The Grumpy IT Admin

Hopefully if plans go well I will be doing a bunch of upgrades this weekend. Firstly I will be doing the EqualLogic firmware, which, due to some rather buttock clenching moments, I have got different versions on a couple of our systems so I need to get them all in line. I will probably go for 5.0.5 rather than the latest 5.0.7 as it has been out for a while and seems to be relatively safe and as I get older safest seems more bearable than latest. This also means I need to get all the iSCSI connected servers on to the latest version of the HIT kit which is always a worry as most of these are physical servers so you can't just snapshot and then roll back if there is a problem, I will probably pull one of the mirrored system drives before updating to give a quick recovery if it all goes horribly wrong. The other is an update to do is VMware up to 4.1, this is a straight forward thing for the most part, however it is made more problematic by the need to update the VMware tools on

Had a conference call planned today with a Dell boffin and our external support people to discuss firmware and all stuff EqualLogic. Unfortunately said boffin was OOO but no one thought to mention this until we had been waiting on the phone for 10 minutes and then emailed our Dell contact (who was on paternity leave). Rescheduled for Monday but once again Dell fall over on simple Customer Service. We have about 30 or 40 companies we deal with, either support or development and to be honest there are only three that I feel are actually any good. One is called PDQ which we have hardware support with for our servers and printers, they are efficient and always follow up any deliveries to check they have arrived and for generally leave you with that nice warm glow of feeling wanted, we also have always dealt with the same people which makes a huge difference. Second we have Voyager our networking people, the account mangers are salesmen and can be irritating but they have a diamond in t

As we rush headlong over to Exchange 2010 (don't get me started) one of the jobs I've had to do was upgrade our Enterprise Vault to version 9.0.2, this also brings with it support for Outlook 2010 at the client end allegedly, but for now we have a 2003 Exchange environment. The first attempt at an upgrade only just managed to get out of the starting blocks before going pear shaped. I patched the server installed SQL reporting and moved the Message Queue to a different location as recommended by the Vault Deployment Scanner and after reboot we had server that was crawling along a wouldn't start the vault services. Our support company were as much use a the snowball in the Sahara. We managed to recover by going back to the just finished backups of the systems drive and all was well again. I did a copy of the server and tested everything again and was unable to replicate the problem so tried again on the live server with out doing any patching or other stuff and all was wel