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Deep breath…

istartedaproject365andamnowmorethan150daysintoit(whichshowshowlongitsbeensinceiveblogged!)
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ibecameabigfanofprismkites
itraveledtolasvegasforalongweekendwithbethanytomeetupwithmyfamilywhichwasawesome
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ifinishedmyfirstsemesteratuaswitha4.0gpa
ispentchristmasandnewyeariniowawithbethanysfamily
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iphotographedtheheckoutoflocalsleddogracesandhadmultiplefeaturesraninthetundradrums
ipassedmyapplecertifiedtechnicalcoordinatorexamsinosx10.6havingneverseenwithsnowleopard
ibecameweirdlyaccustomedtodrivingontheriverinmytruck
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iwillhavecompleted18collegecreditsthroughuasbytheendofjuneafterregisteringformoreclassestonight
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inolongerwearadressshirttowork

I will try to blog more. I usually can’t be bothered and end up with short updates on twitter or Facebook. If you’re wanting to keep up, that’s probably easier. And my flickr photo stream.

This is a pretty sight:

In 10 minutes I was able to promote a replicated LUN on our off-site DR SAN, rescan for volumes on our off-site DR ESX host, and then add the VM to the inventory and power it up. Given our replication scheduling and speeds, I should be able to bring online a fully-functional VM in a state no more than 2 hours behind what the production server was. I’ll take that Finishing off the documentation for the infrastructure and can move on to other areas, such as migrating more of our physical servers in to the environment – I’ve already decommissioned 7, and currently running 17 production and 5 dev VM’s.

On Monday I implemented some routing and switching changes with the help of AT&T and our awesome network support guys from Integrated Logic. This finally let our iSCSI traffic for our Equallogic SAN units talk to each other between the district office and our off site location, Gladys Jung, across a 100Mb fiber line. To say I was a happy monkey upon seeing the LUN replications firing up is an understatement! Tomorrow I plan on bringing one of the LUN’s online, connecting to the DR VMware ESX host and seeing if I can actually bring the virtual machine online. At that stage, I will definately be beyond happy. We started planning our VMware infrastructure at the end of September, and has been a long project to get to the finish line, but totally worth it in terms of the set up we are now running, especially for the middle of no-where Alaska!

Today I bought the bullet and plumped for OS X and iLife updates, taking my MacBook from OS X 10.4 to 10.5 and iLife ‘06 to ‘09. Was literally 3 years ago last week I got the little guy, and I have to say, after a 2Gb RAM upgrade pretty much right away for under $80 and then a hard drive replacement, also around $80, after 18 months of abuse (literally – more than a dozen major airline flights, bush airlines, and 2 month road trip!), it’s been flawless and still powers everything I need without leaving me wanting. It’s probably the most impressive piece of computer equipment I’ve ever bought (I would say electronics in general, bit I do love my Canon EOS 50D!). Given I’ve seen hundreds of new machines passing through the office and workshops this past week for imaging and inventory, I know what the current crop of MacBooks run at, and for general day to use, this 3 year old baby is holding it’s own still!

This last week I’ve been very busy at work as there are a lot of things I can be getting on with, config changes to make, and new systems to deploy, etc. whilst the majority of staff are out. I have been busy deploying a new district office DHCP server and pair of district-wide DNS servers also handling recursion from the X-serves out in sites. I have some layer 3 routing changes to implement tomorrow with AT&T to hopefully finally get SAN replication between our disaster recovery site and district office.

I did head out to Pinky’s Park on Tuesday to watch a little softball:

Four night’s a week there’s a fairly informal league for teams to play in which was good fun:

Wednesday night I then took a ride down to the river to check out the boats moving in + out from people fishing. The last week or two there has been a good run of salmon, with fish drying all over town outside houses:

I also met a cool old local called Joseph that I watched repairing his salmon nets with the traditional tools:

He let me hang around a good 10 minutes or so watching and making some photographs, with one his dogs also keeping watch on the proceedings in case anything good happened:

On Friday, Jeff had Dennis and I round for a roast dinner. I got to play with my new Canon EF 50mm f/1.8 lens which I have fallen in love with! This is Dennis playing barman and making sure not a drop of tequila was spilled:

And then the chef himself taking a break after dinner to drink + chat:

I submitted a few photos in to the Tundra Drums after they got in touch asking for some possible photos to run in next week’s edition. Hopefully they like some of them and they get printed. Large sized photos of these ones here are on my flickr account.

I’m now camped out at Jeff + Angel’s dog sitting Niko and Suka for the next week Is a nice little change, though was weird driving them up to the airport and then coming back myself and dealing with the joys of AC store parking lot! Never imagined I’d be driving round Bethel. Still, there were a few little errands I was wanting to get done in the next few days, so will be a help having a car to use.

The last couple of weeks have slowly been easing up at work with the bulk of the teachers and associated staff winding down. I am feeling kinda like a lost puppy with so many of my play buddies gone though now! I have the last of the VMware SAN replication to do this week with a consultant on-site Tuesday + Wednesday to move our second Equallogic unit off site. I already moved an ESX host to our off site location which works nicely given we have a 100Mb fiber line out there too.

I have a couple of website projects lined up, and a few photography projects to think about over the summer. Nice to have contacts now Some of those could turn out to be quite fun and a good experience. I scanned in 4 rolls of 35mm film the last couple of days too which gives me plenty of post-production work to do this week whilst hanging out here with the dogs. There’s a right mix of photos from the last few months, so will post some when I’m happy with the results.

The last couple of days have been busy with VMware and PowerSchool. We’ve had a consultant in working with us, and it was the perfect opportunity to migrate our student information system (SIS), PowerSchool, in to our VMware environment. I was planning on leaving PowerSchool as one of the our last physical servers to move in to the virtual environment, but given we had the experience on site to do it and I was confident in how VMware has been running, I thought we may as well give it a go. If nothing else, could simply roll back to the single physical server.

But, it all actually went fairly smoothly. I built up a template for Win 2k3 Enterprise with the base config and software, then deployed to 4 new virtual machines. One of these is running Oracle for the backend database, two are running the PowerSchool application node, with one being designated for general staff + parent logins, and the other for teachers and grading, and a final server dedicated to serving images, scripting and PHP reports. I have also snap-shot’d the database VM and one of the application nodes to be used for testing reports and in training sessions. Add in the new SIF ZIS which will be being deployed by the state over the summer, and that gives 7 virtual servers for PowerSchool, a far cry from the reliance and strain on a single physical server.

I’m really happy with how the migration went, as it really showed the power our VMware environment provides in terms of flexibility and resources. It also takes a huge weight off my shoulders, as we’ve never been able to successfully recover from a simulated failure using the backups due to the complexity of the integration between components, so with using straight vRanger Pro snapshots of the entire virtual machines, I can recover in minutes. I can also easily duplicate entire servers for testing updates, new releases (such as the upcoming PowerSchool 6), or for training purposes. Given PowerSchool is such a core system alongside FileMaker, both of which now run in our VMware environment, my management work load and stress levels should hopefully ease up considerably!

We still have a little work to do tomorrow – I’d like to automate a snapshot of the Oracle VM to a test VM that can be used by staff for building reports or whatever, though due to the way the database is tied in to the host IP, will need a little scripting. I’d also like to duplicate one of the application nodes and set it aside for testing the upgrade to PowerSchool 6. Is all positive stuff though, and giving me a lot of confidence in systems moving forward.

This is why I run a 30″ Apple Cinema display. Days like this make me think I either need another one, or another job:

18 Apple Remote Desktop connections plus a Microsoft Remote Desktop Connection I had to quickly work on one chain of our site servers. As Ted pointed out – a computer can multi-task, but can Iain? Will be glad when it’s the weekend and the schools have all broken up so it will quiet down for the summer.

Ted got picked me up at stupid o’clock this morning to be at Yute Air for 7.30a.m to fly out to Atmautluak with their new Open Directory server for deployment. They actually had us on the plane and in the air right around 8.30a.m as planned which was novel. It really was a little puddle-jumper flight across the melting tundra:

A very short, sub-10 minute flight brought us in to the Atmautluak, a pretty small village west of Bethel:

There was quite a bit more snow down than around Bethel, was quite weird. At least the airline agent took the X-serve on a sled to the school whilst we took the 10 minute or so walk there, as I did not fancy carrying a 50lbs server box through the snow! There are signs of melting though, and these dogs are soon going to be swimming if they’re not moved to slightly higher ground:

After some minor networking issues, we brought their new server online without too many problems, got it replicating back to the district office in Bethel and then began migrating some of their staff. We managed to get a good half a dozen staff running against the new server which was most of their teaching staff and our goal. Even more surprisingly, Yute were seemingly on time to pick us up at 4.30p.m, so we grabbed a ride out to the airport. It’s a tough life sometimes working in Alaska – this was Ted + I in the back of a sled whilst Brent clung on to the snowmobile (the sled was a lot safer!):

On the plane, a rather curious navigation device that managed to maintain it’s position throughout the flight back to Bethel:

But, at least we were back in Bethel by 5p.m, a good end to the day. Good ol’ Yute Air finally managed to redeem themselves though – a couple of boxes we were bringing back for the media center never made if off the plane (even though we were the only passengers on it, the pilot helped us load them on, and in fact, had to move one of the boxes to get our bags off in Bethel…) and instead went completely the opposite direction down to Eek and Quinhagak That’s our last Open Directory deployment for the school year though, we’ve now got four deployed outside the district office, and a good spread of users running off them. Will give us some valuable testing before rolling out more users across those sites after the summer and then deploying the technology to more sites across the district.

I decided my glasses were boring after seeing a pair Andrea was walking around with:

Spiffy, but don’t clear up my vision quite as well. Just another Monday morning in the office…

This morning brought more weather holds and AT&T called off the trip out here. I was quite relieved as had to get GCI cable sorted and head to the chiropractor over lunchtime, so hadn’t wanted to travel today anyway. At least our engineer working on our core networking made it out okay this afternoon and got straight to work, so I’m hoping things go smoothly over the weekend and by Monday/Tuesday our spiffy VMware environment will finally be ready to roll.

Anyways, I got cable TV canceled today, and internet is apparently switched over though curiously still works here. My phone has been disconnected so hoping it’s switched too. Is weird sitting in a bare apartment with everything in boxes and a laptop in the middle of the floor as my only source of entertainment and connection to anyone Have rounded up a couple of troops for moving tomorrow, and hoping donating some beers tonight brings a few more!