Well, enough of my lovey-dovey and broken hearted moping entries – it’s time to blog about something productive… and it isn’t related to web design. WTF, mate?
Unfortunately, all my web design goodness is put on hold due to this project I’m doing as a favor for a friend. And the place of business that he works for that asked for my help in the first place. Ahh, the things you hate to do but do anyway for friends.
Taking a flashback to the past when I was gung-ho about SWISS’D and my dual web design/computer support services, my friend, JG, had asked me if I could help them upgrade the network for their non-profit organization, Juniper Centre. Due to my perfectionism, I had presented a proposal to JG and his boss about introducing a standardized network infrastructure to their current environment. Without much forethought and drawing on my previous experience from my stint in IT, I was essentially taking the role of MCSE when I was only working as an MCSA lackey. Lame. Nevertheless, I intended to see it through. I bedazzled them with the wonders of VM, drew ‘oohs’ and ‘ahhs’ from the crowd about AD and group policies, and even pulled a rabbit out of my hat with a full network topology of everything from device layout to wiring schematics. If this was going to be my last job as a tech, I was going to make it a spectacular one; nothing short of a magnum opus for techie geekdom.
The proposal was presented back in December, after I had decided to go solo with SWISS’D. At the time, I wanted to finalize all my legalities with starting the business, so I hadn’t shaken hands yet. By the time January rolled around, I had given up on the tech support business, so I gave them a quote, they paid me half, and I ordered all the parts and equipment we needed. The parts all came in within a couple weeks – and that’s when it all started going downhill (just kidding).
The last two weeks have been productive (and busy). JG and I started out by wiring the building with CAT6 and simultaneously punching down surface mounts. At the end, we mounted the patch panel to the wall and I punched everything down there, testing each drops’ connectivity. The final step was mounting the rest of the networking equipment next to the patch panel.
This past weekend was spent setting up the server. Interesting, right? Not really, I kept running into issues. First of all, ESXi wouldn’t install on the psuedo server I purchased, despite all the met requirements. ESXi didn’t detect the SATA controller, no matter which disk mode I set it to. So, I thought that perhaps installing a base Linux distro with VMware Server would work – not a chance, Linux apparently didn’t like the NIC and wouldn’t obtain an IP address from DHCP. The last solution was to tweak the Vista install and install VMware Server. That actually worked, and installing the server OS as a VM was also successful. Now, I need to configure the server and see if everything works. That is the hope. My next worry is configuring the proxy and ensuring that all the PCs can authenticate to the domain.
I’m already stressing and dreading over the little things. However, whenever I do get it working, VM is quite an impressive technology. It’s just all the layers involved that are driving me crazy.
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