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October 22, 2008
Things That Have Happened Recently
Well, things have been going by pretty furiously around here the past month or so. First, the good news. Dale and I applied the 10.2.0.4 patch to our twou test Oracle database and got it working. This upgrade takes care of those nasty incompatible time zone files that most of us never even knew existed until Oracle and Sun spewed out two different versions that weren't compatible with each other and screwed up a lot of applications including Enterprise Manager. Dave, Travis and Brad got me another 200 GB on Slider which allowed Dale and me to move the backups over to the new, spacious disks. It's really nice to have some elbow room on Slider. Vikingweb continues to perplex us. I worked with Andrew on the Viking app the other day and we discovered a very interesting query. It had an explain plan with a CPU cost over 600,000,000. Changing one line of the query made it run so fast I couldn't catch it on the CPU to get an explain plan. So, occasionally we'll see Vikingweb eating up between 50-100% of the CPU on Slider while really doing nothing but running one of these severely untuned SQL queries. Andrew was going to work with Viking on correcting those queries, and in the meantime if I notice one running I just kill the process.
Yesterday I unearthed a coding project that had been buried for a couple months. It is a fairly simple modification of the SWAMP Parts form to allow a space for notes. The fun part is squeezing in the new code without tipping over all the other code dominoes in the area. It is in Alpha testing right now, so should be done if I can spend an hour or two on it uninterrupted (unlikely any time soon!).
Astra is really coming along swell. I can confidently state that nearly all spaces are configured correctly and entered into the application. So are the users. We are still juggling some user permissions, and working on training the users. Bill has gotten the move to Version 7 going, and it looks like we'll have that upgrade done by the end of this year, give or take a few months. The Astra application requires quite a bit of day to day attention to the many details required to make it function correctly.
The past few weeks have been very rough with the HVAC servers. One of them in particular is getting zapped with a virus about every two days. We have not yet figured out how this virus attack is getting on the computer, but we are all sick of rebuilding it. As of today, it is still infected and has been removed from the MASH domain. We had suspected that a user account had been compromised, but this last time there were very few to no accounts. Dale and I are working on cleaning up the mess, but that doesn't help with discovering the source of the problem.
The bookstore is doing pretty well. The registers now communicate with the controller over a SSL layer, and we physically moved the controller back into the secure area of the store. This put us in compliance with the credit card security guidelines. There is an OS upgrade I got from Mark yesterday. This needs to be installed one night soon, but first I have to educate myself on the upgrade procedure.
The other day Dale and I toured the new MNB Building. Wow, it was nice! The sim lab has some pretty realistic dummies in there for teaching purposes. It is an impressive building!
Posted by rossm at October 22, 2008 9:17 AM
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