Archive for the “IT Skills” Category

As someone doing tech support or tech work how can you add value in the work that you do for the people that you support? Well I think there are three ways and each of these ways probably will putt you out of your comfort zone, which is great.

1. When doing support always refer to the computer as a pet – Most people have no real relationship with their computer and they treat it badly. One of the ways that you can use the pet analogy is to teach them to do drefrags, system scans, and to blow out dust and wipe down the computer. Read the rest of this entry »

I just installed an Apache Tomcat server. Very exciting to me.

I have installed Apache the Web Server a few times at home just to serve sites and to have a functioning web server but had never done anything with Apache Tomcat.

So why do we need Apache Tomcat? Well one of my roles is the support of a Tier 1 app here at the anonymous place that I work. This application has interfaces that point to other systems that we either puch data to or more commonly consume data from. Our interfaces were all built using a third party EAI system with Oracle stored procedures to access these interfaces. The vendor has now changed the format that they want to use and we have a contractor in to rewrite the interfaces.

Now Apache Tomcat is going to be the application layer that speaks to the app as well as speaking to the interfaces. This should be a lot of fun as I try to get my head around how to admin an Application Server

My wife just got a new laptop, a Dell Inspiron 1525 and she had decided that she was going to move completely from our kitchen desktop to doing everything on this new laptop. This is a bit different then a normal migration when a computer goes bad as I had complete access to the old and new machines at the same time.

One of the real kickers her was that our old machine was running Windows XP and the new laptop came preloaded with Windows Vista Home

I of course was the one tasked with this job and I wanted to make sure that everything went smoothly in one step with just a bit of cleanup at the end. It did. Here is the process that I used to migrate all the files and settings.

Find out Scope

So first of all I had to figure out exactly what I was moving from one machine to the other. My wife for instance has her own folder, her accounts and mail in Outlook, favorites in Internet Explorer and her website files for Dreamweaver. Read the rest of this entry »

I ran into an issue with the Zebra printer in after hours when on call a few days ago and these are the steps that I took to eventually fix the problem. The Zebra printer was a 4Z M Plus. I have had all kinds of problems with these printers over the years, mostly because they are not very strongly built as network printers. First of all is the fact that the printer will only work at a speed of 10Half.

Here was the process in the middle of the night.

1.       Isolated the problem. The problem was that printing worked but 5 minutes later it stopped working for no apparent reason. I logged onto the print servers and there was one print job from the printer hung on one print server. I deleted the print job and tried printing a test page to the printer from the same print server. The print job hung.

2.       I looked at the print server logs. It seemed that there was problem for the last hour on all print jobs on the hg01 server. I stopped and restarted the print spooler service. I printed a test page and it went through. I then logged onto the web interface of the printer and saw that my print job went through.

3.       Called back the users and told them all was fixed. It wasn’t and none of the jobs was printing. I tried again and it did not work. The web interface of the Zebra printer though did show the job has having printed. The printing was apparently working from the application as well as locally on the print server.

4.       Additional Print server checks. Went back to the printer server to see if there were any problems and saw a datawindow error for that printers driver in the system log.

5.       Replaced and fixed driver on the print server. Went to the printer properties for the non working Zebra printer and changed the driver to a different printer, hit apply, switched back to the right driver and hit apply again. Printed a test page from the print server

6.       Heard cheering on the phone and after testing within the application the printer was actually working.

One other step that has worked in the past was to changed the IP of the printer through the web interface and then on both print servers. I also did this but in this case it had not fixed the problem.

I have had a great time watching a blog post by Jason Calacanis explode on the blogosphere like nothing that I have seen before. Jason wrote a great post about how to save money running a startup. The article is really more about spending lots of money but at the same time making the work life of a startup employee a lifestyle and at the same time making sure that the process is smooth, taking really good care of employees so that they will want to put in huge hours. I afreed and thought the article was a nice diversion becasue I have in fact never worked for a startup.

Well others did not like the post so much. Duncan Riley at Tech Crunch wrote a great piece about how Calacanis fires people who have a life, Robert Scoble defended Jason Calacanis and  Micheal Arrington at Tech Crunch kind of came up in the middle (look at his comments to see his real thoughts).

So how does a Z list blogger like me look at this? Read the rest of this entry »

Just doing a little poking around this morning and I found a Computerworld article, actually I foudn a few that were interesting about the hot skills for 2008. I always hate these lists from IT based magazines because they always seem to spin the articles towards either the advertisers of the magazines or some kind of testing / training organization like Comptia or Microsoft so the slant does not tell you about workplace needs in the future as much as the truth really is.

Anyway I am not sure about the programming languages that they are pushing in this article but the other skills seem to make a lot of sense from the standpoint that I see in my workplace. Here they are is short version.

1. Programming/application development. As companies continue to Web-enable their existing applications and plow deeper into Web 2.0, demand is red-hot right now for people with AJAX, .Net and PHP skills

2. Project management. CIOs are hungry for project managers who have extensive experience overseeing complex efforts that have delivered clear business benefits — not just someone who has obtained a Project Management Professional (PMP) certification

3. Help desk/technical support. Do the math. As companies continue to expand their application portfolios, more help desk and technical support experts will be needed to support those systems. And much of that expertise will need to be on-premises, with only a fraction of the work being shifted to overseas call centers in places like Bangalore, India.

4. Security. There will always be demand for IT professionals with core security credentials, such as intrusion-detection capabilities and government security clearances, but database and wireless security projects will drive that demand even higher this year.

5. Data centers. There has been a flurry of activity among companies and government agencies to upgrade or relocate their data centers to take advantage of virtualization and other recent data automation and efficiency gains.

6. Business knowledge. As IT organizations strive to align more closely with the businesses they support, demand remains strong for people with business acumen, whether they’re specialized business analysts

7 & 8. Networking and telecommunications. All sorts of networking skills are hot right now, including general network administration capabilities and network convergence, wireless and network security talents, as organizations collapse their voice and data networks with wireless and voice-over-IP technologies

If you are looking for a new job this year or even if you just want to know what bigger company IT shops are looking for then I think that this list is really valid.

Well any national leader can make changes but electronics don’t always have to agree.

This morning I woke up to my VCRs (yes I have two, no PVR for me yet) having conveniently changed time back an hour. To anyone that has a real brain we all know that next weekend the time zone changes but to some of the pieces of electronic equipment that had no patching done last year the time change should be today.

I was reminded Friday that this weekend was the old time change for standard time instead of daylight savings but until this morning of course I forgot.

I will be interested to watch this morning and see what kind of automation is broke. There are probably more problems then just my VCRs but I will not kknow until after my coffee. A nd no the coffee machine, microwave and stove don’t care what day it is so they don’t think they are supposed to fall back.

I just got a new Blackberry today. Not even going to get into the whole argument of “Are Blackberries good or bad”.

Anyway the blackberry that I got had a flashing green light that had been driving me crazy all day. What to do? The green light no my blackberry is a network notification light.

Let’s fix my and your problem.

You can turn this off by going to settings (maybe a wrench icon?) Options Screen/Keyboard and turn off LED coverage indicator, this setting is around the middle of the settings on that page.

After you save the setting the flashing should go away. If the flashing does now go away it would be a notification. Then gO to Profiles select active profile and press option edit. Then go through and verify the LED is turned off.

Recently I was the tech lead on a project at the company that I work for where we were doing a software upgrade. Upgrade is such a vague term in any IT organization and in this case the “upgrade” project was very extensive. The application that we upgrade must remain secret but it is a tier 1 application, an application with very strict uptime requirements. There were lots of changes and a long project so I thought this would make a nice case study on how to do the implementation of an application upgrade.

Environment Before Upgrade
Citrix 3.0 farm
Version 3 of app
Database of Oracle 9i on Windows

Environment After Upgrade
Citrix 4.0 farm
Version 6 of app
Database of Oracle 10G on Unix

Application upgrade
The application was running smoothly before our upgrade and during the upgrade and testing process we needed to iron out some bugs with a new app install process and validate the application as there was “rogue code” that was added to get the application originally into production three  years ago. During the testing phase over 6 months we went through three service packs and then three full cycles of user testing and at least ten very documented installs so as not to get into any problems during a long day to upgrade to production.

Citrix farm upgrade
As far as the Citrix farm upgrade went everything went very smoothly as the changes from Metaframe 3.0 to 4.0 was not very difficult.

Oracle Upgrade
We were very fortunate in the upgrade to Oracle 10g on Unix as we inherited unused hardware from another project which allowed us to run the upgrade many times with no problems, the best new feature that we were able to take advantage of was Flahback, a new utility in Oracle that allowed us to quickly move back to our original data if there was any problem with the load of the upgrade scripts. The old Windows environment was very stable but being able to move our staging to it’s own environment was a real help for performance even though we stressed to users that there were no performance testing guarantees in staging.
Day of upgrade deployment
The day that we did the upgrade was a Sunday and the upgrade because of changes to the application, Oracle and to a lesser extent Citrix made for a really long outage to the application. The upgrade was scheduled to take 12 hours and it took just that amount of time. Although you always have unforeseen issues when you do an upgrade we knew how long every step would take and did take. One of the great things that we used was a conference bridge throughout the day so that everyone would be able to communicate at any time to the entire upgrade team. The upgrade was a success and was really never in doubt thanks to extensive testing.

Challenges met and passed
Looking back is the best way to make sure that a large upgrade project will come together well. One of the reasons that the upgrade took so long was that there were so many changes to the infrastructure that changed in the one upgrade.
We considered doing the Citrix change first, then a few weeks later the Oracle on Unix change, then finally a few weeks later the application change. I would have preferred having a few shorter outages to do this instead of taking a Tier 1 app down for a whole day and also we would have reduced the risk to implement. This tactic was turned down by the project manager as he was more comfortable with having no question around the changes even if there were a lot of them all at the same time. Still not too happy with this approach for the future but it did certainly worked.

My workplace seems to be big fans of Toad software. I have used Toad as just a support guy for three years or so and have barely scraped the functionality needed by the tool. During an app upgrade a few weeks ago there are a few business people that need to run queries and such against the database so we have created read-only accounts to Oracle to facilitate this…oh yes and the installation of Toad on the user machines was needed as well.

One of the things that I found this week after trying to do a minimal install needed of the Oracle client is that when users need to create an ODBC connection as well that they need to have the Administrator install of the Oracle client. When installing the Oracle client there is first and option to deinstall products (and here I was calling it uninstalling for all these years) which is a good thing to do to get rid of 9.2 or other releases of Oracle that you do not need.

Next you have choices between and instant client, runtime, administrator, and custom installs of the Oracle client. If you need ODBC then from trial and error I found that Administrator install is the minimum that you need to get your TNSNames.ora file to have a place to go.

Oh, and if you have no experience with Oracle clients before, remember to drop the known good copy of your tnsnames.ora file into the \network\admin folder so that Oracle and other interfaces to your application can see it.