A Year Makes a Difference

I decided that while sitting in the lobby of the Super 8 motel in Watertown, WI. it would be a fine time to write a blog entry. Julie and I are here to visit Erik here at Luther Prep School as part of homecoming weekend. We always enjoy our trips to Watertown and this one is no different. Well, it is not too different for us in procedure. However, one thing is changing for the better; Erik is growing up in many new ways.

The difference is noticeable to us in how the Friday of homecoming played out from last year to this year. Erik was getting his feet wet at LPS as a freshmen and getting a handle on many new things. Being Erik, he measured how involved he wished to get in the many activities students have available to them. As a sextaner (first year) student, Erik did get involved in yearbook and chess club a little later. Otherwise, Erik stuck to his academics and attended lots of basketball games. He became involved in Livestream broadcasts of those basketball games on a regular basis.

Now in his quintanar year, Erik has become more independent and involved in the LPS student body. His new roommate is part of that coming out of his shell. Erik is now involved in being the varsity football team statistician, has a part in the fall play production, is still doing yearbook and plans on being lead statistician for the varsity girls basketball team. This involved traveling to away games, so it demands some time commitment, but his studies always come first.

Perhaps that is one of the things we have noticed over the past couple years form middle school to high school - the focus on keeping schedules and events in their proper order. Working on tasks early before their due dates is obvious in Erik's approach to school. Even when his has permission to be out of study period, he has his homework with him as he watches Packer football or enjoys other activities.

Erik is also being responsible and thrifty with money. He had an accident with the laptop he was given to use at LPS, and spilled water into it causing a short of the motherboard. He knows the value was close to $800 and decided that his LPS job as janitor would be used to repay the fund to buy him a new / used laptop later on next year.

So how did we notice the difference this Friday? Erik arranged to met us after 3rd hour Latin, eat lunch, then leave a bit early to study Geometry notes for an exam. Afterward, he met us to take us to music class, followed by his Prophets and Gospel class. We were please when he answer a difficult question about a specific topic in one of the gospels for Professor Kiecker. He than went to his English quiz, and afterward performed in the jazz band for the pep rally in the auditorium. Afterward, he report for his 1.5 hour shift for work. Because of work, Erik missed supper, but prepared to do his job has statistician for the football team. Julie and I bought him banana and brat so he was not to hungry. After the game, Erik was able to spend time with friends and his parents.

For a 14 year old to had presence of mind and time management skills like a college student is a heart warming thing to see for parents. Maybe Julie and I do have a little tinge of pride running through us. Just don't tell Erik.

Furthering my learning

I admit that after finishing my certification for WELS teaching at Martin Luther College, I am antsy to get back into the job market. I know several calls I would have been suited for this past 6 month, but the Lord has not yet found that place where I need to be placed to be a teacher. So what is a person to do when the hot summer weather wilts the grass, the jobs around the house are simple and NetFlix is getting pretty long in the tooth?

My solution has been to assist my wife in her information technology needs, look for job openings which have teaching and technology together and change the family's eating and exercise habits. So what have I learned in the past couple months while awaiting a call into the WELS teaching ministry? Plenty of good stuff has peeked my interest and I want to share some of what I have been doing.

Towards the end of the school year at North Mahaska, where my wife works, a new wireless system was researched, procured and installed. Afterward, testing and adjustments were completed to the new Ruckus Wireless system. As far as learning goes, I was able to spend many hours watching educational videos on wireless system from Cisco and Ruckus. The white paper alongside the technical video series helped in evaluating the bids and selecting the new wireless system. Some of the topics I gained an understanding of included beam forming and how wireless antenna design affect wireless signals on mobile device in different orientations.

I have applied for some IT jobs and admittedly have found that just being away for awhile and not having experience with some technologies on a regular basis has dulled my senses and skills a bit. 18 months ago, I began studying white papers and looking at procuring some hardware and software to learn VMWare and VSphere products. After a recent couple interviews, I find that this skill set seems to be at the top of network and IT job skills to acquire.

In order to gain those hands on skills without spending $3500 for a VPC course from VMWare, it seems wiser to spend that money on a home lab to practice virtualization labs. To that end, I have watched a series of videos on topics directly related to virtualization. These include SAN systems, ZFS, Open Solaris, FreeNAS, iSCSI and of course VMWare's current product line. TrainSignal training is sitting on my MacBook Air awaiting a home lab setup.

Outside the technology skill set I continue to improve upon, I also am continuing my theology skill updates. I attended a Pastors' Institute in Omaha, NE. where Daniel Dueschlander and Wade Johnston have sessions that were outstanding. I also have been attending pastor's winkles in Ames, Iowa at Bethany Lutheran Church with our WELS circuit pastors. We have studied 1 Peter and 1 Thessalonians over the past year. My wife and I also attended the 1st annual Intrepid Lutherans conference in Osh Kosh, Wisconsin in early June.

Needless to say, I am staying focused and busy this summer. I am meeting new people and also cleaning out things in the house (my wife is doing most of that) in preparation for the future day when we receive that teaching call to a WELS school somewhere outside of Iowa.

Lion Server Testing Report

Today was the beginning of testing a Lion Server upgrade on the production network at North Mahaska Schools. After school, we shutdown the current Snow Leopard production server called x1 and at the same time started up our identical test server (our cloned x1 server upgraded to Lion Server).

The DHCP began to populate clients almost immediately as the DHCP lease is only 1 hour. We took remote control of some iMacs in a lab setting and tested logins for several accounts, which seemed to work flawlessly. I tried a MacBook Air 11.6" unit and also tested login on the wireless network. I was able to surf the Internet almost immediately. We opened, editing and saved documents to the server with our home directories (x2 and x3).

Then we had a phone call 10 minutes into the test from a teacher using her laptop that she could not get to any websites. Sure enough, there was some glitch with DNS the proved to be causing her laptop to not do domain name resolution. We tried renewing the DHCP lease manually on both wireless and wired connections, but DNS seemed to be non operational. The laptop, a MacBook Pro, was getting its settings correctly from the DHCP server.

Since DHCP was providing the DNS information, we updated that setting to include our two outside DNS providers in addition to the internal DNS server setting. Usually, our internal DNS would provide forwarders to the outside DNS servers. Once the additional DNS servers were pushed to the DHCP client on the MacBook Pro, the Internet worked perfectly.

The oddity of the problem of one machine struggling to get DNS while other iMacs and MacBooks worked fine seems to me an issue of caching DNS entries on the MacBook Pro itself in this case. Of course switching the OS X server that provides authentication, DNS, DHCP, and points users to their home directories on other OS X servers is not common practice in mid-stream. However, with one issue and all others computer users seemingly functioning through the transition from old production to new test server, I am pleased with the results of the test.

Tomorrow is a light day at school and the plan is to test the server for the remainder of the day, prior to committing to upgrading the production server from Snow Leopard Server to Lion Server. If that process goes well, then we will backup the x2 server with its XRAID unit attached and do a Lion Server upgrade on it later in the week. This process will be different as we do not have a spare Mac Pro to test. So you might wonder what is the plan in this case. Stay tuned and let me know if you wish to hear more about the testing process I have in mind for x2.

Server Testing before Production

My wife's job as a technology coordinator is a tough one to be sure. There is never enough time for all the big tasks let alone the minutia. Since I am a "tech guy", I find helping out to be a value to both of us. One of the tasks that my wife gladly allows me to do is that of dealing with studying, planning, preparing and implementing server upgrades. Her organization is going to be implementing a 1:1 laptop program, and with the infrastructure improvements, we need to upgrade server operating systems.

Snow Leopard Server (10.6.x) has served the organization for almost 3 years in admirable fashion. Now that OS X Lion Server is at 10 months of age as of this writing, it is battle tested and patched to the point where it is safe to move the servers to the new OS. However, we never do anything without considerable research and planning. Not only are those steps important, but testing is a key element that so many people avoid.

Today, I am following the following test plan to see how the Snow Leopard to Lion Server upgrade will work on a test Mac Mini. In the first step, I have secured a Mac Mini similar to the actual production server. Both are Mac Mini boxes with Dual Core processors of the same speed. They do vary in the amount of RAM installed (4GB in production versus 2GB in test), however that is the only real difference.

The second step is to get an image from the production server without bringing the machine down for a prolonged period of time. The program I use is called SuperDuper and this program has proven itself over many times. It will repair permissions, then build an image of the production server hard drive to an external device in the form of a disk image. SuperDuper will also preserve the ACL (access control lists) of the production server.

The third step is to take that disk image of the production server's hard drive and image it back to the test server. I have my disk image on an external hard drive that connects via FireWire 800. Boot the Mac Mini test server from DVD or USB key and launch Disk Utility. Then use the "Restore" operation to take the disk image to the text server's hard drive. In my scenario this took about 30 minutes of time since the disk image from the production server contained no data share points. As a note, we always try to keep the data share points off the OS X Server operation system volume.

Once the test server has an identical OS X Server install to the production server, we can begin the process of upgrading the test server to Lion Server. I will not document that process here. The important issue to remember is that you are being safe in testing out whether the upgrade will work prior to committing to the upgrade in a production server environment.

A side benefit is the knowledge that your backup will work should the upgrade fail. On some upgrades, I have been known to do two backup disk images. Taking the server off-line and using Disk Image or SuperDuper are both good methods. While I have not tried Time Machine, it is my understanding that works for OS X Server migrations. In summer 2011, Apple server gurus favored doing the upgrade process over the migration process, which had bugs. Your mileage my vary now that OS X Lion is more mature.

Happy server upgrade paths to you.

MS Office 2011 Debacle

I usually only blog when I have something worthwhile to contribute, or feel compelled. Today I am compelled to blog about a glitch in MS Office 2011 and in particular Outlook 2011 for Mac OS X.

I received a cellphone call on Wednesday morning from a friend and client who uses a MacBook Pro running Lion. The friend had recently done the MS Office 2011 SP2 update that comes via the automatic update feature in Office 2011. Now she was panicking because Outlook would no longer open her email and she was receiving an error message about rebuilding the mail database. I told her I would meet her at the local coffee house (Smokey Row) in a couple hours after doing other IT tasks.

Perhaps some background is in order here. MS Outlook stores its messages in a single database file on the Macintosh under the Documents folder. The subfolder is called Microsoft Identities 2011 which contains the Main Identity. Occasionally, it is probably a good idea for the Outlook user to run the Microsoft Database Utility which rebuilds indices and makes a backup of the database file, but the process is normally a manual one. My friend had only been using the new Outlook since December 2011.

Back to the story. So I meet up with my friend over a cup of house coffee and proceed to look over the error message. Outlook 2011 14.2 (SP2) wants to "upgrade" the old database to conform to the newest format. That process runs for 30 seconds and discovers there are problems with the mail database, so it launches the Microsoft Database Utility, which runs through step one of fixing the database. Oops, a problem occurs. Microsoft Database Utility 14.2 is too new to perform operations on the mail database. We are given an error message and told to use the old Microsoft Database Utility.

OK, at this point I look and discover that the SP2 update from Microsoft does not preserve the older version of the Microsoft Database Utility. So no problem, I get the original media and install Microsoft Database Utility from DVD. I run the Microsoft Database Utility version 14.1 and it reports that it can not fix the mail database, because "I am using the wrong version". Wait a second here, what happened.

Fast forward through an hour of looking at Time Machine backups of the old mail database, and the same errors about versions keeps coming up. By the way Time Machine actually saved the day here, so for those of you who are Mac OS X users, don't be fools - USE TIME MACHINE!

Finishing my cold coffee and ready for a refill, I finally came to a thought that perhaps Microsoft Office 2011 SP1 (14.1.4) had also changed the mail database and that its Microsoft Database Utility was the key. So, I fired up Time Machine and went back to Microsoft Office 2011 SP1 (14.1.4) and tried that Microsoft Database Utility on the mail database. It proceed to fix the problems and make a backup. Then I upgraded to SP2 and processed the mail database by launching Outlook 2011 SP2 and everything worked.

Hey, only took 1 hour and 45 minutes. Part of my problem was that while I use Office 2011 and Word and Excel, I never use Outlook or PowerPoint. I think OS X Mail and Keynote better and they really are better.

To Microsoft programmers, how hard would it be to have the Microsoft Database Utility run prior to performing the SP2 upgrade? There is not even a warning message about potential issues. And the TechNet articles, while painting the process of using Microsoft Database Utility nicely, have no mention of the fact that Microsoft Database Utility versions are particular to the current state of the mail database. The SP2 update process should have maintained the older version of Microsoft Database Utility in case of problems.

I have learned a lot about how MS Office 2011 has issues with regard to its mail component and there is serious room for improvement.