James Drews Blog Spot

Whee, sure glad the month is almost over. Ok ok, I guess I should really say that I am glad that last week is over. Too many problems at work to deal with. Of course, some are my fault, others are upgrades to servers that didn’t go as expected. I just have to think some days that technology just shouldn’t be this difficult.

Novell was sending me daily builds of server.exe to try and fix a memory fragmentation/leak problem. With the service pack 3 release, we would hit the problem randomly, usually after the server had been running for a few weeks. The problem results in the server complaining that it is out of memory, when it really isn’t (or should I say, shouldn’t be). The new builds I could see the problem within hours. Novell claims they couldn’t reproduce this problem in-house, but yet there are lots of us out there that hit the problem. It looks like we do have a winning fix tho. Of course it really will take time to prove that.

Moved our department’s oracle server last week as well. We were running a version that is no longer supported, so it was time to upgrade (two major versions behind). Been working on testing the upgrade for a few weeks now. While we are at it, we also moved it from running on Solaris over to Linux. The move went fairly well. Most things appear to be working. With Oracle 10g, there are new management tools, so getting used to those. The new tools also point out potential problems and policy violations, so working on cleaning up those. One of our tools we use for managing user accounts broke tho. It is a Java applet that uses Oracle’s JDBC interface. Well, this stopped working. Found that the JDBC driver was the cause. Figured just updating to the version for Oracle 10g should fix it. Nope, that had more problems. Eventually found a patch for the older JDBC driver to fix the problem. Still need to contact Oracle about the problem with the using the newer JDBC driver meant for our version of the oracle database.

Slowly digging out of my todo pile. Some things are not for work, but for my Church. This weekend we are going to change our ISP hosting services for the Web and E-mail. This weeks task is to check and double-check everything I can think of to make sure the transition goes well. Sure will be happy once this project is behind me. Started doing some things on the new site already. We want to do a survey to kind of audit the youth program. It was easy for me to install a package on the new site that lets me create online surveys. That was last nights project. Waiting for a few others to proof the survey before releasing it.

Well, that should do it for this update.

Ah, must be spring. Time for the annual battle of ants vs humans (and cats). I discovered over the weekend a bunch of ants moving around the basement (no, I don’t leave food down there. And yes, I do clean the basement regularly). Kind of odd that they are in the basaement this year instead of their usual trek going in the kitchen window.

After a bit of watching where they are going to/from, I found they are coming up through the basement floor. Grabbing my favorite ant killer (Terro) I put down a big glop of the stuff for the ants to come and retrieve. Sure enough, within a few minutes the ants had found it and called in the troops.

I did have to ban the cat from the room for a while. She wanted to go over and play with the ants, but I didn’t want her in the poison. Needless to say, she didn’t like getting kicked out of the room. Hopefully the stuff will have done the trick - will know in a day or two if there are any more ants crawling around.

Oh bummer. Got a report of our problem still happening. Yup, the packet trace showed the same result (packet loss somewhere). Guess we need to search a few more places where the packets may be getting dropped. Got another box watching packets, so now to wait for the problem to happen again (its really random).

After months of trying to track down a problem with the network (isolated to one building it would appear), I think I finally found it. We managed to caputre the “problem” in a packet trace. I also found a router that didn’t appear to have one of its configurations set right. We changed the configuration on the router. Now to wait and see if that actually fixed the problem. Oh happy day…