It's been a slow end to the week as I've been working on some sneaks and haven't gotten to code in 2 days, thus no updates. :-(

Good news is that our switches should arrive Monday or Tuesday and that means we can set up the storage.

Now there are two, count them, two applications running on the app server. The first one just shows the inventory listing and some detail about the products. The second one displays information about a customer.

Okay, so they're not apps in the sense that they do anything yet, but that's coming. WebSphere Studio makes writing these things a piece of cake. It's just like cheatin'.

Steve upgraded the BIOS on the servers today to get rid of that annoying false alert. I watched and learned and found it was really a lot easier using Dell's Open Manage Server than it is to do it manually. No floppy necessary, very nice.

w00t!

We have an application running on the app server. Yes, I did the happy dance. Don't look at me like that, you've done it too.

There is a tech note on IBM's site that references connectivity issues between Windows and UNIX specifically for remote access to DB2. Apparently it generates the same error I was seeing. I tried it, even though I'm going windows to windows. It worked. Broke the test server on the development machine, but I'm fairly certain that the same set of scripts will fix that and I'll be coding happily again in short order.

The storage has arrived as well! Now we just need our switches and we can finish up with the hardware infrastructure.

Well, no DSL but we have completed the DB2 migration.

In an interesting discussion this morning about the storage solution brought up the fact that Exchange can no longer use a mapped drive for a message store. Exchange 2000 uses a block protocol, which isn't supported by CIFS. So we will have to migrate the Exchange message stores once the storage arrives - if it provides a block protocol. If not, we'll have to leave the message stores on the local drive which is okay, it's beefy, but may require future upgrades to either the server or to a different groupware server.

The app server is serving up the database application, but it's not working yet. There are some issues with the JDBC connections and after digging into it this afternoon I think I've found the solution, but we'll have to wait until Monday to see if it works.

Not only does reinstalling solve all your problems, rebooting appears to as well!

I've gotten almost all our data migrated into the new DB2 server. While the last one (big one) was running, I worked on building an application to do something with that data. Like, display the inventory.

WebSphere Studio is sweet. It can be a bit confusing at times, but generally speaking it's a nice environment to develop in. So after building an app to grab the inventory and display it, it connected to the database and .. sat there.

I must have tried thirty times to get that thing to run. It would connect and do nothing. By this point I was getting a bit frustrated so I switched back to DB2 to see how the import was going. Would you believe that after two hours it had imported exactly 0 rows?

In a fit of frustration I rebooted the machine and flipped back to the development station. And lo and behold, the data I'd been waiting for suddenly appeared. All the inventory was listed out in a nice neat web page for all to see. Well, all in the lab, which meant, well ... me.

The DSL people were supposed to be in yesterday, but I haven't seen them yet. The storage hasn't arrived either so hopefully tomorrow is package day and wire day.

Well well well... what do you know? I've always thought people who reinstall as a solution to problems with applications were silly. If so, then I guess I'll have to apply that to myself as well.

It was a last ditch effort to get the General Ledger app running and connecting to the DB before installing the DB locally and then trying to migrate to a remote DB. And whaddya know? Reinstallation actually got to the app to look at the DB and go "Whoa, dude. You have no data, should we set it up?" And I said "Yeah, do it already!"

What a week - I should have reinstalled four days ago.

Hey, all.

Not much happening on the hardware side today. The storage vendor Network Storage Solutions (www.nssolutions.com) will be here in the next couple of days.

We got some additional servers late last week from HP, in the form of a DL580, a ML570, and a DL760. We racked them up and got all but the DL760 going. The DL760 is being stubborn after installing 4 additional Xeon processors, but I am sure that I will be able to get it going soon.

Thats all for now, I will let post again when there is more news.

The Great DB2 Data Import has finally come to a close. That's right, all the data's in! W00t!

Steve was joined by our friends Mike and Jason, who assisted in the racking of some beefy - I'm talking BEEFY - Compaq servers to which DB2 will be migrated and our general ledger software will be installed. Since the software arrived this morning, that was a good thing.

It was late in the day when I got to install the software and was once again reminded how horrible it can be to configure software. All I will say about that is BCP.EXE?? If you knew up front that you required additional tools then why isn't that specified somewhere? I read the release notes and the manual. There is no mention of this anywhere and contrary to my children's beliefs I am not psychic! So I installed the SQL server client tools on the machine because that's apparently where BCP.EXE resides. The software stopped complaining about BCP.EXE and is complaining about something else. We'll see Monday what that's all about.

I'll bet you've noticed that I haven't mentioned what software we're using for our general ledger. That's something I'm saving for the article. But to make up for not telling you now about it, I'll tell you something I won't write in the article: I have a wire tie from a length of cat5 holding the buttons together on the ends of one of my sleeves. The buttons were ripped off while trying to rack one of those beefy Compaq servers. Hardware installation can be brutal.

Well, we're finally getting somewhere. Almost all the data is in DB2 now. Just waiting for the customer import to complete. We'll see how that worked in the morning.

I spent some time this morning working with WebSphere Studio writing a web app to access the data that is ready. Very nice... A bit unintuitive at times, but the database access wizard makes it painless. Of course, finding the right DB2 driver was a bit more complicated. I could not find it in the distribution, but it is included with DB2 so I was able to grab it from the app server machine and load it on the development machine and bingo! Instant DB2 access. Now I just have to figure out how to deploy the application.

Our general ledger software should be arriving in the morning. Just in time because the server it will reside on arrived yesterday. That's right - get all the boxes out and more come in. But that's okay, because we are definitely in the home stretch now!

Okay, time for Lori to eat a little crow. Apparently the problem with DB2 (I still don't have data imported) isn't that it's slow. On the contrary - it's actually quite fast. The problem is that the Control Center does not inform you of problems with the import and just continues to run merrily - for days - until you stop it and realize that something isn't right.

So it isn't DB2 I'm frustrated with, it's Control Center.

We received an Avocent IP based KVM today. Took about an hour to get it confgured and it's running fairly nicely. I liked the small size because I could rack it myself. Can't say that for too many products these days.

Back to DB2 tomorrow. No, I'm not looking forward to it. But then after considering all the positions I held in IT orgs before joining NWC that's no surprise. At no time was I ever a DBA. And after the past week I have newfound respect for DBAs. So all you DBAs out there - kudos to you. Your job isn't easy and you probably don't hear it often enough so THANKS FOR BEING a DBA so we don't have to.

Okay, remember that DB2 import I started yesterday? (Are you sensing a pattern, too?)

I'm beginning to believe that though I may be paranoid, they really are out to get me because it's still running like some ill-intentioned energizer bunny import.

DNS is working for both internal and external addresses. Ron forwarded a MS KB article on a "quirk" of MS DNS that occurs when you configure DNS without network connectivity. You need to delete the "." zone. Which I did. Which broke DNS. For some reason it deleted all the PTR records at the same time. After re-entering them, WHAM! DNS works.

Today was mainly a rack day. After getting the software working we powered down everything and then moved all the racks into place, then started racking servers. The APC units are really sweet and I'm happy to say it's still < 70 degrees in the lab. Nice.

The servers are racked. The core infrastructure servers are running, and we're waiting to see if the orange light comes back on. It did not reappear when we powered the unit back on in the rack, so perhaps it's something to do with power quality.