Well we were intending on starting the exchange migration this morning at 10:30, but as luck would have it, we’re going to have to wait a bit till we tackle that. Our tape robot, which has been performing perfectly for a year and a half now decided to throw a CRC error early this morning, putting a quick halt to the backup process. So I just kicked off another backup of just the exchange data, and hopefully that’ll run to completion. Our exchange db is about 25 gigs, and it’s been backing up in about 45 minutes, so hopefully this backup will complete in about that same amount of time. Meanwhile, both Dan and I decided to go and do some snowblowing.
Edit…
Well the backup is running now – it’s streaming at about 550 MB/minute, so that’s not too bad. I’d guess that’s about all you’re going to get unless you step up to gigabit ethernet.
/me goes out to finish the snowblowing…
I found out….ummm….accidentally…..maybe…..tonight that I can successfully stream a 1Mbit video stream from work to my house over our vpn.
That’s all.
Oh…one more thing. I got to use my snowblower tonight! **grins**
For those of you who haven’t heard, MPR will be launching a new format (to go along with its News and Classical stations) in the coming weeks. They bought the old WCAL 89.3 in northfield. That station was previously owned and operated by St. Olaf. Anyways, MPR is branching out, with the launch of this new station, into the local/indie genres. The new station will be launched Monday morning, January 24th at 9:00 AM.
Needless to say, I’m *incredibly* excited about this launch. Now only to wait to see what the first song is on Monday morning…
Edit…
MPR has a blog up here, to which they’re posting updates about the progress of KCMP. If you look close, you may even see a few posts I’ve made there.
So I finally got a video capture box set up at work. It’s capturing the composite signal from one of our DirectTV recievers, throwing a 1Mbit mp2 compression on it, and then streaming it out multicast. So far, it’s working great. Since it’s multicast, as many clients can connect to the stream as we desire. Consequently, I’ve been able to keep tabs on the presidential inauguration throughout the day from my desk (the reciever and vid capture box are both up on third floor). So…now that this is done, I have two slight enhancements that I want to make to the system:
- Currently, it’s not using the hardware compression chip on the PVR250 card. This isn’t ideal. I need to figure out how to let vlc use the hw compression on the card.
- Now, if we want to change channels, we need to go up to the third floor. I figure it would be easy enough to throw an IR reciever/transmitter, lirc and a quick and dirty php web interface so that we can change channels remotely. I’ll have to price out what the IR transmitter would cost…
That’s it for now I guess.
/me goes back to watching foxnews :-)
Well this weekend, we’ll be (finally) getting rid of our exchange 5.5 server. Much to my chagrin, we’re not replacing it with a qmail server. Heck…I’d even settle for sendmail! We’ll be upgrading to the latest and greatest of Redmond’s “groupware” servers (whatever that means), Exchange 2003.
It’ll actually be a really good change. Outlook web access in ’03 is *much* better and more stable than in 5.5. Granted, you still need IE to get the most advantages out of it, but that’s not exactly a surprise. I guess Microsoft hasn’t figured out how to code any web apps without using ActiveX extensively. Oh well.
So today, I switched our Barracuda spam firewall so that it’s checking for valid email addresses against LDAP on our DC. That went fine. Tonight, I’ll change the email routing so that all SMTP mail will route through the new server. Hopefully that’ll go fine (thankfully it’s very easy to switch back if something blows up). Fortunately, email is fairly tolerant of outages and such, so if our email is down for an hour or so while we do the upgrade, nothing will be lost.
Today, I also installed an SSL certificate for the Outlook Web Access server, which was fun. I’ve installed certs in apache countless times, and it’s very easy, but I’d never done in in IIS. Surprisingly, with all of the “Install Certificate” wizards and such in IIS, I still found it more cumbersome to do than in apache, where all you have to do is add a few lines to your VirtualHost configuration, send it a HUP, and voila. Oh well.
Stay tuned to see how things end up going with the big migration on saturday.
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