Hello again from the blogger world - time to start updating my blog!  Its been a few years.

The preparation for Ike!

Ike started out heading towards the south of Texas when the storm was located near Cuba.  We kept an eye on the storm but did not take any special precautions.  The mode was watch and wait.

When the storm started to to swing more north every update, we started to get a plan together to secure the building and the systems inside.  The large generator we have in our Louisiana office and a fuel tank were move to the Houston office - just in case.....at a minimum we had to keep our samples cool in refrigerators and we had to keep our core computer systems running.  I checked out backup systems to make sure that we had a good full backup that could be taken off site.

Two days before the storm was due to make landfall, we were starting right in the middle of the predicted "cone".  People were starting to evacuate inland, especially the people in the low lying areas like Galveston and Clear Lake.  Our company made the decision to close on Thursday afternoon and Friday so employees could get ready for the storm Friday night.

On Thursday we developed a plan to put a section of our building on generator power Friday by mid-morning.  I was concerned that our Internet connection (10mbps fiber) would be severed and it would be weeks before we were back on line.  Our ISP told me that we would be a priority when it came time for repairs.  Since all our corporate email goes through Houston, this could be a big problem for our company, so we decided to put the mail server, routers, switches and firewall all on the backup power.  I then ran long drop cords from the room with backup power to the server room.

On Friday morning (while no one else was in the building) the backup power was installed and the generator was started.  I went and plugged in the key servers, firewall, routers and switches to the backup power.  The servers that had 2 power supplies, I plugged one into the regular UPS and the other power supply I attached to an external medium sized UPS's and the backup power.  This way, the servers would run on either regular or backup power.  I also placed a fan on the backup power to cool the servers if the AC went out.

That night I went home and logged into the remaining non-critical servers and shut them down.  I had to wait because our other office locations use the servers during the day.

All this and I had to find time to board up a few windows of my house!!  IT is the last to leave and the first to return!

Hurricane Ike - the story so far.....

I wanted to describe what happened to out company and our computer systems before, during and after hurricane Ike.  It has now been a week and a half since the storm and things are still not back to normal!  I will break this story up into the days leading up to the storm, and what happened after the storm.  My company is located in Houston Texas on the South side of town, so this will give you a better idea about the damage to us compared to placed like Galveston.  We are a SMB that has aout 100 employees in the Houston location and about 400 total company wide.  The company has about 75 workstations and about 15 servers in Houston.

Happy 4th of July

Happy 4th of July!!

Dust holds a server together

Went on a road trip this week to several of our remote offices. In one office, there is a 4 year old Compaq server that had a lot of dust on the outside (probably due to the fact that this server was in a closet with the A/C system!). I did the usual routine maintenance, check backups, disk space, temp files, error messages, power etc....there was an old SCSI tape drive on the server for backups .....which no one changed the nightly tapes......so I decided to remove the tape drive and install a USB external removable hard drive (Dell RD-1000). I waited until everyone left for the day and I took down the server. I removed the side panel and removed the SCSI card and the SCSI tape drive. Since the inside was dusty, I took a vacuum cleaner with a hose and sucked out all the dust. The server had 4 hot swap SCSI drives which I also cleaned. I put everything back together and fired the unit up thinking it was time to go to the hotel.......when the BIOS started, I got an error message about no SCSI boot device......not good! So I turned the unit off and reseated the SCSI card....still an error.....I then re-seated the SCSI cable.....no joy.....then I started getting an error about 2 disk drives failed!!!! Not good since there are only 4 drives in a RAID-5......starting to get concerned about losing all the data....backups?? Not what I wanted to do the rest of the night! So finally I re-seat the hard drives and the SCSI card plus the cables......still no luck! My last attempt was to check the SCSI back-plane, cable and power. Since the hard drives did not seem to be spinning up properly and making weird noises, I thought it might be the SCSI back-plane or power. When I re-seated all those items, the server booted with no issues or lost data!!! What a relief!!

So the moral of the story is....... if you are working on an old server that is dusty......the dust might be what is holding the unit together!

Food

Went to Wendy's today for lunch and it cost me almost $7 for a combo meal! Ouch! I guess the price of fast food is going up with everything else! Is this due to the cost of gas....or shortage of grain due to ethanol demands....or stick it to the consumer when they are down???

SPAM attack!

On Thursday, we started to get several undeliverable emails that were supposedly sent from our domains postmaster email address. When I examined the header information, you could see that the header was spoofed with our "postmaster" email address. All the IP information that the email was sent from was typically a DSL or cable connection. After sever hundred undeliverable messages, the barrage seemed to stop. This is scary to see because the SPAM networks are so sophisticated now, that they can send out an address to spoof for only several hours and then change to a new address! I was afraid that our domain would start to get black listed and we would start to have issues with SPAM black holes. At least the SPAMMERS do not harvest addresses long enough to leave a trail!