November 2007 - Posts
I was in Dallas for two weeks exactly this time. It was really nice. I was even able to be home for Thanksgiving. I wasn't planning on it, but it was a nice bonus.
I was supposed to head down to Merida two days ago, but our VOIP provider is making a change to the network that requires changing the IP of the VOIP gateways. This in return required that we make changes in our firewall to allow the new IPs. One bad thing about our setup in the Dallas office is that the router and firewall is one appliance. Definitely not my tool of choice, but here it is for the time being. Normally this change would be a 5 minute operation, but NOOOOOOO, not this time. You see the person that had the position prior to me didn't exactly keep a full record of user names and passwords. Or if he did, he didn't leave it for me. I ended up spending about three days trying different options hoping that I wouldn't have to reset the entire router. I tried the web interface using all of our user/password combinations. I tried the user/password combinations from the VOIP provider company, no luck. It took a day to get connected to the console interface, because the serial to RJ-45 cable that we had ended up being bad. I had to make one myself. Once I got into the console mode I was hoping that it would be smooth sailing, but no. Again more problems. My predecessor had changed the username and/or password for the console admin account. ARG!!! At this point I contacted the provider company again to see if they knew of a method to reset the password without resetting the entire router configuration. They took over a day and came back with the answer of "No, there isn't a way to do that.” Obviously I was VERY happy to hear that news. 
By this time it was 11pm last night and I had to fly to Merida today. I had no other option but to reset the router. I had asked the provider to send me a config file so I could just upload it in case I needed to do the reset, but they never sent one. I went ahead and reset on my own and attempted to rebuild. Let me just tell you that this was not pretty. 
I eventually called the provider back and had them contact their on-call person to walk me through the router configuration procedure. With his help that was very simple and we were back up and running. Now I just had to configure the firewall. I started the config, but somewhere along the way I found a page that dealt with zones. When it warns you that if you make a mistake configuring zone you could lose connectivity it isn't kidding. Well, after about 30 of attempting to unconfigure the mistake I had just made I was about to pull my hair out. Then I realized that I hadn't saved the config to the memory yet. WOOO HOOO Happy Dance right here let me tell you. I copied the configuration to a text file and then rebooted the router. AHHHH back to a blank slate. I used the config information on the text file to reconfigure the router in the same manner that the tech had walked me through and the router was back up and running. At this point I did save the config to memory. I then set about configuring the firewall to open the ports for all of our servers and the phone system. Once I was done with all of that I tested, and tested. It was about 3:00am by the time everything was configured and tested. I was a little more than pooped.
Once I got home, I tested some more, just to make sure that everything that needed to be accessible from outside was. It was now 3:30am and I got to head to bed.
This morning of course the first thing I did was email people to make sure the VOIP phones were working done in Merida. They were!!! 
After that I got to go watch Emily at gymnastics. Boy was she happy that I got to go see her. Of course she did great. I really enjoyed getting to watch her tumble and walk on the balance beam. I am very proud of her.
I am now on the flight to Mexico City. I have to say I LOVE flying Mexicana. First, they ALWAYS feed their passengers. Second, the service really is very nice. Third, today when I boarded the airplane I saw that there was only one person in business class, so I asked if it would be possible to move up there. The stewardess said that normally they weren't supposed to, but she would check for me. I went ahead and sat down and a couple of minutes later she comes back to take me to the front. AHHHHH big seats, leg room, room for my laptop (where I am now writing this). I love business class. Plus the food. Let me share the menu: Butter Lettuce salad with a large portion of lightly smoked salmon, tomato and a nice horseradish dressing. For the entree I choose the beef short rib tortellini with basil sauce and parmesan cheese. Also available was a nice wine selection, but I opted for coffee due to my late night working on the router/firewall. Oh and by the way, the coffee they serve has a great flavor.
We're expecting our new call center hardware either Friday or Monday. I'm really excited to get that in place as the final move of the company revolves around that last step. Once everything is setup we can then bring in the new call center personnel and get them trained and move the rest of our crew from Dallas to Merida.
Well, I think that is about all I am good to write for the time being. I'll write more in a day or two.
Merry Christmas. Make sure you take the time to enjoy this amazing season with your loved ones and friends.
Back in May I was offered an opportunity to help out on a Wrox book focusing on IIS 7, Professional IIS 7. Ken Schaefer was leading and Scott Forsyth was already working on the project so I had to join. 
I was asked to take on three chapters, Administration Tools, Web Site Administration and Web Application Administration. I have to say here how much fun this has been, as well as what a challenge. I have learned so much about IIS 7, just from my three chapters and I can't wait to read the other chapters to see how it ends.
My main reason for posting this is well, just cause the book is finally in its last phases and will be on sale Feb 5th. I've added a link on the site for all of you tech folks to pre-order your copy from Amazon now. Quick, don't delay!!!
I also wanted to publicly thank Ken Schaefer for asking me to join this project, Scott Forsyth for many late night chat conversations about this or that, the other members of the team for their many contributions and the publishing team at Wiley.
Additionally I'd like to thank Steve Schofield for introducing me to Ken. Steve knew I wanted to get deeper into IIS and eventually become an IIS MVP, so he recommended helping out on the iis.net forums, and then he sent this to me. Well, I do help out on the forums, but I need to do more, maybe next year I can get that MVP cred.
If you're into IIS, make sure you check out the book, and absolutely check out IIS 7. It is amazing. I can't wait to start using it for my production environments.
I'm sitting here in the Mexico City airport waiting on my flight back to Dallas, so I thought I'd use this time to write a little bit.
Yesterday we finally got our E-1s installed.
WOOO HOOO Last night I was able to get RDP open for external connection, our VOIP phones now receive incoming calls and I have the phone system accessible from outside so I can work on it. Most of my duties have been just sitting a waiting for the E-1s to be installed because our connection through CableMas was a NAT behind a NAT and let me tell ya, boy did that cause all kinds of problems.
I've still got a nigeling issue with my DNS server dropping its Gateway randomly (or at least I think I do). I have been able to "fix" it by either connection to the machine and in the NIC settings removing the Gateway, closing the properties and then readding the gateway. The alternate solution has been to move the cable from NIC 1 to NIC 2. I have updated the drivers for the NICs and I'm still having issues. I wasn't sure if it might have had something to do with CableMas up until now. I haven't actually been back to the building since last night and I know there was some kind of problem this morning, but I'm not sure what it was yet. I just had Mario swap the cable to the other NIC. Last night I had the servers automatically install patches and reboot, so I'm not sure if that had a residual issue or if the NIC dropped the Gateway. Just a few unknowns at this point. Once I get to where I can connect to the server again I'll be able to check on things.
I'm really excited to get home and see the family. I've been missing them both quite a bit lately. It has been a month since I've seen Emily except by web cam. Boy, I sure am glad I was single when I was in the military. I saw that it was hard on the guys and their families, and I knew I didn't want to go through that, but this gives me a little glimpse of it. I couldn't imagine not seeing them for a year.
I'm not sure how long I'll be in Dallas yet, fortunately right now I can do everything I need to do from anywhere that has an internet connection. (Boy do I love that part of my job!!!)
I'm waiting beside my gate and the plane is supposed to take off in 15 min, they haven't even made an announcement about boarding yet.
It's always interesting around here. OK here is security. Got to go.
As happens sometimes it has been a little while since my last post. A few things have happened since then...
Stacy came down for a few days to visit and check out neighborhoods. We really enjoyed the time together. If you ever want to know how much your spouse means to you, move away from them for a couple of weeks. It becomes abundantly clear how much you rely on her/him for so many things, big and little.
We decided that the first week in Nov. would be the best time for her trip down here. Well, it wasn't. That happens to be the time when Mexicans celebrate Dios de los Muertos (Day of the Dead), Oct 31st, and then the following two days are days to remember loved ones that are no longer alive. So with that the hotels were pretty booked. I was able to get a room at a not so great hotel, but as usual trials later (and sometimes sooner) turn into great stories.
When we walked into the room we immediately sat down on the beds for a couple of minutes to relax before going out to eat. Stacy says that the bed she is on is like a concrete floor (I forget her exact words, but that was the intentioned meaning). I'm thinking the bed I am on is hard, but not THAT bad. Then after a little while I get up and do something and then sit down on the bed she is on. WOW!!!! That thing is HARD!!!. So our lovely hotel has made two beds by putting the mattress on one bed and the box springs on the other. BTW, I could only get a room with two double beds. So we got to snuggle close that night, or spread out and fall off. The next morning I woke up and my back was hurting from the bed. I decided that the air mattress I've been sleeping on at the apartment was more comfortable, so we went to get it. We ended up stacking the hotel beds one on top of the other and then inflating the air mattress. I'm sure the maid called the entire hotel staff into our room to see what the crazy gringos were doing. We also went and bought an oscillating fan for noise. I took Stacy around to see the various grocery stores and such. We looked at a few houses, and found 2 that we really liked, but we decided this trip really needed to be more about finding areas, rather than specific houses as we still need our FM3s in order to get our household goods here. We went to Progreso a couple of times, once for dinner and once to visit Kitty and look into the Apoyo program. Overall the trip was good, it was great seeing each other and we got to have alot of laughs. One thing that I absolutely love about my bride is her positive, beautiful outlook. I have learned most of my faith in God from her. She is amazing.
But I'm sure you are wondering what is going on with the building.
When I got back we still did not have electricity, but within a couple of days we did. Then two days later a guy from CFE came out and wanted to turn it off again, saying that his department was the one that was supposed to turn it on and if someone else turned it on it was wrong. Oh boy did we fight that one. He relented when we showed all of our paperwork. But it was close. We also got our conference table and chairs delivered. It is huge, seriously. It was decided that our conference room wasn't big enough so we had it expanded to fit the table. Did I mention that labor here is inexpensive? So now we have, electricity, cable internet (yes it was installed at some point during all of this) and a conference table in the middle of the 1st floor. We brought in a couple of card tables and worked on those for a few days until our desks were delivered.
So now we all have desks and Telmex has been working on the installation of our E-1s for about a week now. They have tested the circuits and found them lacking, changed to a different circuit (testing as I write) and we're told that tomorrow they should be able to install the router and get us online. I'm really looking forward to that as with the cable internet we have a dynamic IP and I think it is causing issues with our network. Additionally I was given the green light to go out and buy new machines today for the call center. I am hoping to have them by Wed so I can get them setup and ready to use before Thursday. I've also determined the call center application that we need to be using. Our needs were a little unusual. We wanted a hosted solution, that we could eventually purchase and bring in house in 6 months to a year. On top of that, it had to have an IVR (Interactive Voice Response) system that could use SOAP requests to interact with our web services. I came down to only 3 companies that I could find that did all of that. Of those three, only one actually returned my phone calls and acted as though they wanted us as a client. That made the decision alot easier.
On Thursday I head back to Dallas for a little bit. Not sure how long yet, kinda depends what all is left here to do. I miss my munchkin so much, and her mommy too. I have a new favorite photo of her, but tonight my connection has been really bad, so I'll try to post it tomorrow and add a link. Update: I have uploaded the photo now, and here it is.
What are some things I've learned so far: VOIP telephony, I never worked with it before this; Planning processes, I've always tried to be a business planner, being here makes it all the more painfully obvious how planning planning and planning are the three most important parts of a process. Reminds me of something I learned in the Army. Whenever we had a mission we always planned every detail we could think of, every eventuality, because when fighting breaks out the nothing will go as planned, but because of the planning everyone has a better idea of what to do even when things are messed up. I'm installing a completely new Active Directory forest here, the old one couldn't even be migrated, so a little more planning there. Importing equipment into Mexico is expensive, roughly a 30% tax.
It is late and I am tired.
Remain faithful, ever strong and obedient to Him. Draw your strength, not from yourself, but from Him and His strength will sustain you through more than you could ever imagine.
Robba