Dan at Work (the Sunday shift)

Sunday is not my favourite of days to be at work, but here I am.

The problem (for me) with Sundays is that is a fairly quiet day, but technical support can still be required. I've had a few support calls tonight (nothing too taxing though) and have managed to move on with my testing of some .MSI packages ready for rolling out to around 300 users.

I've been playing with the idea of product updates via Active Directory GPOs and have found that they work fairly well. Getting some of the products as MSI packages isn't as easy as it might be, but there are some products available to help convert / create packages.

This should make our security and product updates much easier. I didn't have the opportunity to look at this the last time we had an emergency update which when we upgraded to IE7. This came about when our proxy servers were updated and didn't work with IE6 and lower. That experience proved to me once and for all that trying to update all our users manually is too much work for a small IT department, so when the next batch of security updates came in (with a mid-December deadline for completion) I started looking at alternatives.

Using group policies isn't perfect, but it is certainly a damn site better than visiting each machine individually. I'm off to get some more packages sorted out, ttfn.

Dan at work - Dan vs MySQL

Todays challenge was to port the back-end code of our company Intranet from SQL Server 2000 to MySQL. This is due to our company Intranet sitting on our web development server (not the best place for it really).

In theory this shouldn't be too difficult a job as the SQL queries that we run to generate the site aren't really that complicated (no nested procedures or anything like that), the only parts that I was a bit concerned about were moving the data (especially binary objects held in database tables) from SQL Server to MySQL.

I didn't want to install MySQL on the same server as SQL Server 2000, then I remembered that I'd already set up a MySQL database on a test server for use with Merak Email server, so that can hold an extra couple of tables till I can sort out a more permanent home for it.

MySQL comes with a migration tool which takes care of moving the tables and data from the old server to the new one. It will also make relocating the database later on an absolute breeze. There were a couple of gotchas - namely codepage support on some of the databases - the data wouldn't move over until I set the target database to "international" mode.

A couple of the ASP pages needed a little tweak here or there - the original SQL Server 2000 table name was "northeast.dbo" (this was to match a remote version of the database used for our "live" client pages) - the MySQL version is "northeast_dbo" so some of the queries needed a little nudge here and there, as well as MySQL not supporting things like CAST or TOP. All told it took a little over five hours to port our company Who's Who database, Newsletters databases (three of them), Editorial Style Guide and Administration pages (including fixing up the ASP pages).

Tomorrow I've got to create a version of our Intranet site for one of our sister sites, and I get the feeling that will be followed by one for another site too. So it looks like things could be a little busy for the next couple of days (at the very least).

Dan at work

Well, it's Friday at last, traditionally the quietest day of the week. Of course, it doesn't always work that way. For the last couple of Fridays we've had all sorts of Internet related problems to contend with which have kept us busy from shift start to shift end, so having a quiet(ish) day is nice.

This also allows me to do some of the less glamorous but still needed admin tasks, such as working my way through our servers event logs and investigating any errors or warnings, ensuring that all AntiVirus software is up to date on the servers, checking patches are installed and so on. More than enough to keep me occupied, but nothing to panic about.

. . . .

I should have known better than to say it's quiet. Three calls in a row there (one external engineer who has come to repair one of our printers, and two internal support calls).

Better run before anything else happens.