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The worst documented piece of technology we have at our organization is the phone system, or rather, the analog piece of it.  In our older buildings, there is miles of twisted pair copper, numerous 66 and 110 blocks, and sparse documentation or labeling on anything.  Thankfully, the bulk of it is dead, the remainder of multiple phone systems of the past.

Now, 99.9% of our handsets are cisco VoIP phones.  We still have POTS lines dedicated to fire, burglar, fax, and who knows what else. The “who knows what else” is the problem I have.  There’s spotty documentation on what each POTS line is for, and due to many interconnected blocks spread out throughout every building, it’s difficult to determine where these lines go to from the demarc.  The most frustrating part is, out facilities department can’t tell me what equipment they even use that pulls dial tone.

At least with email systems and directory services you can sort of put a complete picture together of your servers, or using your routing tables and cisco network assistant (if you’re on cisco gear) you can put together a map of your network starting with no documentation.  Old twisted pair phone cabling is like the wild west.

Any other system or network admins out there have to deal with spaghetti soup legacy phone systems?

The old wordpress theme was getting a bit stale.  I’m mucking around with some other looks.

If you’re a Cisco IPSec VPN client user and recently switched to 64bit Windows 7, you probably noticed that the combination doesn’t fly.  Cisco’s IPSec client won’t run on a 64bit OS.  One option is to use XP mode to run the VPN software, but unfortunately, every remote tool you may use has to be run from the XP VM.

Reading through serverfault, I saw a post about shrew’s vpn client.  I have installed it and it seems to be working great, in native 64bit Windows 7.  The best part is, the software is free(outside of the twinge of guilt for not donating of course!(edit:  I will be)).  I’ll report back if I run into any issues.

One large issue I have run into with installing Windows 7 on my laptop was that my USB to Serial adapter that I need to use a cisco console cable and that no longer worked.  Apparently, from a little bit I have read on the web, most of the manufacturers of these devices use a chipset from Prolific.  I pulled the driver from this site:

http://www.prolific.com.tw/eng/downloads.asp?ID=31

Once I got that installed, all was well again and I was able to connect to switches and routers via the console cable.  Yay

We have a lot of what you might consider, legacy systems.  Primarily, most of our NetWare servers.  For us, they’re still highly used production machines.

One such server is a NetWare 6.5 box running iScsi target services.  That server is the shared storage for our Novell cluster.  I’m working on getting a base Zenoss install configured for some sort of host monitoring.  I couldn’t get the Netware server to talk back to the zenoss server.  I realized that the default gateway was wrong.  It was set to some bogus gateway from when we had a flat network and gateways were irrelevant.  The best part is, the reinitialize command doesn’t seem to work when I change any setting in inetcfg.  There is some goofy step when you first run inetcfg where it has to transfer from autoexec.ncf and requires a server reboot.  So basically, I have to drag the entire cluster offline to change the default gateway of the target server.

And people complained about having to restart windows 95/98 when you changed your IP!

Apparently Zenoss changed their listserv and http forums recently.  However, they got rid of the old software and messages/posts.  Almost every google hit that has anything to do with zenoss goes back to those old pages that don’t exist anymore.  Why the hell would you eliminate those old pages or not import and redirect to the new resources?

We recently purchased 100+ Lenovo Thinkpad SL500 units.  We ran into a major issue with a large chunk of them having issues connecting to our LAN via the wired Realtek NIC.  It turns out there are a couple of fixes, none of which include a driver or BIOS update.  Either the IO card has to be completely replaced, or a capacitor has to be soldered onto the IO card.

The symptoms are that when you are on AC power, the NIC will connect at 10/mbps and half duplex.  If you force the switchport to 100 full and the computer to 100 full, the unit simply won’t connect at all.  The funny part is, if you run the laptop on battery, there are no issues.

Dealing with the tier 1 techs was a bit of a headache.  The high level techs at Lenovo have identified the issue but I guess it hasn’t worked its way down to the front line support.  Tier 1 support actually wanted me to return all of the laptops because we didn’t purchase on site support.  This was the first time I’ve ever yelled at any support person on the phone, which I generally don’t do because most of the issues I have aren’t their fault at all, but I lost it this time.  Finally after about 5 business days of constant badgering and being slowly pushed up the support tree, I finally got on the phone with someone who could make things happen.  And they did make things happen, FAST.  I was up against the wall to deploy these units and they flew a tech out that night to start working on the issue.

The issue was completely over the tier 1 support and I can’t really blame them as they probably don’t often have someone call with more than a 100 busted laptops.  I can blame them for not moving up the tree quick enough, but in the end, the issue was resolved.  I’m impressed that Lenovo didn’t leave me in the rain and are sticking by their product and their mistake.  Too bad software companies don’t follow suit when they release shit software and charge hundreds of dollars to even talk to an engineer.

This is going to be a quick one.  We’ve upgraded to eDirectory 8.8, NetWare 6.5 SP8 on all the netware boxes, and introduced the first OES Linux server into the directory.  We’ve also upgraded to GW8 just today. Initial thoughts:

The Good:  The webaccess client is as big of a leap foward as it was from 6.5 to 7.0, maybe even more.  Seamless scrolling past 20 messages and enhanced javascript functions really makes the web client a viable option for people who are in between the power user and I just check my email crowds.  The Windows client seems to be a nice improvement.  I’m really going to like the threaded topic view.  ConsoleOne on Linux with the latest snappins doesn’t actually require you to hold the mouse button down to select attribute screens.

The Bad:  The installer, both NetWare/Windows and especially on Linux still leave a lot to be desired.  The Linux installer is still incapable of properly resizing windows without cutting off buttons even after its initial release with 6.5.  ConsoleOne on Linux is still a slug with the java swing(or is it awt) UI.  The linux agents need the ability to display the live agents screen(the gray screen) without having to unload the daemon and loading it as an application.  I’d prefer to see everything live instead of using the http screen or gwmonitor.

The Ugly:  What’s up with that client icon?

I walked in this morning and got logged in.  Shortly after that, I was approached by a coworker stating that the server room was really loud.  I wandered down and heard the server fans screaming away before I even got to the door.  As soon as I opened the door I was blasted by a head wave as hot as some of our mid summer heat waves here in eastern PA.  At first, I felt like I was walking into some crazy bizarro server room.  Every server was flashing amber or red and there was a slight odor of burning electronics.

I quickly realized the 1 year old AC unit had crapped out. The server room has two doors so I opened both doors and grabbed a few box fans to start moving air through the room. I then started to shut down most of the servers and a large chunk of the network gear. Somewhere during that, I called our facilities department and alerted them of the situation. They began to work on the AC unit and determined that a fuse blew, which has been replaced and the unit is back on. The server room is still cooling down now and I have slowly been bringing servers and other equipment back online.

There are a few issues here. Ultimately, things break and we need to have some sort of control of the environment of that room or at the very least, a way to monitor it. First of all, I should have an independent temperature sensor that will alert me when it gets too hot in there. If someone hadn’t alerted me to the problem when they did, there could have been a shit load of issues if equipment started to fail.

The other issue is that I’ve always been toying around with a network monitor system, but I’ve never been able to settle on anything. I’ve mucked around with Zenoss and nagios but I’ve never stuck with anything. I need to just find a proper system and knuckle down and get it configured.

There are lessons to be learned from this morning!