Ed Buford - Just Another Geek

Wii Hunt

My boys each have a "My Giving Bank" which has three banks in one; A bank for saving, a bank for tithing, and a bank for spending. We have always had the boys on the 10 10 80 plan (10% tithing 10% saving and 80% spending), yet the boys are really good about hanging onto their money.

they'd Recently they decided like to find out how much they have. So my wife helped them empty out their spending cash along with their tithe moneys. They were excited to take the money to church and give it. Meanwhile my wife took their spending money to the bank and had it counted up. When they added the money from their banks with the dollars they keep on hand, they had $221 and some change.

They're good about pooling money to get something cool, so once they realized they had so much money they decided to ask for a game console. I had heard good things about the Wii and talked to them about it.... since they've never seen one, they asked if they could try one out. I arranged a demo for them - Thanks John!

So now the hunt is on... my first instinct was to head to eBay, but they very first console I saw went for a hundred more than I should be able to buy it for.

Next stop PriceGrabber...

Hmmm still way to high....
Every store is out of stock, and every online store has them set to unavailable (can't even order and wait). Any tips on how to get one of these things would be welcome!

3 Bloggers

I've fallen behind on saluting new bloggers, and now there are 3 new bloggers I want to mention. 

Kyle Sagarsee - In case you didn't know it yet, Kyle is our new Help-Desk guy. He's an incredibly talented actor, and has instant rapport with people. He's come to GCC at a really tough time for Jason and me, as we've slowly been drowning in support tickets and we're experiencing some severe network issues. Yet Kyle has managed to jump in and start making a real difference.
Hats off to Kyle!

Mark Moreno - Mark has a small computer consulting firm and has been volunteering for the IT Dept. for at least a couple of years now. He works mainly in the corporate sector but has been shifting his focus towards Churches for a year or more. He's great with SonicWall equipment and has a lot of experience with Windows Small Biz Server.

John Dolan - I'm particularly happy to see this guy blogging. John also is a consultant, and he has very close ties with Perimeter's IT department. For whatever reasons, I took an instant liking to John and I really enjoy hanging out with him. The guy's a wealth of knowledge, and insight, I'm really looking forward to following his blog (he's already posted something on there for me!).

New Switch

Today I began setting up our new HP Procurve 5406zl switch, which all IDFs will eventually dump into. The switch came with two 24 port copper modules and we purchased an additional module (not shown) with 20 more copper and 4 fiber ports.

 

Setting up the new switch proved a little frustrating, not because of the switch but because of Vista on my new workstation. First, I find that Telnet isn't installed in Vista by default, you have to add it in Windows Programs. Then, I discover that HyperTerminal is not a part of Vista at all... aarrggh! So I fell back to an old favorite TeraTerm.

After doing some initial configuration on the switch, Jason, Kyle, and I racked it up and turned it on, It was a pretty sight. The next phase is to group the network into VLANs... the downside is that there is a considerable number of static IPs that will have to renumbered. Unfortunately we don't have the software to change the AMX devices and we'll have to bring in a contractor to do it for us.

More to come.

IT Roundtable - Personal Highlights

The IT Roundtable is like taking a drink from a firehose; so much of it blew past me that I can't remember it all (I can't wait to get the notes). For me the highlights were mainly relational. I thought I'd list some of them while they are still fresh in my mind, I'm listing these in no particular order.

• ACS meet and greet at Pappasito's
  • Great Food, Great atmosphere, Fun of seeing old friends, chance to make new ones. - Thanks Dean!
• Hanging with John Dolan from Viant (works with Perimeter).
  • Always fun, thought provoking, inspiring. -John, you owe me a game of pool!  
• Joking and talking with Trace Pupke
  • He won the Best Laptop Award you know :-)
• Realizing how much I value the relationships I have with so many of the people at the roundtable.
• Hanging with Jason Lee
  • Someone get that guy a blog!
• Dinner with Jason Powell, Terry Chapman from Fellowship , Mike Gold, Gina Buresch, Vicki Dolikian,  Beth Hayes, David Jenkins, all from Willow Creek.
• Late night chat in the parking lot with Jason Powell, Jimmy Williams, and Mark Stephenson.
• Mike Gold's Presentation called Flood.
• After hours chat with the guys from DataCore.
  • Trying to get my mind around storage virtualization makes my head hurt.
• Laughing with Jason Powell
• Building a friendship with Jason Kergosien
• Dinner with David Drinnon and a personal tour of Second Baptist
  • WOW
• Getting to know Fady Eldeiry
• Food

Thanks Tony and Chris McGuffin for making all this possible. You guys did a stellar job.

Looking at Logs

It's my opinion that event logs, syslogs, and security logs are the most important and most useless part of IT. I know that my log files have a great amount of really useful data; the trouble is that there is just so much data I don't have time to look at it all. Because there is so much data, trying to find that useful data is like searching for a needle in a haystack.

What I really need is an aggregator that will sort enough of the hay out so that I can see the needles; and I need it on a budget... oh yeah, it needs to be easy to install.

So tell me what do you use for log aggregation, how hard was it to set it up.... how much does it cost?

So who's creative?

I've been amazed by how many IT people are musicians. I'm certain the others have some creative outlet they dabble in. IT people spend their time trying to find creative solutions to seemingly mundane tasks. If you think you're a "creative" and IT folks are Technical non-creative geeks, you might want to think again.

Robocopy

I thought I'd take a few minutes to post about an old friend of mine.... Robocopy. It's part of the Server Resource Kit, if you don't already have the resource kit, download it here.

I won't go into detail as to how to use it, you can email me if you're having trouble with it, but here are some bullet points about what it will do for you.

• Copy Permissions
• Mirror Folder / Files
• Copy in restartable mode
• Copy only updated files
• Monitor Folders and Automagically update

And of course since this is a command line, you can script all the functions in a batch file.

For those of you who want a GUI, you can get one here.

Google Lag

Ok I admit it, I'm a Google freak. I use gmail, Google analytics, Google personal home page and of course, Google Reader. I really like Google reader but I can't stand the lag. I'm sitting next to Jason and I watched him post something, I go to Google Reader and nothing... I go over to Bloglines and there it is. Come On Google what's the Deal?

Best Laptop Award

Trace Pupke and I went toe to toe with our laptops earlier this year, read about it here.

Although, I had good shot at keeping up with Trace's sweet laptop, I traded my Lenovo in for a Mac and had to concede that Trace did a much better laptop than I do.

Sooo I'm pleased to announce that Trace is the winner of the Geekiest Laptop Award! Here is a photo of Trace receiving this sweet Post-it award.

Congrats Trace!  

Just a little sad.

Recently my wife set up gmail accounts for both of my sons who are 6 and 3/4. This morning, I got an email from each of them. I know my wife has something to do with it, but it really was a sweet thing. One the one hand it's fun to see them growing up, on the other head it's a little sad to see them growing up so quickly.