Okay. Remember I left that DTS transfer running on Friday?

I walked in to find it had gotten to -ready for this?- 324000 records processed. 60 hours and not even half finished??? Argh! So I stopped it and deleted the records from DB2. I used DTS to export to a text file - very fast - and then shut down SQL Server. Then I started DB2 Control Center and started to load the files.

It isn't going any faster. I guess we know who the culprit is now, don't we?

In other not-so-exciting news I set up LoadSim on one of the white box servers and got it running against our Exchange server to simulate people working. I have no idea what they're doing, but they are doing it quite often.

The strange orange light is still on and Steve is waiting to hear from Dell about that little issue. We plan on actually racking boxes tomorrow (except for the one I just know will still be importing data into DB2. We're also expecting that software yet (nervous tic, nervous tic) and additional hardware to arrive in the next day or two.

I also took time out to VLAN off a GB port on our lab's Catalyst 6k so we could actually get out of the building and download tools/software/etc... Unfortunately, MS DNS is not cooperating and I can't get it to return any address but ones on the local subnet. I'll be working on that tomorrow as well, I suppose.

Hey all.

Today was slow, at least from a hardware perspective. I had a vendor in the lab all day today for an unrelated article, and didn't get much done.

We had one of our Dell servers exhibit an error code, E0012, if memory serves. Because I had a vendor in the lab, I sent Dell an email about it with their automated system including the error code, and they will get back to me within 48 hours. Hopefully, they can get it fixed for us quickly. Thats all for now, I will catch you all later.

Hi folks. We thought you might enjoy a few candid photos of our lab build-out in action.

Lab Pictures
	Sept 24th --The APC racks waiting outside the elevator. They didn't fit. The elevator man took the headknocker off and we transported them one by one downstairs.
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	Sept 24th -- The electrician doing something. The place looks like a tornado hit it. Yes, that is a stereo speaker on the top of the beige Netshelter. Yes, they are used often. Keeps me sane.
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	Sept 25th -- One of the racks today, wired right to the power. That's the electrician hiding behind it as he wires it. He was nice, he helped Steve get the rack through the door.
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	Sept 25th -- That's the ADS, Exchange and application servers sitting nicely while being installed and configured. They look nicer with the bezels on them, but they aren't quite ready for that.
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WebSphere is running! It isn't doing anything spectacular, but it is running!

DB2 is running! I am using DTS to send the customer data to DB2 right now. It is running. And running. And will likely be running on Monday when I come in. It had accomplished trasnferring a mere 14,000 records when I left. It needs to hit 600,000. The rest of the tables will be exported to a text file and loaded by DB2. DTS is not going to cut it for this transfer.

The strange orange light appeared again on one of the servers. I shut it off and Steve will take a peek at it to see what's going on. These are brand new servers and I'm hoping that it's just not getting enough power. Cross your fingers!

Things are chugging away at this point. Hopefully the financial software will show up Monday so we can install the last piece of software needed. Then it's just configure, configure and code code code.

The inspector came and said "flip the switch" today. The meter is in and all is good. I didn't flip the switch because I think Steve should do that when he returns tomorrow. Just in case. :-)

Exchange is finally working. I spent an hour trying to find the server in Exchange Manager. It wasn't there and I almost took a hammer to the server after the first half hour. Finally it was discovered that you have to specifically enable the "Show administrative groups" in the option in order to see the server. It was there all along, but didn't appear by default. Grrrr.... Then I played the multiple select game in ADS again, creating mailboxes for all the employees. But at least it's up.

Tip of the day - when the server has redundant power supplies, plug them BOTH in. Even when you're just staging the machines. I've got way too many machines on one circuit right now and the blinking orange alert light freaked me out. Plug in both power supplies and they stay a happy blue. Also, don't put the bezels on until you know you won't have to use the power switch. If you watched carefully today you might have seen an interesting wrestling match between myself and the bezel. It almost won.

The rails are in the second rack, awaiting servers. As soon as the switches arrive the servers can be moved to their new home. We're almost there ...

I've also decided that there is a downside to getting new hardware and equipment. The boxes. We usually save the boxes and packing material for equipment we review because, well, it has to go back eventually. But this stuff we get to keep, so we don't need the boxes. But that means you have to break them down and carry them away. And there were a lot of boxes in the lab until yesterday....

We made major progress today.

The electrician hardwired the main rack today, and it is now waiting on the inspector and the installation of a meter by our local utility. It's one sexy hunk of metal. Of course, it took Steve and two other guys to manhandle it through the door, but it's in the lab.

The mail and app servers are up and running, or at least they have an OS and are networked now. The web server is up and running too.

Tomorrow it's back to fighting with Exchange and ADS. I won't go any further on that subject right now because this is a family blog. At least that's the excuse I'm using to avoid discussing the problems with getting Exchange running because I couldn't possibly do it without using obscenities. Perhaps once I figure out exactly why it isn't working I'll be able to articulate the issues in a sensible manner.

I expect our general ledger software to be delivered the end of this week or early next week. By the time it arrives we should be ready to install.

What a hectic day!

The good news is that the alarm system works. Apparently the management company in the building tried to let in the electricians early this morning and set of the alarm, resulting in a series of phone calls to Steve, myself and the police. Steve handled it and the day began.

By the time I got in there was a large truck with our APC racks on the back. Nice looking units, but too large to fit in the elevator until the "elevator man" came and took off the headknocker - seriously, that's what Steve said he called it - the lights that show whether it's going up or down.

The air conditioner was kicked on today, ready to handle the additional heat. Hopefully tomorrow we'll have some additional servers installed and ready to be racked, providing that we can manage to maneuver around the multitude of boxes that have been delivered over the past few days.

J&D Heating was here yesterday afternoon, installing some duct-work. They got some of it bolted up, but won't be back until Monday. They only work half-days on Friday, the lucky dogs.

Haven't seen the racking yet, but it should be here soon.

I have the new WallBot from RackBotz, and it's sweet. Click on the picture image on your left, you will get a color image of the Lab. I will be moving it a bit, it's not getting the field of coverage that I want, but that will have to wait for later.

Sorry this wasn't up sooner, our ISP changed their DNS settings, making it impossible to update the blog.

More when it happens.

Sorry I didn't get that end of day post up, but things were a bit crazy in here. The alarm system is installed, programmed, and working. Kudos to the dudes from Martin Security, even though they made me miss my lunch. :-0

The HVAC guys from J&D Heating should be back today to begin duct work activities. They installed the new 2 ton air conditioner in the ceiling and have been running about 60 feet of copper pipe to the outside cooling coils. They had to drill a hole in the bottom of our 50 year old building. The wall is about a foot and a half thick. Took them an hour to do it. Heck of a Milwaukee drill, that's for sure.

Our suite is located in the basement, so this air conditioning trick is not as easy as it sounds. It will all be worth it though. The building cooling has never been able to REALLY deal with the heat from the equipment in the Lab, despite being boosted twice.

I expect our UPS and racking to arrive from APC either Friday or Monday. Then, with a little work by Thomas Electric, we will be able to begin in earnest. More when it happens. Ta Ta.

Okay, VERY hectic day in the lab. The HVAC guys from J&D Heating are here and so is Martin Security putting in our security system. It's almost impossible to work in here.

Some of you may be wondering why the picture from the cam on the RackBotz hasn't changed. We were having some sporadic lockup issues with the RackBotz, so thought to mess with it a bit. Lori and I attemped to upgrade the bios on the unit, and well, fried it. The pretty lights no longer blink, but simply stare like some horrible hardware zombie.

I spoke with a nice gentleman at RackBotz, and he is sending us a new WallBotz, that will give you guys a view of that actual application lab equipment, and *bonus* it's in COLOR. Booya! That should be here tomorrow, and provided I can get network and power run over there ASAP, we should have new images for you soon.

Thats all for now, I post an update later, at the end of the day.

What a day, what a day!

We have the first machine ready to go. After a v e r y long installation of Windows 2000 Server (it seems to take longer using Dell's OpenManage) I configured the machine to run ADS and DNS.

Using one of our home-grown perl scripts, I'd pre-generated a file containing all our employees and associated groups, then used LDIFDE to import them into the ADS tree. Sweet.

But all the accounts were disabled ::grumble grumble:: and I did not see an option to automatically enable them in the import file format nor in the command line options for LDIFDE. So I hand enabled them all (thank goodness for multiple selection capabilities and a small user list!).

Machine 1 is now ready to deploy.

Howdy folks!

I'm Steve, the other guy helping with the Enterprise Applications Lab. Gots some hardware updates, as that is my primary function.

Martin Security will be out tomorrow to install a security system in our suite. I can't wait till the first time I set it off by accident.

Choice One Communications, who will be installing our 1.5 symmetrical DSL line will be able to route our class C block of IP addresses for the lab. As Lori would say: w00t!
They are also working with our local Bell Child to expedite the installation. Personally, I don't have a lot of hope that it will be done in less than four weeks.

I am expecting that the work on the HVAC (Heating Ventilation and Air Conditioning) should start soon....Thats gonna be a mess. More when I know it. Ta ta.

Today is full of good news.

On the SQL front, with a bit of shell scripting and some interesting uses of transformations within a DTS package, we have customers in our database. Many of them with strange names, but customers none the less. Now it's time to start scripting transactions, both to create new orders and to add to our inventory.

As a bonus, a grumpy delivery man brought some huge boxes with hardware in them today. Just for the application lab. Maybe it's just me, but have 2U rack mount servers gotten excessively heavy in the past few years? Now we just need the racks to put them in and we can start installing software. w00t!

In order to simulate an enterprise environment we cooked up a company, complete with customers, products and even order histories.

But in order to make it come to life, I've spent the last week in a fugue, moving from PERL to shell script and back, generating megabytes of simulated everything.

Some of the work I've done on Linux in MySQL and need to migrate to SQL Server. Defining the databases was simple, and you'd think all you'd need to do then is dump the data and import into SQL Server.

Not true. Oh not true at all. SQL Server choked on integer columns with lengths, and absolutely would not accept the "auto_increment" attribute. Well, it's only a few tables, so I edited the files to make SQL server happy and then redefined the tables within Enterprise Manager.

Then I tried to import the actual data. isql, the CLI for SQL Server, did not like the generated files designed to do bulk inserts. I fixed them one by one and managed to import the smaller ones. But I hit a snag I couldn't get around - "out of memory" . 1GB of RAM on this beefy machine and it's out of memory importing 200,000 rows?

Eegads. I was in trouble. The last two files had 200,000 and 600,000 records each, respectively. I moved to DTS to pull the data.

The first one took some modification to the table. What the heck is the difference between a datetime and a smalldatetime? Argh! Finally, I was ready to try the last file.

Alas, it was not to be completed today. The PERL script that had generated the customer data was not perfect. It missed some enclosing quotes. vi and regular expressions are your friend, unless you're dealing with a 35MB file. Scratch that. Write a quick shell script to modify the data and set it to running. We'll get that customer data in tomorrow.

Enterprise Application Lab ???

Yes, you read that right but before you freak out, let me just say: Don't PANIC. NWC isn't changing its core focus of testing sexy networking based products, we're just widening our coverage a bit to include more business applications.

And if we're going to continue to cover business applications with the same hard-core testing model we apply to all our other core areas we need to have a lab specifically designed to let us do that. In the past, we've had to beg and borrow data and applications for our testing, create databases and directories and .. well, you get the picture. We've had to do a million things just to test one application. And the next time, we had to start all over from scratch again.

So we're going to build something to give you what you need to make your decisions even easier. We'll give you the skinny on implementing business applications from how much CPU and memory that app really sucked up down to how much code we had to write (yes, we'll even code for you) to get things up and running. We'll look at the effects of applications on our database, our network and our other applications - mission critical and not-so-mission-critical.

How are we going to do that? By building a lab that looks a lot like your enterprise, simulating a real live company we're calling "NWC Inc.". Hardware has been ordered. Software is waiting to be installed. Code is waiting to be written and our lab refrigerator has a 12-pack of Mountain Dew waiting to be consumed. (That's only a daily allowance, really. I'll buy more - I promise).

But I can't give away all our secrets just yet. We still have a ways to go before we're ready to tell you the nitty gritty details, but check back often to see what's happening. We'll continue to update here as we progress and you can read about our daily successes as well as the walls we run into as we move forward.