server woes: when to throw in the towel

Sorry, all I heard was "I'm trying to make my life miserable"

Too bad these companies basically killed themselves with 'big business' support policies that don't even fit with the modern world in fortune1000 companies, let alone the little guys.

 

Nothing to do with Sarb-Ox, just looking for better fault tolerance. We may be able to split our environment over 2 locations, we'll see where we end up.

Regular MS support for Exchange can be tricky. They've outsourced a lot of it, it used to be that the Exchange Enterprise support had access to the "real" Exchange guys (developers, etc.), but that doesn't seem to be the case since the switch. We have a complex, multi-forest environment. After the 2nd call to support where we literally had to spend a day explaining everything to the 1st level drone, we popped for Alliance support. Now, we have a dedicated 6 person team that knows our environment and we call or email direct. The guys we deal with really know their stuff. We are also fortunate to have a good Exchange (2003) environment, we were able to build it from scratch the right way, including Active Directory.

We're migrating off of HP OpenMail. 6000 home office users are done, we should have all 14,000 in the field offices done by the end of the year.

I find that the MCSE tests are a little more difficult than the NT 4.0 days, but not too bad, as long as you are working with the product every day.

So who's going for their 2003 MCSE now? Just me and Enzo? Anyone want to start a pool on who finishes first? I need some motivation.

 

Hey you are in WI. My in-laws are in Stevens Point (I think that is close to you). The good ol MCSE tests I hate them. I have committed to going through the boot camp just to get it done with.

 

Close enough. Stevens Point is in the middle of WI, I'm in the SE corner.

I hate them too, but what's a consultant to do?

 

Yup. Everything went as planned except that

1. The monitor we were using at the server was so old, that the video card on the server didn't support a low enough resolution... so we had to buy another monitor (luckily this happened right before lunch so I got to take a break and meet the DFW crew for lunch.)
2. The CDROM drive doesn't work, so we had to install apps by copying installation files from CDs on different computers, transferring data to the server HD, and installing that way.

Could have been much, much worse.

 

I finished last year.

 

I'm in Manglement now, I'm required to let my tech skills deteriorate

All my certs have expired...

 

You should at least keep current. That way you know if your admin group is dragging their feet or in over their heads. Plus, should you move, it makes you more marketable.

I no longer do Cisco stuff but I have kept my CCNP current because you never know. I was at the IBM sterling forest DR site in March and I had to reflash the routers and add static routes on the switches . Had I not kept my NP current, I would have had to make a call of shame to the LAN/WAN group.

 

If he is wanting to browse and drag files, You should go raid 1 with the OS, and raid 5 for the DB and raid 10 for the redo logs if you have the money to waste on disks. Is this connected to a SAN? I am running Oracle on the inside parts of the IBM fastT drives

 

That's a DELL OEM controller IIRC. Sorry I am late to the thread.

 

LLED is not a good choice to run Oracle. The drives are not up to muster unless you are running ultra 320's 15k, HPUNIX or IBM rs6000's are better suited for it.

 

Are you putting the redo logs on a the raid 5 too? You will see performance issues, even if they are on different LUNS.

 

SATA's usually have pretty good I/O wait times but a Fiber attached SAN really is the only way to run oracle without performance issues. Try running the OS raid 1, DB raid 5 and redo logs on raid 10 using different LUNS on different attached storage units. This will still allow you to run the LLED server and not take additional IT budget hits.

 

Call me anytime. I will PM my cell.

Check my subsequesnt post about hardware and raid setup's.

Oracle does not like imports. It likes restores.

 

Hey, Randy, guess what? All the scanned documents we had are still there, but the guy didn't name the server with the same name and folder configuration as the old one, so now, instead of using ACT to search by client name and clicking the attatchment in their profile, we get the pleasure of changing the shortcut string so that the attatchment can be clicked and viewed. No way I, or the guy I hired, can figure out to change them all at once. Isn't that special?

 

Yeah, I know, I already knew exactly the names of the server and it's relevant folders, but the guy is telling me it would screw up alot of other stuff if we went back and renamed the new server the same as the old one.

I fail to see what the problem would be but at whatever rate he is charging me, and my new perspective on his abilities, I don't feel like paying him to explain it to me.