Author: Karel Kerezman

  • Nothin’ On My Plate

    On the day I started work with this company almost 10 years ago, I had no tickets assigned.

    Once, late last Autumn, I got down to zero tickets.

    Welp.

    NoTickets4KKMind you: I have projects to work on, so I’m not bored by any stretch of the imagination. But still, the Spring Break doldrums seem to be rolling on into early April for some reason…

  • 4200 minus 2700 equals Headache

    For most of the calendar year so far we at work have been plowing through a massive reorganization, upgrade, and consolidation of our servers. One of the last stages of this consolidation & upgrade process involved upgrading our Kaseya environment. During the shuffle I found some quirks. For instance, the UserProfiles directory contains roughly 4200 subdirectories, one per agent in the system.

    Problem is, we only have about 2700 agents. The other 1500? Old agents.

    I asked vendor support about this, as the impression I had was that there was an agent archive process. I mean, there’s an archive directory configured in the system, what else is it for if not to archive these agent directories? Heck, the archive directory has agent directories in it.

    Apparently, nope. This isn’t something Kaseya does. I must archive those 1500 directories manually. How did the previous archive directory become populated? No idea at all.

    “Okay,” you might be saying right now, “Just look for the oldest directories.”

    Problem! We just migrated the front-end and database back-end parts of Kaseya to new servers over the last couple weeks! All the directories have brand new dates, all in numerical order, dating from when they were copied off of the old server.

    4100minus2700So this is my life now. Comparing the list of directory names with a list of agent IDs from a report, moving anything not in the report into an archive directory, by hand, one by one. Lather, rinse, repeat.

    Fun.

  • It’s a Very Monday Monday

    This week is getting an early start on kicking my ass:

    • Sunday Night Insomnia with a vengeance.
    • Remembered to do dishes and take out garbage this morning, forgot to grab lunch.
    • MAX train broke down one stop away from where I needed to go. (The operator had to be talked through cycling the breakers. That’s right: They rebooted the light-trail train.)
    • BurgerVille’s closed today, so no high-octane breakfast to boost my energy levels.
    • Half the office is on vacation or out sick.
    • The link between two of our key work systems is broken for no reason I can determine.

    Is it too late to throw my hands up and head back to bed? (Yes. Yes, it is.)

  • End of an Era

    Farewell, Node1 server.

    Long live Node2.

    Email has been on Google Apps for a couple weeks now with no problems, websites are all migrated to the new box, and nothing remains of any use on the old system. So, I just turned off and removed the Linode VM of the old server. Had to do it by month’s end or get dinged for another $75, so today was a good day to make that happen.

    It’s always a bit of a downer, shutting off a server you worked so hard to build in the first place. But that’s the way of things.

  • WordPress and comment email

    I… may have only just a few minutes ago fixed a setting that prevented WordPress (and anything else PHP-based) on this new server from sending email.

    Whoops. No comment notifications, for instance.

    On the upside, if this is the worst mistake I make throughout this process then I’ve done pretty damned well.

  • New Server, New Email Service

    If you can read this, then the website migration worked.

    If I get email notification of any comments left for this post, then the email migration worked.

    Okay, the email migration worked and I know it, because I got my daily Ello “inspirational” email newsletter today. Oh, Ello, when are you going to become something people other than froofy artsy-fartsy types will actually want to use?

    Anyway. The email accounts are over on Google Apps now, and all but one of the hosted websites are migrated to the new Linode server. Hopefully I’ll have the last website and the NTP Pool configuration done in a couple of days and I will be able to turn off the old server. Huzzah!