Rambling »

In April I mentioned some upcoming projects….and well things got just so crazy busy that I had to suspend my writing. Quite frankly I was to tired to write. At times it was very overwhelming; but like all my summer seasons before, I seem to pull a rabbit out of my hat!

One of the projects was for a farm implement dealer. There are 9 locations and they all call home to a dedicated data center in Lincoln. Several of the sites had no local server which made logins very inefficient. It was pretty straight forward stuff…Each box was a $700 HP with Windows 2008 R2 on top of  a XEN server hyper-visor. I’ll probably write about XEN when I deploy it for one of my other clients as I was only on the user side of the software this time. To say the least, what I saw was very impressive indeed. End result for the client was that there was a major improvement in login times!

My second major project was to upgrade my COOP’s infrastructure to Windows 2008R2. They want to use DFS-R and unify file versions for end users. Harvest came and postponement was inevitable. Other more pressing infrastructure items needed to be addressed in the switching department. As a side note the DMVPN has worked flawlessly and there was no appreciable downtime during harvest.

I didn’t write about it, but I have completed 4 other projects for schools I work with. One of my schools needed a complete switch replacement in three buildings, and other sundry regular annual maintenance stuff. The second school I work for did a complete re-imaging of their Macs and PC’s I’ll write about this little adventure in another post. Other than that we had some mail server work to renew certificates on them, which was fairly straight forward. On top of all of these I had two other 5 workstation and 1 server retrofits to do which were fairly straight forward but would have been a quite a bit easier if I could have manufactured a couple of extra hours in my day!