the way i see IT

Lately my blogging has slowed quite a bit, and my blog reading has sunk to almost zero (I feel so out of it - at least I have Twitter).  What happened?  Well, life happened.  In addition to the regular goings on at work, I’m taking on the responsibility of finding a new Church Management System.  It’s been literally months of meetings, phone calls, research, meetings, email and meetings.  We’re coming closer to a decision, but then I have to compile all those notes and rationale into my budget that’s due in a week and a half.  If/when the budget committee approves my budget, then the real work starts - moving to the new system.  That will be a huge addition to my already crowded plate.

On top of all that, my wife and I sold our house back in February.  The house we wanted to buy sold the day before ours did, so we’ve been living with my parents since the end of February.  That’s actually been a great experience (which is good because we’ve got a few months to go).  We finally purchased a house in April that we’re really excited about, but it needs a ton of work.  So any free time that I had is now spent remodeling the house.  Of course I have always refused to take away quality time from my two girls, so I spend a lot of late nights at the new house after I put them to bed.  Sleep is over rated anyway!

Here are other miscellaneous things I’m doing or planning for at CLC right now:

• Replacing Symantec Antivirus Corporate - Sophos, Trend Micro, etc?
• Integrating a new Flash based media player into clcdayton.com
• Budgets, budgets, budgets
• Video guys need a big fat RAID box for storage & redundancy
• reinstalling some XP boxes to be used as public Internet kiosks using Windows Steady State
• need to purchase another Dell PowerEdge 2950 and remaining desktops & laptops before fiscal year is up
• purchased and still need to install memory upgrades for a couple servers
• I love Spotlight on Windows (and it’s free!)
• just renewed my hosted HelpSpot account - I’ve been using HelpSpot as the Help Desk and Knowledge base at CLC for almost a year now and love it.

In case you don’t keep up w/ my Twittering, I’m in the beginning of a long-awaited family beach vacation to Destin, FL.  We’ve got a total of 10 people here - 4 kids under 4 and 6 adults.  So far it’s been amazing, and I’m doing well disconnecting (for the most part).  This is the longest I’ve ever been away from the office, so I’m a bit nervous about that. That’s definitely one of the down sides to being a one man IT show.

Okay, the gulf is calling.

I finally wrapped up a series of support calls with SonicWall for our Pro 2040.  For the last week and a half, my secondary WAN connection has been down.  I initially thought it was a Time Warner issue, but in no time I realized it was related to the Sonicwall.

What it finally boiled down to was no traffic could go out the X3 interface, which is our secondary WAN connection that we use for redundancy and load balancing.  After more than a week and every troubleshooting step under the sun, they finally determined (after lots of prompting from me) that the 2040 had a bad interface. 

Now granted, it was not a text book hardware problem.  But I kept telling them “I really think this is hardware related.”  They kept insisting we try more steps. Finally I decided to setup a different interface w/ the X3 settings.  Voila!  That solved it, and within minutes I had an RMA number and the new Pro 2040 will be here Monday morning.

I’ve included the tech support notes for your geeky pleasure.

On the WAN load balancing stats for x3 it shows: Link Up and load balancing state as failover, probe main and alternate target shows as target unavailable. Asked customer to remove the primary wan. Restart the Sonicwall and see if he was able to go online through the secondary WAN. Customer is unable to go online using the X3 interface of the Sonicwall. Bypassing the Sonicwall , he is able to go online using the ISP connection. Asked customer to disable the primary WAN and try to ping 4.2.2.2 from the Sonicwall interface. Wasnt able to. Asked customer to see if he was able to ping the WAN gateway. Wasnt able to. Restarted the cable modem. Still unable to go online. Sonicwall has the mac address of the upstream device, but unable to ping it. Laptop plugged into the cable modem is able to go online. Asked customer to use the laptops LAN mac as the Sonicwall WAN mac. Still unable to go online. Asked customer to disable load balancing and wan failover and see if he was able to go online from the secondary wan. Did a capture while asking customer to ping 4.2.2.2. Didn’t see anything in the capture. No custom routes added.

–Unable to find anything that could cause this type of issue with tests we have ran Submit case for escalation

X3 was working for internet connectivity in the past, currently unable to route internet traffic through X3 –Internet connection is a cable modem. With Sonicwall plugged in and assigned same or different ip information on X3 unable to route out, Sonicwall has ARP entry for upstream gateway but we are unable to ping the gateway from the Sonicwall and unable to route to the internet –Rolling back to 3.2.3.0 build does not help out at all, Brett was sure it worked without issues on this firmware version –Packet capture on pings from the outside show no traffic hitting the Sonicwalls WAN interface –ISP says everything checks out and they can see the Sonicwalls mac address –Cloning mac address for hosts that can plug directly into cable modem produces same results –Unable to find anything that could cause this type of issue with tests we have ran. Submit case for escalation

This case has been assigned to a Senior Technician.

-Pulled power on modem/sonicwall and powered up at the same time, no good -X3 worked fine for a year (timewarner cable/static) then upgraded to 4.0.0.2 and Brett noticed within a week that there was no traffic going out of the x3 any longer as probes kept failing -changed mtu/fragmented packet handling, no good -tried all link states, no good -reset modem, no good -when customer plugs a laptop into the modem with same settings, it works fine -pings from sonicwall to secondary default gateway shows arps going out of the x3 looking for the gateway but no response. -The gateways mac does show up in the arp cache -Tried configuring the x2 with the timewarner connection and it worked great -x3 is bad RMA

I thought this was pretty good.  It’s the video version of my MacBook Air post in January.  Check out the video.

I got one of “those” calls today. 

“Um, I accidentally, well, um kinda sorta,  I mean, I’m not sure how I did it, but. . .  I just deleted an entire folder of really important stuff.”

As luck would have it, I’ve got all of our users home folders backed up to tape and to Mozy.  Instead of having to wade through Backup Exec logs and find the right tape in the changer, I just logged in to the server, right-clicked her home folder, and chose “Restore Files in Folder.”

Mozy pulls in all the files that it has backed up in that folder and you view the entire contents of that directory as of the latest backup or as of a specific point in time.  You can restore individual files or the whole folder.  In 5 minutes she had the whole folder back where it belonged

In the last month I’ve noticed a big increase in spam, both at CLC and in my various web email accounts.  I checked out the logs from Postini for our clcdayton.org domain and here’s what I found.

• In the last 31 days:
  • 511,058 messages were sent to the clcdayton.org domain
  • 149,407 of those were to valid accounts
  • 119,850 messages (80.2%) were blocked as blatant spam
  • 17,415 (11.7%) were quarantined as potential spam
  • 12,142 (8.1%) were valid messages and were forwarded to the recipient

Almost 92%! That is definitely the highest percentage of spam that I’ve ever seen.

My dad just got a brand new D-Link DIR-625 802.11n router. I’ve had really good luck w/ D-Link products at home, and he got a great deal on it.

We got it setup and connected his XP desktop & wireless laptop in no time. The laptop is 802.11g, so we haven’t had a chance to test out the “n” capabilities yet. I’m going to connect my iMac just to try it out.

Anyway, I then attempted to connect my Dell Latitude D820 with Vista Ultimate to the wireless network. I thought this should be easy, if not easier, than the XP laptop. Boy was I wrong. I’m still not sure where the problem is – Vista, the wireless adapter, or both but I simply could not get the laptop to see the wireless network.

Here’s the setup:

I have the network named, it’s in mixed 802.11n, g and b mode. “Auto Channel Scan” is enabled, so it’s automatically picking the wireless channel. Transmission Rate is set to “Best (automatic)” and Visibility Status is Invisible (hidden SSID). Security Mode: WPA-Personal, WPA Mode: Auto (WPA or WPA2), Cipher Type: TKIP and AES. Finally there’s a 63 character Pre-Shared Key that I generated from Steve Gibson’s password site.

No matter what security & encryption settings I chose, Vista simply would not see the network. Finally I set all of the above settings, except I made the network Visible so it would broadcast the SSID.

(Insert choirs of angels singing here)

Found it! Vista connected in a second as soon as I started broadcasting the SSID. So why in the world could it not connect to the network with a hidden SSID? I haven’t done any research yet, but if you know of something let me know.

This info is for my future reference, but maybe it will help someone else too.

I’ve got an older Dell NAS box that, over the years, has picked up a few applications.  The C drive is just under 5GB, so needless to say it fills up quick.  I routinely have to go through the C partition and clean off various logs and updates.

I needed to see the size of each folder, but of course Windows doesn’t offer that seemingly no-brainer feature.  So I downloaded “Folder Size for Windows.”  It’s a great open-source piece of software that calculates folder sizes and displays it in Explorer in a new column called, you guessed it, “Folder Size.”

I was then able to quickly track down the source of the ballooning files - a file called ‘ReporterSvc.log’ in the folder  C:\Program Files\Common Files\Symantec Shared\Reporting Agents\Win32.  It was well over 300 MB and I’m sure would have been bigger if it had any space to grow.  This server used to be a Symantec Antivirus Corporate server. That role has since been retired but the software was still running. 

I stopped the “Reporting Agents” service, then I moved the reportersvc.log file to another partition (in case I still needed it), then restarted the service.  I’m sure it will eventually grow again until I uninstall the software, but this was a quick fix to reclaim those much-needed bytes.

Finally, Google has released their Calendar Sync tool.  I’ve tried a couple other solutions, but haven’t had any success.  Today I installed Google’s tool.  It took about 5 minutes to sync my 1,154 calendar items from Outlook 2007 to my Google calendar, and it all looks great.  You can setup 1 way or 2 way syncs and adjust how many minutes in between syncs.  Pretty basic, but exactly what I’ve been waiting for.  Now my wife can keep tabs on me and change my schedule as much as she wants!

For years we have used PhoneTree with Shelby to do automated phone broadcasts for announcements, reminders, cancellations, emergencies, etc.  It was an okay system, but it only made one call at a time and it tied up one of our phone lines in the process.

Last month we finally dropped PhoneTree, and we’re now using Call-Em-All.com.  I looked at a lot of services, and liked them the best.  It’s a very affordable and powerful service.  I’m the administrator for CLC’s account, and then I can create as many sub-users as I need.  So each department has their own account w/in CLC’s account, and we can run reports on everybody so we know which department to charge.

Call-em-all calls at the rate of 1,000 calls per minute, so what used to take us days now only takes minutes.  There are detailed, real-time reports so you know who was reached, who didn’t answer and who was left a message.

People also have the option of placing themselves on our Do-not-call list, which unfortunately might happen quite a bit because we had a staff member do a PhoneTree at 3 am instead of pm.  Oops.  Call-em-all lets you set an allowed calling timeframe, which in our case is 9am - 8pm.

If you’re looking for a great way to get the word out, check out call-em-all.  If you reference our username (9378988811), you’ll send some free call love CLC’s way, too.