Friday Exhaustion

Since my last post HERE, we have completed the Great Server and Workstation Move, mostly.

There have been little bumps and excursions along the way, but nothing major came to a screeching halt. Except for the external email that didn't work for two days, that is.

On the Tuesday, all the Really Big Stuff worked. Our depositors never noticed a thing. Their money was there when they wanted it, our website was up and running with their account information, it just flaming-well worked.

Our email system runs on Microsoft Exchange, and it worked just fine - as long as you were working within the Small Financial Institution. But from the outside? Nada, zip, zero, bupkis and nothing.

As it turns out, our firewall didn't want to know about a change in IP addresses for email. Everything else was OK, the firewall just had a snit about SMTP from the outside.

Grrrr.....

After much heartburn, and an outside and very expensive consultant who really did earn every dime of his outrageous hourly fee, email came back up on Thursday. And we didn't lose a single email message. Because of Proper Prior Planning, we didn't lose ANYTHING. Not permanently anyway, it was just delayed a bit.

If this all sounds a little vague, that's my intent. I am NOT giving out any further info - and not for CYA, just for basic security.

I've been very busy for the last 3 weeks, and I am one tired puppy.

"So, OWW, why are you up at this late/early hour?"

Glad you asked! It seems that our Voice Response system decided to pick tonight to be a PITA about it's backup routines.

CP&C (Crap Pee and Corruption).

It's fixed - but now I'm REALLY tired.

G'night....

Moving A Data Center

Granted, it's a very small data center - about twenty servers, plus assorted routers, switches and other paraphenalia.

The SFI (Small Financial Institution) that I work for decided about a year ago to plan ahead for the next ten years, and build a brandy-new Administration building to serve our five current branches.

That includes a brand-spanking-new server room (my term) or "data center" (our Marketing Guy's term).

We have raised floors (to keep the cable mess to a minimum), CAT6 wiring (for Very Fast data flow - can you say "gigabit"?), and some new switches (also for gigabit). All this "giga" stuff makes my geek heart just giggle...

So now it's all ready - and we've been moving servers and switches and routers, Oh My! And changing IPs and wrestling with cable and sweating bullets to get all this stuff in place and running.

'Cause Tuesday, if it don't work, the handy-dandy wall out back will be ready for it's first bullet marks, after the hapless IT geeks have been stood, "Up Against The Wall".

So, that's where OWW has been for the last couple of weeks.

It's kinda like marriage - BEING married is great, GETTING married is... not so great.