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5 months. Crap.

Published at: 04:05 pm - Wednesday May 05 2010

So 5 months has lapsed since my last post. I just haven’t been keeping this thing up the way I wanted to, I’ve been too busy with other stuff to think about it.

Since last post, I’ve gotten my MCITP:SA and the new job I spoke of last post, working for the Network Operation Center. We’ve got servers and network devices on 6 different continents, and I’m gaining a new knowledge of WAN that I was only scratching the surface on before. Cable cuts in the Mediterranean are now a big deal to me, and I’ve gained a new hatred for HSSI interfaces on satellite links. WAN is one of the few things that I still have high interest, yet know very little about when it comes to IT.

My current geek project involves Dropbox, and exploring all the potential uses I can find for it. I upgraded to a $10/mo, 50GB account so that my photographer, iPhone toting girlfriend has a place to back up all her images in the cloud. She can also get at any of the photos on her iPhone with the app. I’m especially proud of the symbolic link set up on my webserver that allows her to instantly publish a photo to her photography site simply but putting the image in a folder on her computer, or even just snapping a pic from her iPhone. She’s pretty happy with it too so far.

Also in the news, I’m going to Vegas this summer! Wooooo! The girlfriend will be turning 21, and we’re gonna go gamble and have a great time in the city of sin. Should be lots of fun. If I don’t forget about this blog, I’ll post details of the trip and the days leading up to it.

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Misc Ramblings about Certs, WinMo7, and etc.

Published at: 04:01 pm - Friday January 15 2010

Yeah, it’s been a month. Whatever… I’ve got no time any more.

Since last post, I passed my 83-640 test, and am scheduled to take the 70-642 test next Monday, in pursuit of my Server 2008 MCITP:SA certification. It’s a 3 part cert, and i’m a third of the way there. If I pass my test on Monday, I’ll take the third and final part next Friday and try to wrap it up. Assuming all goes as planned, I’ll be MCITP:SA in a little under 2 weeks! Pretty exciting, since a new job opportunity could result if I get the cert, not to mention it makes me that much more valuable to a potential employer. I’m very confident in my passing the exams, and from what I can tell, the hardest test is already behind me.

On another note, I’m seeing a lot more blog press on Windows Mobile 7 and its possible debut at the MWC in Barcelona this February. I’m really hoping they unveil and announce a release for it, since it would mean big things for Microsoft’s mobile market, and big things for me as a fan of WM. I’ve been hearing some of the rumors going around about XBox Live integration on WM7, and various other features that WM7 may be touting. I for one would like to see “mobile Media Extender” type function in the new mobile OS. I want to be able to have my phone connect to my media library at home and stream my music, pictures, and videos straight to my device the way my 360 extends my Media Center in my home theater. The way I see it, I have my stuff at home, why do I need to copy it to my phone to use it on the go? I have a decent, always-on internet connection on my phone, and a pretty good connection at home, so let’s make use of the bandwidth I have available to me! I can stream YouTube vids and Internet Radio streams to my phone, now let’s get my Windows 7 Media Center streaming out my own media at my command to my phone too!

Seriously. How awesome would that be? Oh cool, your iPhone has 16GB of music and video storage. My Media Center at home has 3TB of storage for my media, and I don’t have to sync anything to see it wherever I am! That’s the future of mobile media if you ask me. Also, playing XBL Arcade games on my phone or my XBox would be pretty nice as well. That’s how MSFT can get back into the mobile market, by making a platform that can be an extension of a bigger cloud of media and games. I’ve got my media at home on my PC, I want it on my XBox and on my WM7 phone. I’ve got my games on my XBox 360, I want to play them on my PC and my Phone. And maybe this is a strech, but my PC and XBox have mics, speakers, keyboard entry mechanisms, I want to send texts and make calls through them too! All three should work in unison. The mobile business market is being gobbled up by Blackberry, and iPhone CREATED the consumer mobile market, which has proven more profitable than business ever was. WM7 needs to get in where the money is and make something that everybody’s teenage son and daughter wants. That’s my take.

Posted in: Geek, Personal by AiRDawG No Comments

Access Granted

Published at: 04:12 pm - Tuesday December 15 2009

Whups, forgot about this thing again. Ahh well. Moved this blog for the 2nd time now, onto a VM running on my box that is now colocated down in MacLean, VA with SuberHosting.com. More on that in a bit. Along with a couple big developing stories in AiRDawG world to be mentioned.

Big news in the last week or so is that I’ve been granted full enable access to the ten edge switches on campus at work! 6509′s and 6513′s with 2500+ nodes are now at my mercy! *Evil laugh* Also, I pretty much ran the show over the weekend when myself and a couple guys from the team did a closet cleanup and line card shuffle to try and organize the rat’s nest of patch cables that was in there. I did all the config changes on the switch afterward, and pretty much got it done they way I wanted it. It also came to my attention today that these closet cleanup efforts, while 4 or 5 people total had a hand in making the decisions on how to do it, ultimately have just been the group saying “yeah, Aaron’s ideas are good ones, let’s do that”. I took a look at the two closets we’ve done so far, and all the changes were the product of my vision for what should be done.

Other big news is that Zeb and I finally finished up with our box for the ArcusHosting project we’ve been working on, and I trucked the thing down to the datacenter one friday off about a month or so ago. It’s up and running with 2 or 3 VMs on it serving up some websites and files, including this site! I’m very happy with what we’ve done, and the machine is absolutely a beast. It just tears through anything I can throw at it. As things progress, I’ll try to update more on what’s happening there.

Amber is coming home tomorrow evening, so I may disappear again, impossible to predict. She’s home from school on winter break until early February, which is great because I miss her a lot when she’s at school. We have nothing at all planned for break, which is just the way we like it, lots of sleeping in and video games.

Hopefully I’ll get back to this thing again soon and won’t let it go for so long…

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Uhg

Published at: 03:11 pm - Saturday November 07 2009

Loads of stuff going on this past week or two, had no time to post. Typical grind in my absence, nothing seriously major to update. Spent the weekend with Amber last weekend, and Monday night with my parents. Managed to get that heatsink on the grinder while I was over there, so now it fits in the server, and it’s running well with both processors. Gonna try to finalize the Win2k8 Server install over this week so we might possibly get it to the datacenter this coming Friday. May not have much else in the way of options to get it down there with the holidays coming.

Been playing some Borderlands, and I must say the game is quite fun. There’s not REALLY a buhzillion guns, just a buhzillion variations on 6 different types of guns. It’s a LOT like Diablo in many ways, both in the items aspect and in the quests aspect as well. It’s very entertaining to say the least though, hopefully some extra content will come around, because this is a good, modern variant of Diablo and that style of game definitely has a solid market.

Not even concerned with MW2 anymore, already decided I’m not gonna touch the game on any platform. I’m gonna wait until BF:Bad Company 2 comes out, since DICE still respects the PC community that made them what they are today.

More updates will come as they happen and when I have time to post them!

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ArcusHosting Server Update

Published at: 04:10 pm - Monday October 26 2009

My little side project, Arcus Hosting, has hit 1 final snag in the build process that must be addressed before colo’ing the box down in MacLean, VA.

The second processor has been patiently waiting for it’s heatsink to arrive so it can be put in the box and be cooled properly. Well, come in it did, but fit it does not. The four screws that mount the heatspreader to the mainboard have extended “stands” on them that prevent it from making contact with the processor, thus rendering it useless. Rather than deal with returning it to an eBay user and all that mess, I’m going to make use of a grinder to essentially grind down enough of the extended stands until there is enough taken off that will eliminate the clearance between the bottom of the heatsink and the processor.

Will post another update to describe how it went…

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Playing on the 6513 Lab Switch

Published at: 12:10 pm - Monday October 26 2009

My job has been beating around the bush when it comes to moving me from a temporary, “contractor” position into a permanent spot, which frustrates me on a daily basis. However, when it comes to giving me opportunities to learn and experience new stuff, I’ve never worked for a company that has helped me this much.

I have at my disposal the knowledge and experience of our Senior Global Network and Telecoms guy, who has been at this stuff for over 40 years, has an electrical engineering degree, and is a full-on HAM enthusiast. He’s forgotten more about networking that I will ever learn. That kind of resource is hard to come by. What’s more, he’s obviously enthusiastic about teaching me and a couple of my co-workers about his specialty, because he set up a Lab environment for us with a 6513, a 6509, and a couple 3500 series switches, complete with enable access to all of the above.

So that’s what I’m doing this afternoon, just fiddling around with a $100,000 Cisco appliance and the $250,000 worth of line cards and modules. A CCNA/P course only wishes they could provide this sort of privilege to students.

AARON(config)#no shut brain

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Windows 7 on my Mom’s HP tx1000

Published at: 03:10 pm - Friday October 23 2009

I’m a terrible geek son. My mom brought me her laptop with a hard drive failure over two months ago, and I still haven’t fixed it. She’s a saint for going so long without it, and I know she’s missed it. She’s barely even asked me about it.

Regardless, I’ve got a brand new WD blue edition 250GB drive in the thing and it’s cooking with a fresh install of Win7 Ultimate. Getting all the drivers installed now so that I can play with the new tablet functions of 7. From the very little I’ve read, the tablet stuff has gotten some enhancements for 7 along the lines of math equation recognition and some other character recognition-type beef-ups. These damn things have a biometric scanner built in, which my mom HATED and I ended up disabling it for her so it would stop bugging her for finger swipes, and now I’m loathing it as well since it’s wanting special drivers and such.

But it’s all done now, so it’ll be back home with her tonight when I go up to see them…

Posted in: Geek, Personal by AiRDawG No Comments

Borderlands?

Published at: 12:10 pm - Tuesday October 20 2009

What’s this nonsense about Borderlands having so many guns you’d never be able to use them all? Sounds like a wager to me.

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Day 2 – Hyper-V and the HP platform

Published at: 09:10 am - Tuesday October 20 2009

Two days in a row!  Making progress!

A co-worker and I decided to undertake a little project to try our hand at some hosting and virtualization.  We procured via eBay an HP DL140 and have spent the last few weeks pooling our finances to purchase a slew of upgrades that took the machine from a single 1.66 Xeon with 1GB of RAM and an 80 gig HD, into a screaming banshee of a platform with about as much power as you can fit into 1u of rackspace.

The final piece of our puzzle, a heatsink, arrives via FedEx tonight, which will provide passive cooling for the second quad core processor we have ready to go in.  This final partwill make the specs as follows: 2x Xeon 5310 quad core 1.6 processors, 16GB RAM, and 2TB disk space in a RAID 0 array (yeah yeah, no fault tolerance, blah blah blah).  The end result is a machine that will virtualize the hell out of some Hyper-V.

The next step will be to cart this monster down to the datacenter in MacLean, VA, where our host will provide Colo with a 100mbit line to some big peers like Level3 and Qwest.  I’ve had a box leased through this host for the past year or so, so it was easy to choose SuperbHosting again for Colo services, since their service and price point is fantastic. </plug> Once the server is on a 100mbit line, we’ll have a lot of freedom to virtualize servers and potentially client OSes for our own personal use and testing.  We’re going to try to run the box til it can’t take any more and see just how far we can push it until failure.

I’ll put up more details on progress and what I’ve gleaned as the project progresses.

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No Dedicated Servers in MW2

Published at: 04:10 pm - Monday October 19 2009

So this one came as a blow over the weekend.  The news that IW was scrapping the tried-and-true, user-owned, dedicated server model in favor of their matchmaking service has sent shock waves through the PC FPS gaming community, complete with online petitions, and fanboy backlash filling the database servers of gaming forums.

Personally, I hate the idea too.  I, like many of the aforementioned fanboys, think this is a move away from the fundamentals of what make FPSes great on PC.  As a long-time CS player, I know the benefit of having “a place to call home” or a server and group of players you can go to over and over.  As a server admin, knowing that a peaceful place to play is only a banhammer’s swing away is comforting.  As a server host, I can earn some money for myself and pay for my boxes, all while enjoying perfect registry on the fastest pipe I can afford.  Gone are the days.

On the brighter side, it’s $60 less that I have to spend.  With co-workers that are PS3 exclusive, friends that are 360 exclusive, and a girlfriend that is PC exclusive, I was saving up to be able to dole out $200 (with tax) to buy the game thrice over.  Looks like Amber and I will have an extra $60 to spend on each other.  (Aww, how cute)

What it brings is an obvious move to shift players from their beloved PCs and onto the much larger, less comfortably uniform, playing field of the consoles.

Times, they are a changin’.

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