Travis Knabe's Blog

Storage Tiering

knabet — 2007-08-21T16:26:56-08:00

We purchased some software and some cheaper storage to better utilize our resources. The short story is the software allows us to determine where files are placed. (cheap or expensive storage) Currently if a file has not been accessed in 200 days it gets moved off to "cheap" storage with 99.9% reliability.

Otherwise the files are placed in the expensive storage 99.999% reliability.

The ROI for WOU on the software is staggering. The performance is great, and the user sees nothing different. Business as usual.

Florence Chamber of Commerce

knabet — 2007-07-05T15:49:54-08:00

Florence Chamber of Commerce's website is now up and running in production. This is a very cool development for UCS, and extends our partnership with the City of Florence a little further.

File Placement Software

knabet — 2007-02-14T14:29:15-08:00

Our Storage Area Network was quite spendy, however it has rewarded us with 2 years of 100% uptime. There are lots of files stored out there that are old, or may not be academic in nature. ( mp3's )

So I'm looking at purchasing 2 items. First being some software that allows me to set up file placement rules, and the second being a cheaper storage.

For those not interested in the technical explanation of this may as well leave now.... because its gonna get boring for you.

We'll call our current SAN tier 1 storage and the new stuff tier 2. The tier 2 storage is about 1/20th the cost of the tier 1 storage. It of course will be somewhat less reliable, and slower.

So what will happen is I'll build a set of file placement rules. They'll be things like *.mp3 or file hasn't been accessed for 365 days. Then the software ( behind the scene's and transparent to the user ) will move those files to the Tier 2 storage.

With the the tier 2 storage being less reliable it may go offline at some point where I don't expect the Tier 1 storage to. The only negative effect is the files defined in my ruleset will not be accessible, but everything else will be.

The other cool thing this software will do ( among other things not relevant to this blog ) is called snapshots. With snapshots we'll be able to take a point in time picture of your h: drive or i: drive. For example last night, last week, and last month. We can then give you a drive letter for each of those. So if you accidently delete a file, or make a mistake and save the wrong file you could go back to one of the snapshots, and pull it back into the correct location. The snapshot drive letters would be read-only so you couldn't accidently save to the wrong place.

Finals Week

knabet — 2006-06-16T13:26:08-08:00

Well here it is about 1:30pm on the last day of finals week; and I'm starting to breather a little bit easier. I'm always a little more stressed out during this time of the term because I want everything to go smooth.

I guess something could still go wrong, but its already 1:30pm so only a small number of people will be knocking at my door to kill me. And I can handle that.

Next week we'll be doing some small updates, but nothing major. And then after summer school the real fun will begin.

Communications Express

knabet — 2006-06-14T20:59:48-08:00

Comms Express is becoming more and more stable. Even though the latest timeout issue does not support that statement. However I feel as though the application is actually working better. Thanks to all for your patience.

Ldap app

knabet — 2006-05-12T10:38:05-08:00

For my staff development time I've been writing ColdFusion code to modify and search the ldap directories. Its been pretty cool stuff, and made life about 1000 times easier on me. I'm quite pleased with the outcome.

Webserver Update Complete

knabet — 2006-04-12T10:37:32-08:00

The files have been copied and permissions have been set. Today we're monitoring the server status to insure everything is working correctly.

Thanks to Ron for his work on scripts to make this update possible, and seamless.

Website Update

knabet — 2006-04-05T14:30:05-08:00

Now that things have settled down with regard to negotiations, we're going to move forward with the webserver update. The plan as of now is to start the file copies Tuesday night.

Wish us all luck.

Lost employee

knabet — 2006-04-04T21:57:09-08:00

UCS's unix systems group of 2 is now down to 1. Hopefully we'll get the chance to re-hire, but due to the possibility of cuts coming down the road, we're not sure we will. If that's the case I certainly hope people around campus become more patient than they have been in the past. Things are going to be a little hectic while we try to re-hire, but if we don't get to re-hire, its going to suck for some time.

Finals Week Winter 2006

knabet — 2006-03-24T22:22:52-08:00

Another finals week came and went. Everything was going great until about 2:30pm Friday afternoon. And then Sundown went down. It had been up for 315 straight days. Which is pretty good uptime. Turned out to be a bug we were aware of, and I was planning on patching the server over Spring Break. But of course it didn't quite make it.

The downtime was quite minimal, and the patch was installed Friday afternoon. I then took the server down gracefully this evening at about 20:20. It went down, and came back up with no issue. We should be good to go for another 315 days.

Sun's Communications Suite

knabet — 2006-03-22T14:34:22-08:00

Let's talk about Sun's communications suite. The server applications run... all the time. They never go down they never have issues. What does go down, and what does have issues ( all too often ) is Communications Express. It certainly is a nice program when it works.... WHEN IT WORKS. After having a meeting with the brain trust from Sun today it would appear we are not the only ones dealing with this crap.

What was Sun's response to my rants about their lack of support for palm/blackberry sync, and comms express. "Its Sun's issue that we need to resolve" And my question to that was "Soooooo what's the status?"

This is where the folks became less than open with their answers about a resolution. I sure would like it if Google would buy Sun, and develop GMAIL around Sun's messaging server and then add a calendar portion to it, and integrate that. Sun sucks for client development!!

Nike is Flash Happy

knabet — 2006-03-13T22:20:26-08:00

On my laptop I run Linux, and use firefox for my web browsing. I can go anywhere and see anything I need to... that is until I head off to Nike.com and go to the Jordan Web Site. To go there you need to have Flash 8; which is not available yet for Linux.

I love Nike, they've got good stuff, and they were started local. All reasons for supporting them. Then they go and pay $95million to Lebron James before he dribbles a basketball in the pros. ( although it was a good gamble ) And now they tick of my nerdy side too.

Ughh March 15th

knabet — 2006-03-13T21:57:41-08:00

March 15th is a date I usually can't wait to come and go. Well it didn't quite come fast enough this year. As most employee's of WOU know, unclassified staff are on a year to year contract. Up until this year most or all of the unclassified staff have been guaranteed that year. Not this year; for me at least. Now I'm only guaranteed 90 days. Real bummer.

I'm guessing the administration has their reasons. With the looming strike, and if the administration has to come up with money they don't have; then there will probably be some cuts. Of course this is all Travis speculation.

Calendar Express application

knabet — 2006-03-13T09:15:44-08:00

As many of my faithful blog readers.. ( yeah right, like I have many ) have seen I'm currently very down on Communications Express.

There are currently many alternatives to using Comms Express for email, however only 1 for calendar http://sundown.wou.edu:82 That is until now. I've found an application that will allow the use of the calendar. Its quite nicely written, and for now a free option. Hopefully it will stay that way.

This is a two part application. First part is a "Player" and the secondp part is the app itself. If you're interested in it, drop me a note to knabet at wou.edu and I'll make arragements for you to download and use it.

The major downside of this app, however is its a windows based app only. Sorry mac / *nix folks.

Java Programming

knabet — 2006-03-08T22:22:12-08:00

Troy's Blog refers a little about Thin Clients.

As many of you have seen the thin clients are propagating around campus. We are able to do a lot with these little buggers. Including presenting just a web browser, full windows enviornment... I think you get the picture.

Anyway, we wanted a good way of keeping the "kiosk" type functionality of just a web browser, but also make it easy to get into windows. ( without right clicking, and picking windows )

So now that you know what we wanted to accomplish, here's how we did it.

Bill Kernan and I started working on a Java Application. This would be what the user sees on each of the thin clients. The java application has room for some announcements, as well as buttons to open various applications. These as you might guess are web browsers, windows etc..

The cool thing is the web browsers open directly to various needed applications. Including AccountLookup, Banner web for students, or just a default web browser.

Keep your eye on the thin clients. This app is going to revolutionize their use!!

PS:
We used NetBeans as our development platform. I'd done very little Java Programming in my day, and this app made it pretty easy.