c.R.E.A.M. (The speed of light Rules Everything Around Me)

No joy in Brooklyn tonight as I wait for the file transfer to trigger the beginning of the end of my time here to complete.  It's robocopying as fast as it can but you can only push electrons so fast. 

On the upside, the transfer is reading as a pretty consistent 98 to 99.5 Mbps on the performance window and I've chosen to interpret that as a sign of good wiring. 

I'm pruning a lot of the general musings out of the documentation I've been writing so far.  As much as I know future generations would appreciate my diary-like writing style I don't think it'd be much help to someone trying to figure out why the next migration isn't working right. It's been suggested that I have a 'holistic' style of writing and I'm really making an effort here to put together something functional. 

The other day someone asked me what my experience with Linux is and I had kind of a hard time answering.  The truth is that I have extensive Linux experience at home and school but I was a having a hard time answering the question without instead talking about the applications I've run on it. Most of what I've done with Linux directly seems so pedestrian: editing text files and managing processes. The answer I gave was to rattle off the various installations I have around my house and what their primary function is but I feel like that was a pretty weak answer.

So in that spirit I'm also giving a thought to how I'm going to describe this whole internship project to future employers.   

Final sprint

Very close now to having everything migrated and working perfectly.  The only thing that isn't great is that a VM needs to be re-copied over and of course it's the one that's like 200 GB. I tried using an external hard drive enclosure, as that would be about four times as fast as going over the local network, but the one we have isn't compatible with Windows Server 2012 R2. If that weren't enough the finicky drive on that server finally clicked it's last which means I only have one copy of this gigantic VM I need copied over so I'd better be quick about it.

So over the 100 Mbps network we go.  In case I ever need to robocopy a bunch of large files over a slow connection again: There's a robocopy flag called /IPG:xx that delays for xx milliseconds every 64k.  This shouldn't be very large (I'm using 10 here) but it breaks up the transfer enough that it doesn't totally overwhelm all other network traffic.

All said I should be able to put this project to bed pretty soon

Gold-ish

So after a long weekend of frustration for much of the team things have been returned to normal functionality here.

I think I've found the issue and developed a new appreciation for how important it is that your applications don't just fail silently.

Christmas!

It's here!  And it's amazing.  Well, mostly amazing.  It takes a very long time to boot up and I'm in that new-OS constantly rebooting period.

I got the RAID set up and Server 2012 installed without issue.  Now it's just a matter of assembling it and I've already got a pretty good road map for that.

Or rather I did, but today our Confluence isn't working and I can't access my notes.  I've got an older version that I exported to hand in as my capstone documentation and that was pretty up to date.

Now...   Well frankly there's a fair amount of waiting.

There was a slight crisis on the old dev server due to it running out of space on the one remaining good storage drive.   Since I retired the drive that was having controller issues there's been a few additional projects spun up and there just isn't room for it all.   I was able to move some stuff off for now and it's very good news that the new hardware is here already.

Going dark

Been quiet lately as I'm trying to nurse out the last of the hours left in my internship.  Tried to do a switchover to the new hardware for the file server and everything worked perfectly.   Tried to do the same for the build server and I hit a snag that required a total, multi hour, return to the old hardware.  

The intranet site was working, the VMs were building and installing, but for some reason the step in the scripts where they:

1. Revert the VM to a clean snapshot
2. Restart the VM
3. Start the build

Wasn't firing properly.  The VM would suspend but wouldn't restart.   If I manually clicked start the reversion would happen and the process would proceed normally.  I'm still not sure what caused it and I've stressed everyone else out enough for now so right now I'm researching and just fixing things here and there when they pop up. 

I'll try again next week, if I can figure out what happened. 

Not quite Christmas

No hardware to play with today.

I'm still trying to make a new version of the current build environment on a more recent operating system than 2003. I had a remote desktop into my new VM with a build going at almost any given time today and I've managed to resolve the issues that prevented the .NET portion of the compilation to succeed and now it's the very beginning of the VB 6 portion of the code that is failing.  Following some advice from a Microsoft forum I tried upgrading to service pack 6 but that didn't fix the issue.

In other news I wrote a Powershell script today that I should have written weeks ago that pulls the environment variables from a remote computer and saves them as a csv.

OMG I can't believe that the hardware will be here next week.

Today has been a huge reminder of the vast universe of things I don't know.  I discovered that the source of some errors I've encountered is due to the way post-Vista operating systems handle sessions and that is almost literally everything I understand about it.