Work night recap

Last night’s big project was installing a new wireless AP in Origins Cafe.  The AP is a Proxim AP4000, which I’ve had in the box for a few weeks and never had a chance to install, mainly because there was other stuff that needed to get done.

The hardest thing about this project was getting the new cable pulled to the pillar that the AP is mounted on.  Fortunately, our A/V engineers spec’d the building with an abundance of extra conduit during the planning stages.  One of those conduits just happens to go from this pillar straight to one of the IDFs.  NICE!

The second project of the night was getting our backup server’s RAID chassis mounted into the server rack.  It’s been sitting on-end atop the server UPS for some time now, and with a tape library coming down the pipe, this needed to be done soon anyway.

Just for the sake of mention… that whitebox below the chassis is our backup server.  After wrestling with a rack-mounted shelf (which fell apart as soon as I removed it from the rack….grrr), I am most-likely going to be ordering a rack-mount case to transplant the backup server’s hardware into.

Aside from being exhausted this morning (I didn’t sleep good at all last night for some reason), it felt like a productive night, and I like those.   Hopefully the rest of the week turns out the same.

Prism

I was reading through my feeds this morning and came upon some sweetness over at the Geeks Are Sexy tech blog.

Mozilla has launched a project called Prism.  Prism is able to take a web application (Google Reader, Zoho, Facebook, whatever) and make it executable inside it’s own Windows screen.

Right now it’s only available for Windows, but it’s well-worth a look, especially if you’ve got web applications that you keep running all day.

Much thanks to Kiltac at [GAS] for posting this.  Good stuff!

Sunday Afternoon Miscellany

It’s a great afternoon for resting, and I’ve been doing just that.  I thought I’d take some time and dump some stuff off my mind though.

We had a Mac crash during production today in our control room.  Yep, a Mac.  The service screeched to a halt for about 15 seconds while we brought it back online. 

Apparently I missed a DST patch on one of our servers.  I walked into the office after morning services to check things out.  One DC had changed time while the other one hadn’t.  I applied the DST patch to the offending server and things look like they’re back to normal.

I’ve eaten way too much pizza this weekend.

I’ve been spending a fair amount of time in Planning Center, and the more I use it, the more I like it.  I may even learn CSS and Liquid so that I can crank out some custom production plans.

I started using Meebo for instant messaging a few weeks ago, and I’m pretty much hooked.  I still have some of the apps on my PC just in case I need to do a file transfer, but I can’t remember the last time I’ve had to do that.

That’s all for now.

Some need this more than others…

…and I’m not saying I know who “some” are, but I do know the above statement is true.

Last night I was looking for a couple of items to aid me in a conversation on email etiquette when I came across this web site.  There are many good articles in the blog (where I did most of my reading) that are well worth a read, especially if you spend a fair amount of time typing email.

Domain Rebuild – Part 1

I didn’t have a whole lot of time to spend on the domain rebuild this week, but I did get it started as of Tuesday night.  Currently it’s in the form of a Server 2003 VM.  AD was installed, and the OU structure has been replicated from our existing domain.

I used the Group Policy Management Tool to make printouts of our active GPOs.  It would be nice if the tool also allowed you to print out a list of OUs that link to each object as well, but a little bit of handwriting never hurt anyone.  I also started a mind map of everything I can think of that will need to happen for this domain migration to go smoothly.

Next week I’ll concentrate on recreating the GPOs in the new domain, as well as moving over any login scripts.  I’m also going to continue mind mapping so I can get my mind around the magnitude of this project… I’m nowhere near done.

I’m just glad I’m not on a hard timeline.