New servers and the standing room only office
Feb 25, 2010 Technology, Work
It has been a while since my last post here. I have a few things in the works to put up that are still in draft form and I am hoping to finish the documentation here shortly to get those items out. In the mean time though here is my latest project. The company I work for is in the process of changing out some of our main software to another companies software. Due to this new software we are in need of more servers to handle this software. We are in the process of adding 2 new switches and 2 more ESX servers. It is a beauty seeing 128GB of RAM in each of the 2 servers I just put in the rack today. If you were wondering what 128GB of RAM looks like here it is:
With this new hardware we have started to take a better care of how we deal with cables. Mostly in regards to labeling and color coding since we(I) have not done that well with this in the past. I am in the process of replacing the cabling for certain functions going to our other servers along with updating the labels on all network cables. All of our cabling currently is gray CAT6 cable that is labeled on one end only which is a real pain. Here is how things will be structured now:
- All servers/switches/SANs have a label on front AND back such as VMx for ESX servers, SANx for either SAN and SWx for switches.
- All network cables will be labeled at BOTH ends of the cable. Label will consist of equipment name, PCI slot and which jack on the PCI card.
- Network cable will be color coded based on function:
- KVM = Purple
- Dell Remote Access Card (DRAC) = Orange
- iSCSI = Red (Means don’t touch this or something terrible will happen, heads will roll!)
- Regular LAN = Gray and some blue since I have run out of gray
- Power PDU (Power Distribution Unit) have a stripe of colored electrical tape on each and labeled as to which UPS they go to
- Power cords for servers have corresponding stripe of electrical tape wrapped around signifying which PDU connected to as well as being labeled on PDU side what the power cord goes to.
- Any power cord connecting two PDUs has a stripe of each color electrical tape signifying where it is coming from/going
Once I get done with the entire project in the next couple business days I will post more pictures of things. Until then I will leave you with a view of my standing room only office for the past/next few days with the folding wall shelf.
If you have any other type of labeling/coloring of your wires please feel free to leave a comment.
Tags: Dell, ESX, Labeling, Networking, Server
BlackBerry Curve 8330 slow after Verizon pushed Bing
Feb 8, 2010 Cell Phones, Technology, Work
We recently just upgraded our BlackBerry Enterprise Server (BES) to version 5 service pack 1. Shortly after that time our Curve users started complaining about how slow their devices were going. We knew the issue would not be application related as applications are not allowed to be installed on these phones. The only way to resolve the issue for a short period of time was to do a battery pull. Today while looking into the situation again I noticed that when on the main Applications screen the Bing icon would show/hide itself automatically without touching anything on the phone. The phone would take a long time to move the trackball and it was a challenge getting the right icon on the home screen due to this icon showing/hiding itself. After doing some poking around I found that there was a Bing service book that once deleted seems to resolve the issue. After talking with Verizon about this there they suggested that the service book get deleted and that there is no long term fix for this issue at this time. The tech support representative stated that there is a good chance that Verizon would just push the service book back out again.
How to delete Bing service book:
- Go to your main Applications screen by pressing the BlackBerry button next to the green answer button
- Find the Options menu. On the BB Dimension themes this icon is a small wrench. On the default Verizon screen it is a gray box with green, red and blue sliders.
- Select Advanced Options from the Options menu
- Select Service Book which is towards the bottom of this menu
- Then find the Bing VPL [BrowserConfig] service book. Press the BlackBerry button on the phone to bring up the menu and then select Delete.
This should resolve the phone speed issue along with removing the Bing icon from the main Applications screen until Verizon pushes that service book back out.
Tags: Bing, BlackBerry, Verizon
