In the morning I will be flying up to Toronto for my first business trip out of the country. I will be setting up a new datacenter for the company I work for in a Sungard facility in Mississauga, a suburb of Toronto Ontario Canada. Due to Canadian laws, we must keep all our customer’s data in Canada in order to do business in there. So we are putting in an exact replica of our production system but with canadian customer data. I will be putting in 6 physical servers and plenty of networking equipment. 3 are ESX hosts with 4 virtual servers each. This is gonna be interesting to see how virtualizing our system works out. From my experience setting up the servers in our office, I think it is going to work great giving us enhanced performance and flexibility while lowering our equipment costs.
There is one problem with this trip though. We shipped the equipment on the second of July. It cleared customs in the middle of last week, but DHL has no idea where the stuff is now. Hopefully we can find the equipment tomorrow, so that we have time to install before the end of the week. I have another trip planned to our datacenter in Phoenix beginning on Sunday so it is going to be an interesting couple of weeks. Of course my papers and finals for my online classes fall in these two weeks too. But the experience will be good…as long as we can locate the servers.
I had to make a small change to the network of a QA box I manage. So I logged in, via remote desktop using a domain admin account and went to the open the network connection. Which was missing. An ipconfig confirmed that I did have a network address, and of course it was working since I was accessing the machine remotely. Very puzzling. A reboot did not solve the problem either. Since it is working, I’m not gonna mess with it. I took this screenshot to document the problem.
Continue reading ‘The Missing Network’
I have updated the theme of the site. The theme is K2, a slick theme/framework. I had been using K2 since the beginning of the site, however I was several versions behind. The theme is a pretty basic theme that is fully customizable with CSS. I am not a very creative designer, so I doubt I will ever make it look that slick. This theme has an easy option to change the header image, so I’ll probably start with that eventually. This theme is now wider. The old one was optimized for 800×600 screens, this one is now optimized for 1024×768. Since 97% of the visitors to my blog had at least 1024 or higher this should make it easier for pictures and text to be displayed. Hopefully I will figure out how to customize it more. Any input on the theme is appreciated.
After my previous observation of Endpoint’s memory usage, I came across a disk space issue. On both test Windows 2003 clients, I found that the space on C: was completely gone. Using some space analysis tools I found that on both servers, c:\program files\common files\Symantec shared\virusdefs contained several gigs of temp files. Some research on Symantec’s forum’s showed me that this was a common problem. I also found on this blog that this should be fixed in MR2. I have not checked my version number, but I am assuming that I don’t have MR2 installed. I haven’t yet had a chance to install and test, but have instead removed Endpoint from one of the test servers, and my own desktop where I was testing. Performance on my machine instantly improved. My machine is a brand new Dell, with dual core and 2gb of ram. If it can slow that down so drastically, I am definitly not going to drag older machine’s down with Endpoint. Hopefully MR2 improves these problems.
There is a very useful Windows command that Microsoft didn’t include in any version of windows but should have. This is the uptime command. There is a knowledge base article here. It was released back in the Windows NT days, but still works on all current versions of windows. I have found this to be an easy way to find out the uptime of the windows servers I maintain without have to log on to the box.
Continue reading ‘Check windows uptime stats w/ Uptime.exe’
Ok, not really, but I do know if somebody is looking at my site. When I stopped keeping my site up to date about a year and a half ago, I let the mint stats that I was keeping break. This past February I connected the site with google analytics. This is the website stats tool that google runs that they bought from Urchin a few years ago. It is a pretty good free stats tool, which seems to integrate well with adwords (which I don’t use). Now though, I wanted a little more real time stats as well as more flexibility. So I went back to Mint which is a great stats program. It does cost $30, but it is well worth the money. I would highly recommend it to anyone who runs their own website. There are numerous plugins that can be added to enhance the functionality, or you can write your own. My installation can also be hosted on my server, which I like. That gives me more control over the settings and allows me direct access to the database if I want to run queries. I am already getting addicted to watching my stats and seeing when I have visiters. Not that I have a lot of visiters, but I do have a couple of posts that get regular traffic. Watching my stats will probably help push me to post more useful articles. Please note that I do not give out the stats information nor do I have any way of identifying who you are while visiting my site.
I’m not sure if anyone really subscribes to and reads my feed (not much new stuff to read) but I noticed today that since upgrading wordpress a week ago, my feed was broken with feedburner. I downloaded the latest version of the feedburner plugin (I didn’t know google now owned feedburner) and modified the settings and my feed is back working now. Feel free to check it more often as I am now going to be more actively putting content on the site and interacting with it more.
Over the past week I have been playing with Symantec Endpoint in preparation for a migration from Symantec Client Security 10. Endpoint is basically the next version of Symantec’s anti-virus with a firewall and antispyware combined. The management server seemed to have way more features than the previous version, however the interface is not any more intuitive than before. Now, I’ve always noticed that symantec’s products are huge resource hogs, so I was surprised to notice that the size of rtvscan.exe had only a fraction of the mem usage of previous versions. However on further investigation on several test machines I found that the usage was actually rediculously higher. I’ve compiled a chart showing the differences in the usage. I had four test machines running on VMware virtual machines. Two windows xp clients, and two windows 2003 servers, one as a client, and the other as a management server. Both Endpoint, and Client Security 10 memory usage is shown.
| XP SP3 |
No client |
110 mb |
| XP SP3 |
Client Security 10 |
190 mb |
| XP SP3 |
Endpoint |
283 mb |
| Win2003 |
No client |
90 mb |
| Win2003 |
Client Security 10 |
266 mb |
| Win2003 |
Endpoint Client |
285 mb |
| Win2003 |
Symantec 10 Server |
555 mb |
| Win2003 |
Endpoint Server |
1037 mb |
| Win2003 |
Endpoint Server w/ Management program open |
1403 mb |
All the test machines has a fully updated system with nothing running but the Symantec program, wiht the exception of the Symantec 10 server which was also running several smaller inhouse apps. The management program uses java, (another pig) which explains the high use of memory when the management app is open. I attempted to do PCmark benchmarks, however it didnt like the virtual machines.
This is an horrible misuse of memory. The program’s size on disk is less than all that. Several posts by developers on symantec’s forums mentioned that they tried to reduce the memory footprint. Not sure how they thought they were doing that. I am hesitant to start rolling this out, because I know that all my users will start complaining about their machines slowing down. I am running the endpoint client on my machine, however its a brand new Dell and has plenty of resources to spare. I just need to install it on a Vista machine for the ultimate bloat experience.
I guess this proves what a procrastinator I am. 14 months after my last post, I finally started to make some changes to this site. I upgraded the backend to the latest version of Wordpress, 2.3.3. I also added Google Analytics so now I can finally track site stats. Unfortunatly the previous system I had broke well over a year ago, and I have no idea how the site has been used. I have been approving comments and cleaning up spam that got through, so I have a slight idea how things are going. As far as content, I always have a ton of thoughts floating around in my head that would warrant a good blog article, but since I am not a fan of writing and am also a bit of a slacker I may not get much up too often. Of course I have been very busy with other things the last year and a half and I should soon post a recap of what I have been up too.
Wow, from the look of this site you would think I fell off the face of the world. But I’m still around. The semester flew by, and I got way too busy with school, friends, and a girlfriend to give much thought to this site. I’m disappointed, because I had a lot of good ideas of different content I wanted to put up. And even though Christmas break is pretty hectic this year, I’m gonna try to do a few things to get this place back on it’s feet.
First off, I want to migrate my site from (mt)’s Shared Server system to the new Grid system. This should open up some cool things as it eliminates many of the problems of the SS plan and allows me to run some cool apps, I’ve wanted to try out. Then I will make sure that all the software I use is up-to-date.
As far as content goes, I want to start off with getting a new theme, and changing the look around. I have some articles that I have been thinking of working on too. I’m gonna change the focus from strictly tech stuff, to any random thing I feel like putting up. So it will probably end up being tech stuff, sports, personal, funny stuff, and other random tidbits. I’ll try to set some goals, and maybe I can accomplish them.