ITECS Systems Staff Notes

• Catching Up - Reading email, returning voicemail, and generally just getting back up to speed after being out for 3 weeks.
• AD - Some random fixes in the ENGR, Wolftech, and IES domains.
• VMware - more work on pricing model and discussion about cluster sizing/design.

Meetings:

• BigFix Demo
• Architect Interview
• Backups/Nagios
• Logging
• AD Policy

I'm gone for the next 3 weeks in a foreign land full of wonderment and shenanigans. Sucks to be everyone else.

• TMOS 10 - Got a gpo setup, it will update v8, but its talking to the wrong parent server.
• ENGR Cleanup - Deleted krb_disable user accounts and removed a couple more GPO/OU/groups.
• Project Planning - Went around to everyone in Systems and a couple people on the second floor to discuss what would be going on for the next couple weeks to help them prioritize and to give feedback on anything that would normally require my assistance/input/etc.
• Networking - Troubleshooting Celerra access issues, going through QIP DB dump to try and distinguish VLANs from subnets, monitoring the DC's via OIT's nagios on Sysnews.
• Podcasts - Got some MS, FLOSS, VMware, Security podcasts to fill up the 60+ hours of travel time I'll have to/from New Zealand.

Meetings:

• IAM Roadmap
• Solar Center -> Wolftech
• Engr-Sysadmin
• Domain Controller Monitoring
• AD Policy Committee
• Project Planning x 6
• Network Architect Interviews x 3

• Networking - Troubleshooting moving VIPs on vlan 30 vs. other VLANs and how that interacts with VMware internal networking. Getting changes made to the Research IV firewall for ITRE. Diagnosing communication issues with VLAN 25->Celerra.
• ENGR - LOTS of cleanup, including replacing 15 WSUS policies with 1 using GPP targetting, removing a bunch of unused/redundant GPOs, unused groups/users/computers. Setting up some application upgrades.
• Wolftech - Discussion of application upgrade options, authentication issues with samba+Win7, and encryption for mac shares. Working on requirements for the ad object auditing report. Creating trusts for engr/itre. Diagnosing issues with the ou creation script.
• Mediasite - Helping with some troubleshooting and cert procurement.
• Logs - Trying out OIT's splunk setup and asking Pete lots of questions about his work.
• IES - Fixing DNS entries and diagnosing AD replication issues in the IES AD domain.

Meetings:

• ITECS Managers
• CSC + VMware
• AITD
• OIT Clustering
• Security Subcommittee
• ISE Consulting
• WolfWise Customer Advisory Team

• ENGR - Firefox upgrade, Quicktime upgrade, and deleted almost 200 objects. More cleanup needed.
• Mediasite - Did some diagnosis on the issues with one of the EX nodes and then got comtech to pull it from the load balancer.
• Architect - More reviewing resumes.
• FF+GW - Diagnosing the Firefox upgrade interaction with Groupwise. Turns out, if you don't have a default web browser set, the Groupwise spell checker crashes GW. Awesome.
• ITRE Firewall - Working with Comtech to get it setup correctly so that we can setup a one-way AD trust.

Meetings:

• IAM Conf Call
• IES VMware 1
• Shibboleth
• NDSTech
• Mac AD Permissions
• IAM Service Team
• IES VMware 2
• Download.eos

• Private Labs - Created the OU's and groups
• EX Software - Migrated a number of applications GPO's from EX to SW/FW in Wolftech.
• Firewall - Reviewing the ITRE/Comtech firewall settings. Need to request some openings in the firewall to complete the AD trust.
• Managed Desktops - Updating the online matrix and trying to come up with a way to prioritize.
• Purchasing - Some random stuff from CDWG.

Meetings:

• BAE AD
• ITECS Managers
• User Filesystems Working Group
• User Filesystems Townhall
• RDP/Calista Conference Call

• Meetings, meeting prep, summaries, email. Bleh.
• Permissions Cleanup - Removing perms for old employees, fixing some locker permissions, and removing old ip acls.
• Visual Modflow - License manager is broke. We're waiting to hear back from support.

Meetings:

• ITRE
• Sun IDM + AD
• Groupwise Town Hall
• Visual Modflow
• IAM Roadmap
• Download.eos

• Meetings, hallway conversations, and phonecalls.
• Managed Desktop - Research and discussion, but not much movement yet.
• UITC - Dan's doing the presentation, so I got to write the short report.
• Ops - Created all the new Jabber accounts.
• Office - Its cleaner than its been in a year and I still have piles of crap everywhere.

Meetings:

• OIT Backup Services
• Jabber
• AITD
• ITECS Managers
• VMware Partnership
• Rewrite Rules
• NCSU Football Game
• AD Technical

• Lab - Apps, permissions, fixing stuff. We realized we're not seeing as many permissions issues as we thought we should have been seeing because we messed up the permissions on the C drive.
• Networking/Firewall - Working with Comtech and other random groups to try and come up with some networking plans, firewall processes, and determine what they rules for firewall config/log access should be.
• Clean up - Room 5/17 look alot better. Nothing like rewiring the testbed when your brain is fried.
• Download - Worked w/ Daniel/Mike on random issues with the download site.

Meetings:

• Networking/Firewall
• ITECS Managers
• Justin/MSE
• AD
• Shibboleth
• Security Subcommittee
• MD3000i
• ISE App Packaging

• Labs - Every free moment. Fixing apps, helping with image, random bug fixes. Basic beginning of semester craziness.
• Blackberry - Broken. :(

Meetings:

• MacTech
• ITECS-Staff
• Hoit + AD
• IAM
• Wolfwise Advisory
• ISO AD
• Textiles VMware
• AD Policy

• Apps - Moved lots and lots of COE/OIT apps to the NCSU level in Wolftech for people to test. Also went through the membership for the old AV groups/apps. Will probably be moving a bunch of stuff from EX->SW in the next day or so.
• VMware - Figured out and set perms on the 2nd cluster, wrote up a page on techies about it and made a VM for internal audit.
• Server GPO's - Combined 3 that were at the same level in WT, applied the baseline 03/08 security policies to a couple sub-ou's so we can phase them in, and had to set a couple settings via gpp.
• Wolftech web - Set some perms for Dan, poked at some scripts, and unsuccessfully tried to figure out where some .htaccess's were fed from.
• PT - Got 99% of the work done on getting our PTer. Luckily since I pounced on it on July 1st, I got in between spending freezes.

Meetings:

• Keith/IES/Budget
• ITECS Managers
• Managed Desktops
• AITD
• Colleges Cluster
• OIT Labs
• Charles
• IAM Auth

Out 1 day for Vacation, and 2 days sick. So twas a very short week.

• Apps - Moved 12 apps up to the NCSU level in Wolftech.
• Nagios - Updated stuff for CSC

Meetings:

• UofFl Phone Call
• AD Policy

Short week for me cause I'm heading to the Windy City till Monday night.

• LDAP - We've been having all sorts of issues with LDAP auth to DC's. None of the 2008 boxes worked. The 2003 boxes worked sometimes. Turned out we had expired certs on some of the 2003 boxes. Aaaand the issue with the 2008 boxes was that we had hardcoded the service accounts to only be able to login to the 2003 DC's. 1st rule of service accounts and I forgot about it. :(
• Cached Credentials - Turns out we caused the issue with the Solar Center laptops not doing cached creds when we worked around a work around on a set of machines and had a policy linked in where it shouldn't be. Sigh. We need to clean that mess up.
• StuAff - Helped with a programming bug, some info about the Celerra, and some random questions.

Mere mortals bow before the weight of my Meetings:

• Centers in ENGR -> Wolftech
• Sun IDM / Admin Portal / Wolftech
• ITECS SAN Needs
• ITECS Managers
• Mediasite + Moodle
• Engr-Sysadm
• Comtech
• Network Binding Order
• Download.eos procedures
• Leading Change During Uncertain Times

• DC2 - Power outage required a good bit of VMware and AFS planning. I also came in with Rob to shut things down.
• Certs - The certs on the DC's were causing issues with the Password Change page. And then Bleu blew up. Bleh.
• VMware - Decommissioned a few VM's, sync'd .iso's across a couple servers, and worked w/ Richard on migrating clusters.
• Cached Creds - Some of the laptops for Solar Center have decided to just not do cached credentials anymore. Or at least not obey the GPO.

Meetings:

• ITECS Picnic
• IES Mediasite
• Security Subcommittee
• AD Technical
• Enterprise Directory
• DC2 Power Outage

• AD - More Domain controller stuff, replication and firewalls. Never ending....
• Give Aways - I'm trying to give away as much server room hardware as possible because we've got a number of items that could still be useful for another group but that we're not gonna use again.
• Random - Lots of Random.

Meetings:

• AITD
• FS Team
• IAM

• DFS Replication - Slowly getting DFS errors reduced.
• Domain Controllers - dcpromo on the new 2008 box took forever. UAC is still blocking us from logging in locally and LDAP auth over SSL isn't working.
• Classes - Taught 2 OU Admin classes (3 hours apiece).

Meetings:

• AD Class x 2
• Shared Mail
• CUACS Racks
• Shibboleth WG

• Classes - Updating presentations, getting instructors together for advanced classes, creating OU's for the Monday/Tuesday classes.
• DFS - Replication is messed up betweem lono/kane. Kane has been giving cryptic errors for a couple days.
• GW - You can't reply to your own sent mail?? More IMAP issues. The GW client is crashing, and Mulberry doesn't like the IMAP too much. LDAP is not showing up for people and there are WMS (from the 1996 .dlls - WTF) errors that I haven't figured out yet.
• Port activations - Trying to get the secondary ports in everyone's offices in Systems activated without paying $. The admin VLAN we have is too small and will get firewalled more than it is and test machines really shouldn't be on it.
• Binding order - Turns out you can hack the registry to change the NIC binding order to fix the Remote Assistance issue. But its complicated. I've found some powershell stuff that gets us most of the way there. Justin is gonna take a crack at getting it the rest of the way.
• VM - Random supporty things: iso uploads, mounting iso's from backend, deleting/creating VM's.
• shib - Tried to help Daniel with new download.eos, he and Charles got it working.
• UAC - Damn thing fooled me. If you are only in the admin group and you login with UAC on, you get a blank background.
• TMOS/SAV - Trying to figure out exactly what still needs TM.

Meetings:

• Solidworks/Matlab
• CHASS + Mediasite

• AD - Domain controller issues ate up at least 2 full days between last week and this week. Then various troubleshooting "opportunities" and discussions.
• DR - Gave the DR people my updated copy of the DR plan for systems. I'm not particularly happy with it, but it'll do for now. Also got access to LDRPS... I don't like it at all.
• VM - Deleted 5 VM's, recreated HD's on 2, increased HD sizes on 6, moved some resource pools. And I think I created one in there, but can't find it.
• GW - Random issues, emails, and discussion. And I thought I had crashed IMAP, but supposedly it was someone else.
• Postmaster - Mailbox was full, and it took me a while to get cyradm to behave.
• dtank - Its still sorta messed up. But upgrading to IE8 somehow got the java client to work with the Dell drac cards, so at least that works.
• Classes - I'm teaching 2 sections of the OU Admin class on the 29th and 30th. I'll be doing the Intro course again soonish. Also working on a scripting course, advanced group policy, and splitting the packaging class I taught last year into 2 sections. I've also got "volunteers" for helping with everything so far.
• Michael - Some help with Solidworks and matlab. Biggest help I was to him this week was questioning whether some old apps need to go on the lab machines at all. Answer: Nope.
• Random - 2 web server issues; afs stats show we're at about 65% usage on the RW servers and about 60-70% overbooked. So we can handle taking down 1 box at a time.
• Security position - Filled out my evals and got them in, only 1 day late.

Meetings:

• Engr-Sysadm
• Birthday Lunch

• Meetings - Considering I was out sick one day and had 2 meetings canceled, this was almost the most meetingful week in history.
• CS - Worked with CropSci on importing their OU/Group structure from XML. Had to patch the script from MS to get it to work.
• VM - VM for Tex, helped Richard with some of the cabling for the VMware cluster in Poe, fixed the license file that had some errors in it.
• GW - More random GW issues.

Meetings:

• Security Analyst Search Committee
• DR/BCP Planning
• Interview x 2
• VMware
• CED + AD
• FileSystems SOP Team
• Performance Contracting + Poe
• Brainstorming session
• Download.eos
• Lead Architect Search Committee

• Reviews - They have a way of sneaking up on you. And taking up a lot of time.
• DR - Answered some questions, did more writing, and have been merging everyone's feedback in.
• MAE - Helped Lance with a a GPO setting.

Meetings:

• Reviews x 7
• ISE
• Interview+Presentation
• Systems+Web

• VM - VMware permissions are terrible. Setup AD groups, VMware Roles and granted appropriate access to allow OIT Provisioning to create VM's on our cluster. Also granted a bunch of VM User permissions, and setup groups for when the new cluster is built. Created/modified VM's for OIT/ECE/IES. There seems to be some brokenness in how the "Administrator" role is handled at the root. We might have to reboot VCenter to get the changes to take effect.
• Jabber - Created accounts for IT staff in Student Affairs. Helped Daniel with poking SSL to work right.
• DR - More work on DR/BCP planning.
• Version Control - Talked with Damian about their needs and read up on Git a little.
• GW - Got my calendar imported another couple times.

Meeting:

• Student Affairs AD
• OIT GPO
• Security Subcommittee

• DR Plan - Started. Due by the end of the month.
• Reviews - Started. Due by the end of the month.
• VCL Web Server - Helped diagnose a bug with the permissions with certs on the new server.
• GW - More issues. Waiting on a 3rd import of my calendar.
• 2008 Clustering - MS Switching from using domain user accounts for services to using Network service plus a computer account for the cluster is confusing when you first look at it. We weren't adding the cluster computer account to the local admin group. The thought of adding a computer to log into another computer doesn't process quite the same way.

Meetings:

• ITECS Managers
• FileSystems SOP
• ITECS BCP/DR Audit
• UITC
• IAM Service Team
• Mediasite Architecture
• Network Architect Interview/Presentations x 2

• Labstats - Got #'s for unique users per month for Keith.
• 2008 clustering - Did lots of trial and error on getting one of the Mediasite clusters working. I did. Though I'm not sure quite how.
• GW fun - More issues. Playing with .ics files and breaking webmail. Also worked on trying to get address books to import
• IE - Trying to help Richard with issues with DRAC ActiveX controls.

Meeting:

• Lab Printing
• AITD
• SIS
• Shibboleth WG
• FileSystems SOP
• Managed Desktops Report

• Groupwise - This was a far, far more painful transition than I expected.
• 2007 - The way MS changed the 2007 installer makes it more susceptible to problems.
• DC1 Racks - Racked up a couple servers in DC1.

Meetings:

• ITECS Managers
• Web Services
• VMware
• Citrix
• Lab Apps
• AD Tech
• Ed
• Interview
• AD Town Hall
• ISE Remote Access

• Office 2007 - Figured out 2 issues so far. Apparently installing it via GPO and other apps at the same time doesn't work too well.
• AD - New OU's for CVM and Libraries. Also some random other AD-related tasks.
• VM's - Made one for OIT for the new KMS server (had to reinstall it cause I selected "core" the 1st time), removed 2 old ones.
• Apps - Worked with Michael on the VPN client, WaterCAD, and did some basic MSI training.

Meetings:

• Admin Desktop
• Engr-Sysadm
• Library Thin Clients
• OIT Meetings x 3
• MS VDI Conference Call
• Interviews x 4

• Lots of meetings. Lots of preparing for meetings.
• AD Stuff - Cross realm trust: added 2, removed 2. Reviewed 2008 DC upgrade plan. Technical oversight committee formed. More fighting with 2008 TS licening.

Meetings:

• ITECS Managers
• Managed Desktops
• Computer Committee
• ACSAD DNS/DHCP
• Security Subcommittee
• SIS