Thursday, June 29, 2006

Taken much needed time off

I've taken a month off from work and all tech related things to raise my daughter. You can tell that I can't sleep by the time I am posting this. She has has changed my sleeping pattern. I'm not sure how I am going to cope with that when I go back to work. We'll see!

Sunday, June 11, 2006

She's here.

At 10:52am my first born arrived. She is so beautiful. The life that I once knew has officially changed. I am a father.

Daddy loves you Maia.

Tuesday, June 06, 2006

Network Upgrade complete! Flawless execution!

On Saturday June 3rd we did our cut over to the new network. This was the true test and all went damn near perfectly. All in all it was still flawless. We had one issue with netbios and one of our CAD applications.

We used an IP Helper address to route all those packets to the license server IP.
The application work where the client needs to find the server and check out license. Once the client gets the license the server seems to need to know if the client still has the license so it can give the next license to the next client. What was happening was that the server was giving out the same license to all clients. Seems like the server was using netbios to look for computer names. I was able to resolve this by adding DNS suffixes to the server and license server was updating not thinking that the clients were giving up the license they were trying to keep. It's a bit confusing reading it here but if you see it in action it will make more sense.

Other than this legacy netbios multi VLAN issue everything else was golden. VPN, email, web, all of our remote sites, databases etc. was all good. I think I mentioned before that we had to change subnets from /16 to /24 so this also meant that some of our servers needed an IP change as well. Those changes were made and everything was updated. I also had to create objects in my checkpoint firewall for every VLAN. I was getting some IP spoofing in the logs and was like WTF! Come to find out the objects weren't created.

If you are attempting to do anything like this make sure you have a checklist and plan, plan, plan. So much for that project. My hat goes off to Dimension Data for their help and support. Thanks Joe!

cabled_rack