Charles Pluta – IT Service Integration

So the week has flown by since I knew I needed to blog for Project 52, since that has officially restarted. But this week has been just crazy.
Too many things going on at work.. Too many concerts to go to here in Augusta, plus me time? Right. Lets try to actually keep a schedule this coming week.

So while I wanted to still post a new blog every week during 2010, I think I have missed a week. I however am not the only one, plus, the official Project 52 year will be starting soon anyway.

Project 52 announced that the blog posts will be from March 17, 2010 – March 17, 2011. This gives me some time to think about how to dedicate a little more time to writing a new blog post each week.

I still plan on having a mixture of personal and how-to tech type posts. Hopefully the increased ESX posting will help some people. There should be more to come, as I was notified this week that we are planning to virtualize 90% of our datacenter environment. This should provide me with plenty of help and how to info that I can write on.

Until then

Week 6 – Project 52

So my plan to start a week early on Project 52 worked out, because now I already missed a weekend in posting, but didn’t miss the week! The plan was to schedule a post to appear every Saturday, but that hasn’t worked too well.. So in the middle of the week works too, I suppose.

Sadly I can’t share both of the projects I’m leading right now due to NDAs. Hah. As i thought I’d be able to talk about most things on here.. The things I want to share I can’t. For now at least. Lets just say it includes VMware and Windows 7. Yay Two of the best technologies, and I get to work with both in my projects.

Project 52 – Week 3

Troubleshooting a problem can be tedious and time consuming. However, with the right process, you can turn a drawn out troubleshooting process into a more concentrated point of observation. As an example, this week I was setting up a single VPN tunnel, however it connected 2 offices to a single 3rd party office. This was done via a point to point connection between the 2 offices of my client.

The equipment being used included 2 TZ170 Sonicwalls for my client, one at each site, and a Cisco PIX firewall for the 3rd party. I had no control over the Cisco device, but full control over the Sonicwall devices. I had the VPN tunnel setup for the 1st hop fairly quickly. We agreed on a preshared key and had the one office setup almost immediately. However, the 2nd office (over the point to point connection) could not get access into their network.

This is where I began my troubleshooting process. The easiest way I troubleshoot something like this is to break it down piece by piece, and in this case, hop by hop (The Sonicwalls are also routers). I enabled logging on both devices and watched as we attempted to ping from both networks. On one network, everything was being sent fine. However, pings from the point to point network were being sent, but nothing ever was being received. At this point I was happy that it seemed both of my devices were working properly. However, their network was not responding to anything I sent.

After several conversations over almost a week-long period, the 3rd party finally admitted to having entered the IP information incorrectly in their PIX device. Once this was resolved everything was operating as needed.

My point is how to break things up so you have an idea where to look at. I could have fired blindly and started making changes that I though could have fixed the issue, but by breaking it down first and peering into what was happening on a step by step basis, I was able to pinpoint where the problem was, and then once realizing where it was, how to fix it.

Project 52 – Week 2

In the past few years, “social media” has gained dominance online as more and more younger people join those who have been plugged in for years. But what is social media, and why have I avoided it so much?

Back in the day I was all over the internet… Before Google was as huge and my homepage was the basic HTML layout of Yahoo. I played on the awesome java applet of Yahoo Games and was on IRC constantly. However as things evolved, somehow I didn’t see all of those new things nessesary. You could call those things the Web 2.0 change, but I don’t want to get that idea mixed in with social media.

The big one at first (that I saw) was Myspace.. and I avoided it like a plague. Why would someone need something this slow to post their thoughts and make friends? I finally succumbed and made an account, as everyone I knew kept asking me for my own myspace page. And then came Facebook. I can’t be found there… Not from any hidden privacy things (Is that possible there?) but because I don’t have an account.. and I refuse to create one.

But then there is Twitter and somehow, all of its magic. Granted, I haven’t even had a twitter account for almost 2 years.. still late to the party. But somehow, its not like the others. Its simple, and easy. It has streamlined what I think Myspace or Facebook could be. Sure, there are plenty of spammers, but I have encountered that everywhere.. Even those Yahoo games applets And from this I see what everyone else got from those other sites.

So in the future I plan on being proactive in social media, or whatever comes next.. Not on the sidelines watching it and wondering how other people benefit from it. I have already started by getting a Gowalla account and the associated iPhone app. And hopefully, the more people I follow on Twitter, the faster I can get into the next big social media site… But whats after social media?