has requested a MacBook to run Final Cut on, as well as ProTools for both offline and live use.  This unit would also serve as their “working” system, i.e. they would be checking email, writing Word docs, and doing everything else they did on their previous laptop, on this MacBook.

Now I don’t know if this request is going to go through or not, but it did get me thinking about support issues for Macs.  When do you actually begin to support Mac desktops and notebooks.  Do you wait until you have a certain number of them deployed?  Do you just wait until your users are so frustrated that you no longer have a choice? 

And what about getting your Macs to play nice on a Windows network?  Do a lot or organizations bind them to the windows domain, or are they just free-roaming machines that wander around on the LAN with no external management?

Let me get this out of the way.  I’m not AGAINST Macs.  Those who know me know that I’ve been editing on Final Cut for a few years now, so I could actually sit on either side of the fence on all the Mac/PC issues (cost aside, of course).  What’s on my mind right now is this:  On a Windows network, how much support time do you dedicate to your Mac users, and where do you draw the line on Mac support (if you have a line)?

I know many of you have different thoughts on this.  Share them if you have time.

Backing up on separate networks

[Disclaimer:  This is a long post, and primarily for my own future reference.]

One of the things I’ve wanted to do with our backup server is get it running backups on a network separate from our LAN.  This would allow us to run backups at any time without loading down the network.

I’m no network guru (not even close), so I had a little bit of trouble getting my mind around how this would work.  After talking with my good friend Ed, it made much more sense.  Basically what we needed to do was put a new NIC in each physical machine and give it an address that’s a different class from our LAN.  (our LAN is 10.80.*; we chose 172.16.* for the auxiliary).  After that, I would set the backup server and clients to listen on their 172.16.* addresses.  Thus, all backup traffic should get pushed through the new NICs and onto the auxiliary network, and life would be good.

After installing the new hardware, the next task is to go into the virtual network settings of your VMware host and bridge each of your physical NICs to a specific VMnet.  By default, the VMware server bridges your first adapter to VMnet0.  You’ll need to disable this in your host’s virtual network settings.

I bridged the physical NIC for the 10.80.* network to VMnet0 and then bridged the new NIC to VMnet3.

The next task is to add new virtual network adapter.  You’ll want to select a Custom network connection for the new adapter and point it directly at a specific VMnet (VMnet3 for me).

After you’re done, go into your VM, configure your new virtual NIC for the right network, and you’re good to go!

We use CommVault Galaxy Express for backups, and so changing the client to run on the alternate network is pretty easy.

 

I am by no means saying that “this is how you should back up your stuff,” but this is what’s working for us.  I’ve only been using Galaxy Express for a couple of weeks, but I am already a huge fan of the software.  It is extremely flexible and as far as I’m concerned, quite easy to use.  If you’re in the market for a backup solution, this is definitely a tool that you’ll want to consider.

Tuesday night follow-up

On Tuesday night I took the opportunity to shut our servers down for the night, clean up the wiring in our server rack and MDF, and move the server rack to the other side of the room.  The moving of the server rack wasn’t super-crucial, but it did line the rack’s exhaust fans up with the air return in the room, so our air flow is now slightly more efficient.

I said on Wednesday morning that I would post some pics… really more for my benefit than anyone else’s.  So here they are.

A picture of the server room before the cleanup.  We’ve got wires hanging all over the back of the MDF/Telco rack. 

Wires hanging out of the server rack too.  I didn’t take pictures of the inside of the server rack, but believe me it was UGLY.

Here’s a couple pics of the server room and rack after the cleanup.  The wiring at the MDF is cleaned up, and the CAT5e wiring from the servers has all been replaced with CAT6 and is running to the ceiling through a piece of flex tubing.

The wiring in the server rack was also tied down with velcro ties (just in case we need to loosen it up to run more wires through).  Again, no pictures of the inside of the rack, because some goof (me) forgot to take them.

Why so much trouble to clean this up?  I admit, I’ve got a little bit of OCD when it comes to keeping things neat and orderly (and I’m still learning how to do it better as I go).  But I also believe that if something is hard to look at (like messy, unlabelled cables strewn loosely inside racks and such), it’s going to be hard to WORK ON, too. 

I’d rather make a time investment to get things in order rather than pay the price for it when something goes down and we have to start chasing down a patch to this or that.  We’ve still got a bunch to do in this room (as well as our IDFs), but Tuesday night got us off to a good start, and I’m looking forward to doing more of this in the future.

Hard day's night…

It’s just coming up on 6:30 Wednesday morning.  I just got home.  Tonight’s work night was a success for the most part.  The only thing that I didn’t get nailed down was figuring out how to run CommVault Galaxy Express on a network that’s separate from our LAN, though I think I might have stumbled onto the answer during the drive home.

I have to say, I really love what I do (duh).  I mean, I could have called it a day at 1:00am and gone home, but being RIGHT on the EDGE of getting something to work the way it should (namely the backup server)…man… that fuels me and keeps me going.  I guess I’m passionate about stuff working properly and looking good, even if it does keep me on task until the birds start chirping.

I’ll post some pictures of last night’s work after breakfast.