The one with Design Group.

Less than a week ago, I couldn’t type up a blog entry without suffering some repercussions of backlog at work. Now, the story is different. This new job is amazing – albeit unpredictable. I started my new job at Design Group/INCO on Monday. The first day was quite laborious – we had to move several decommissioned servers to the warehouse for disposal. Along with that, we had to clean up our storage/electrical room of empty boxes and unused equipment. It was a lot of work, but I scored myself a workstation-class server. Sweet. It’s going to be a small project of mine, but I plan to set it up as a domain server with maybe Exchange and Apache. First off, though, I need to upgrade all my switches to gigabit ethernet. I want to move forward into Cisco enterprise switches and wire everything into the walls so there are no wires anywhere. It would be an awesome setup. I wouldn’t be able to have an offsite tape backup solution, but I’d have tape backup storage at the restaurant. Decent enough.

My second day at work consisted of fixing the RAS/FAX server. Users could dial-in but couldn’t fax anything out. The second multi-port modem somehow lost its driver and the OS kept hanging when we tried to reinstall the driver. Wil had swapped over to the backup LAN port, but it didn’t fix the problem, so we mirrored the static TCP/IP settings back over to the primary LAN port, and that’s when I noticed it – the static DNS servers had the second and third octets transposed. Once we fixed that, we were able to reinstall the drivers for the modem again. The rest of the morning was spent in leisure. The afternoon was a bit of a rush – some GOS admins in Sudbury needed a server that Wil disabled before I started the job. So, with Wil’s help, we unmounted a server, grabbed the box from the warehouse, packed the server up, and sent it to shipping. It was very heavy and very hard on my almost unused muscles. I was sore for a couple days. When we got back, Wil found an old P-II HP Vectra. I loaded it up with RAM and downloaded a Gentoo Linux Live ISO.

As a result, yesterday was very slack. Did I accomplish anything? Not really. Attempted to install Gentoo Linux on the Vectra, but it was slow. Very slow. So, I downloaded the minimal Gentoo Linux Live ISO. It was exciting when I booted it up – no fancy GUI interface, just the old, familiar bash console I remember from my past memories of tinkering with Linux back in the day – but this time with a sidebar logo. It’s kind of neat. Gentoo has some very comprehensive, step-by-step documentation on customizing your Linux install, which was what I wanted since I’ve been away from Linux for so long. It was exciting to get back into it, since INCO uses UNIX servers here.

I’m on day 3 of the Linux install. ;_;

It’s Thursday now – a lot more of the same slackness at work, which I’m loving. Wil said that when we’re busy, we’re crazy busy. Basically, if a server goes down, tape backups are needed, or a project involving the server room is required, we jump into action. Weird enough, though, we don’t deal with managing the ports on switches, much like how it was with EDS at my old job. I’m STILL installing Linux – I don’t think I’m anywhere near the end (I’m only NOW emerging the bootloader, GRUB). At the same time, I’m learning things here and there. Where network drive shares are, a bit about processes, and working with Active Directory. Tomorrow, the CRMs are taking me and Trevor (the new Nexi/INCO tech) out for lunch. I have a feeling we’ll be going to Boston Pizza because we can’t think of anything else.

We just finished moving a server from ITSL here – we’re going to be copying all the data from the ITSL server to a local server this afternoon – we’re just waiting for the networking group to activate the LAN drop in the server room.

So, yeah, having fun at work for a change. It’s going to be harder to leave this job when the time comes to move.

以上。。。であります。