Musing of a Repressed Mind

While reading a blog and cruising through very old entries, I ran across the following and had to bring it here to share with those who know me.

You are NOT who you think you are. You ARE Love, Peace, Acceptance, Forgiveness, and Freedom…

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What are your thoughts on this?

I am not part of any mainstream religion. I’m closer to Agnostic than God, but far from Athiest. While attending the LDS Church, I was introduced to a common term, Testimony. One day, I was talking to a Missionary about some of my very own life experiences and how I’ve been able to learn from them, and she thanked me for providing my testimony to her to further enforce why not to do some things.. That moment stuck out in my mind and always will as a moment that I’ve had a clear, solid impact on someone else’s life. My very own experience and testimony of that experience was able to re-enforce in someone reasons they chose not to do something that I had done in the past.

Recently, I’ve talked with a close friend who’s having hurdles with religion and normal society. I’ve been able to bear my testimony to this friend many times of things I’ve done in life and how I’ve grown because of them. I’ve told this friend how I was physically or emotionally hurt and how I healed due to actions in my past. Being able to talk to someone about my life experiences to further solidify their reasons not to do something has felt amazing, knowing that my life experiences are worth to someone else, in some cases, more than they were worth to me. Even if we don’t have a relationship with God or a Religion, we all have our very own testimony of life experiences. How have you helped someone with your testimony?

I spent the evening with a small group of fun, outgoing, goofy people at my favorite coffee shop. It’s not very often I can do the dinosaur, claws and all, without people looking at me weird. You know those times where you look at little kids chasing each other around the yard, rolling in the grass and enjoying life, and go “I remember playing around like that”, then go back to your adult conversation about work, marriage, and anything other than, well, goofy fun? Thanks to a new group of people, today is a day to remember the goof.

With that in mind, I was drawn to an image online of a cemetery. I’m reminded of something I used to do, years ago, when I thought life was difficult. I would drive to the local cemetery, walk around looking at headstones, and remember that one day, I, too, will be buried in the ground. I wonder to myself, how large are these problems I’m having in life to keep me from enjoying the time I have, before my eventual fate lands me where I was standing those early mornings or late nights. What a perspective on life, to look at all of the people who do not have any problems.

When you’re someplace new, working a new job and unfamiliar with people in your area, it’s easy to lose track of being a goof, and to focus on being professional and mature. With my perspective on life, and a great evening with people who have not lost their fun genes, I say let the goof out and enjoy the time here. So here I go, it’ll take work, but goof is making a comeback, starting with a Velociraptor, rawr!

What do you do to let your goof out?

Today while wondering around the pharmacy section I ran across these itty bitty tiny toothbrushes. Being the weird fanatic of small strange things, I had to pick up a pack. At less than $2.00, I thought, what do I have to lose? I feaverishly grabbed a single package and made my way to the cashier. Little did I know, I was stumbling upon the greatest invention ever for tooth care, the Colgate Wisp. This thing is tiny, it fits in the palm of my hand and allows you to brush your teeth anywhere you are, without being messy or needing water to finish the job.

Skip ahead half an hour as I’m brushing away in the office while sitting in front of my work PC. Co-workers are looking at me strangly as I turn this new toothbrush into a chew toy. It’s great and works for hours! I’m now on my 2nd one for the day and am spreading the joy to people I run into. My short-term goal? To go buy more of them and take them with me eveywhere. No longer will I worry about garlic breath, or feel bad when I’m in a hurry in the morning and skimp out on the full tooth-brushing process, because within easy reach is my trusty Colgate Wisp.

There are different types of sleepers in this world. We have soft sleepers, deep sleepers, people who barely sleep and people who sleep a whole lot. There are snorers, wheezers, tickers and some who are as quiet as the dead. This week, I chose to start finding out what kind of sleeper I am, all with the help of a small piece of technology.

While wondering why I’ve been sleeping 12 hours a night lately, my boss introduced me to a cool iPhone application called Sleep Cycle Alarm Clock that will measure the amount you move at night and relate that to the depth of sleep you are experiencing by taking advantage of technology already built into the iPhone, the accelerometer. You simply start the app, place it on the corner of your bed and it’s business as usual.

This is a graph that displays normal sleeping as recorded by the application for my boss, who apparently falls into a coma every night. As you can see, there’s very little movement for most of the night, and peaks into dreaming with some movement, but overall, a very healthy deep sleep. This is all, of course, correlated with the amount you toss and turn.

Below are 3 graphs from what I would assume are from a person no doubt possessed with an evil spirit thrashing about. You’ll notice an extreme lack of deep sleep, very little dreaming and clawing at the covers for most of the late nights and mornings… Candidly… you’re looking at my sleep patterns, where for most of the night I toss and turn, and as you can see by my movement activity, I get very little quality sleep over a large amount of time.

Night 1	Night 2
Night 3

What are your sleep habits, and how much merit would you put into an iPhone application to tell you how well you are sleeping?

I’ve touched down in Denver, Colorado where it’s a warm 45 degrees with clear skies. I’m camping out at the farthest part of the airport enjoying the free wi-fi allowing me to blog about my adventures. While here, I found a few awesome photos, which I’ve included in this blog. Apparently you’re not supposed to joke about old-school fuse bombs, small handguns floating in the air, or pointing at people.

The one thing I don’t miss about this area is the possibility of Tornadoes. I remember as a small child running down the stairs to avoid one coming down in Oklahoma. Luckily for me, this is not Tornado season, just ice and cold season. While in the Denver airport, I ran across this sign. Apparently, only Men are allowed in the Tornado Shelter, which is also a very roomy clean restroom. At least we’ll have running water, right?

Today, I was talking to a close friend about religion, personal views, being honest with one self and knowing who you are. In this conversation, I told this friend “We only take hurt from other people’s words when we doubt ourselves and give them the power to re-define who we believe we are.”. Later in the day I was having an argument, rather, being lectured on me being rude to my parents, and was told that this was the root cause in my problems with jobs and my relationships in the past. While I love my parents to death, I had to disagree; accepting such feedback without deep thought isn’t something I can do.

I almost immediately argued and disregarded such an all-encompassing reason brought up by a fairly unrelated topic.. However, this was from someone close to me and important to me; my parents. I have to agree, they do know me better than anyone else in the world, but hearing that put me on the defensive. Could one thing be hindering my personal relationships, causing me to doubt myself and reflect on my past…. I, after some heavy thinking, began to reflect back on what I told my friend. Her mother was telling her things and causing her distress, and now, here I am wondering if it could be a single thing that could improve my life. I proceeded to reflect on a friend of mine telling me to live a principle based life. That would be Ryan Byrd over at ryanbyrd.net.

I put the two thoughts together and came up with my own decision, and that is that I will proceed to continue living a principle based lifestyle and working towards who I want to be, and I will also not let other people try to re-define who I am based on their own views of who they think I am. We see everyone around us as a reflection of who we are, not as that person truly is.

I thought this was worth blogging about, simply, don’t let others re-define you. You define yourself, and work towards who you want to be. I’m a geek, my humor is dry, I’m sometimes outgoing and I really do enjoy this social medium. I like to people watch, and I don’t like getting gifts. Sometimes I’m strange, but really, I make myself laugh, and some people around me. I enjoy my life, and if this is the consequences of who I am, I’m perfectly fine accepting them all, because honestly, life is absolutely amazing. This is to the Geek I was, and the Geek I will continue to be.

I’m sitting at Sunset Coffee off of 8000 S. and 1300 E., in Salt Lake City, Utah. On the walls are pictures of MOAB, there’s a barista named Lil making some of the best Chai in what I consider the entire World, and a small group of people that, like me, are regulars.

This coffee shop is the most normal one I’ve had the chance to find here in Utah, compared to others I’ve had the chance to visit outside of Utah. Being a constant traveler to places such as Seattle, WA, Spokane, WA, Anchorage, AK, San Diego, CA and numerous other high-coffee drinking areas, I found it difficult to accept coffee shops in Utah.

Here’s why. In Utah you have a massive cultural shift, as the state is primarily LDS (the Mormons). There is a very large divide between loyal LDS followers and non-religious individuals. In most states, there is this comfortable middle ground of people just going about their lives. In Utah, that middle ground is almost non-existant, especialy in Salt Lake City, where the population is 55% LDS. This causes some concerns for an individual like me, the middle-grounder.

Yes, I’m a middle-grounder. I’ve dove into religion and chose not to dive into religion. I believe we were created, and that is as far as my belief goes. Is there a God existing Today and Forever? I don’t know, and I won’t know, so I don’t bother my mind with trying to solve that puzzle. I’m also not a far-sided anti-religious fanatic trying to disprove the Bible. There is plenty of helpful information in the Bible, even if you don’t believe there was a God and Jesus to create it as believed, it still holds valuable stuff. Being a middle-grounder, I’m comfortable taking lessons from many resources and enjoying walking down the less-traveled path in Utah.

Coffee shops in other states hold this comfortable social mushup of many different takes on life. I can walk into a Starbucks in Seattle and find my artistics, my business casuals, my upper managements and my calm teens. If I want to find someone like me, a coffee shop is the best place to socialize with anyone.

Utah coffee shops, however, are much, much different. I’ve found the extreme anti-religious people in Utah hang out at local coffee shops. There’s no comfortable middle-ground here, there’s anti-religious propoganda any time religion comes up. Typically, I’m fine with this, however, this isn’t a healthy debate, it’s a axe wielding iron fist waiting to disprove religion, specifically the LDS religion. Those same people are normal smokers, some do drugs (light and heavy), and largely unemployed. I’ll find adolescent teens in large groups wondering around talking about goth concerts and drugs. While there’s no problem with personal taste in music or any individual scene, this is a stark difference between a Seattle or San Diego coffee shop, and the Utah coffee shops I’ve gone to to steal wireless from.

I’ve met great people at this coffee shop in Sandy. It’s the most normal one I’ve found to be a regular at. There are others in downtown Salt Lake City that sport what I’ve written above to such a degree you wonder if the world is falling apart. Here at Sunset, things are calmer and people are nicer; it’s almost like Seattle, just a bit less traffic. It’s amazing what a large society norm will do to common places, such as simple coffee shops, where anyone is typically welcome without regard to, well, anything. Welcome to Utah, a bit less on the diversity cruise and a bit more on the anti-religious propaganda. For now, I’m off to enjoy my Chai. I do hope you get the chance to visit a few coffee shops in Utah, to sit back and realize the differences.

In designing a colocation fail over plan, I had to find a way to bind ports together both at the Switch (L2/L3) level and at the Application (L7). I originally come from a Linux world, where binding NIC cards together and Switch ports was an easy task. This is not the case with Microsoft Server 2008 R2 X64. This is a quick quide on how I was able to accomplish full redundancy using Microsoft Server 2008 and 2 Netgear stackable smart switches.

The hardest part of this is making sure your NIC card supports Teaming/Link Aggregation. I fortunately have a Dell R710 server which uses Broadcom NIC cards. You can find their utilities here. You’ll need to know which NetXtreme devices you’re running, then proceed to download “Broadcom Management Applications Installer” which contains BACS 3, the system you’ll need to use. You’ll go to Team Management and define a team of adapters; I chose the first two physical adapters on my server by plugging in one cable at a time to find out which logical adapter (What you see on the screen) showed a connection. Once this was completed, I went on to the switch.

The second part of bonding ports is to have a Switch that can handle link aggregating. I am using (2) Netgear Smart Switches which are stackable. I went with 2 different switches to cover the failure of any one device. I’m using the Netgear GS724TS. You’ll spend 5x as much for a comparable Layer 3 Fully Managed switch to do this. For our system, we didn’t need the additional options, so a few smart switches covered our needs. Netgear uses a LAG-based method for link aggregation on the switch level. I was able to bind Port 1 on Switch 1 with Port 1 on Switch 2, providing for the full redundancy I need.

Initial testing showed a maximum downtime of 3 minutes when an entire switch went offline. I un-plugged the power adapter and timed the fail over. If you lose all connections (both NIC cards, both Switches, or your Router) you’ll have 3-10 minutes of down time for the devices to come back online and start communicating again. In the event of catastrophic failure, this is perfectly acceptable. For my setup, in my prior blog entry, the BGP failover would kick in and switch everyone to the secondary data center, with less than 10 seconds of down time visible to the clients.

If you have any questions, feel free to get in touch with me.

Today I’d like to go over a project I’ll be bringing to life the 1st week of February, and that would be my 2-site Dallas, Texas Data Center installation. I was hired on as I.T Manager and given the first project of getting our current colo facilities released and implementing a new, fully redundant system on a almost tight budget. With some sly dealings going through Dell, a lot of Data Center research, I came up with the following (image):

When I was introduced to the need for this project, the CEO and CTO sat me down and told me that we needed a fully redundant solution on under $5,000.00 a month, and it had to be geographically dispersed across at least 2 data centers. I went to work, first, by planning out a solution that would allow for most common hardware failures without the need for immediate hands-on support. I then went to work finding out the best way to do geographical failovers and common industry practice. Here’s the solution I musted together.

If you look at the diagram, above, you’ll see hardware distributed across 2 data centers. These are roughly 40mi apart in Dallas and are on a Carrier Hotel (Internet Backbone). At Site 1, on the left, I have N+1 throughout most of it. I’ve removed most single points of failure, excluding the Firewall. Starting from the top I have a SonicWall NSA2400 firewall and router with VPN capabilities. From there I have 2 Netgear smart switches that are stacked, with bonded ports. From the switches I have 2 Barracuda Load Balancers setup with a direct server response configuration reaching out to 2 clustered Cold Fusion servers, leaving room for lateral growth in the future. I then have a single, massive SQL 2008 server with 16GB or RAM, a total of 8TB of drive space, dual quad core processors and some jet-engine fans. Every server also has 2 bonded NIC cards which provide fail over in case of a cable, switch, or NIC failure and also provide 2x the throughput on the network.

On the right, you’ll find Site 2 is a +1 setup where there is only power and internet redundancy, as this is a warm fail over that will only kick in if the entire data center goes offline at Site 1. I have a single firewall, the lesser SonicWall NSA240. From here, I go into a single managed Netgear switch, which goes down into a single Cold Fusion server, which connects to a mirrored SQL 2008 server (as beefy as the first).

In between these 2 data centers is a private Gig-E backbone dedicated to this solution. At each colo we have a fiber drop-in that connects the two data centers together into a single logical network. It’s this single logical network that allows all machines to think they are in the same physical area, which allows us to have the secondary fail over mirror the primary data center.

We had two options when it came to failing over. I was able to speak with industry experts at F5 where I was walked through exactly how their geographic load balancers and fail over works. Amazingly, it’s with 2 authorative DNS servers monitoring each other and feeding back new results if one fails. This would be easy enough to do, as you can see in the diagram, I have 2 DNS servers already partitioned off of our 2 file servers. The second option was to go BGP routing and re-direct to the other facility. This was more expensive, but much faster.

Luckily, we found a data center in Dallas that offered us managed BGP routing. This removed our need to do any DNS fail over or our own BGP solution. In the end, I have a fully redundant +1 system that can handle not only hardware failure but also massive data center failure with under 3 minutes of down time in the most extreme of cases. Everything is automated, if demons fail monitoring systems start them back up, if anything has a hiccup I’m automatically alerted VIA text and e-mail.

Not all of the hardware is here with me, the Cold Fusion servers are down in Oklahoma, a lot of cabling and accessories, tools, etc. For now, I have some hardware piled on and by my desk. The fun part is taking all of this great hardware to Dallas, Texas to install it all. I’ll be down there from Jan. 29th until Feb. 9th, which should be plenty of time to get everything setup, online, and even cut-over from our old data center to this new one.

If you’d like more specific details on how I was able to get NIC Bonding in Server 2008 R2 x64, or how I’m automating most systems, monitoring, and handing this project as a 1-man I.T. team, feel free to drop me a note and I’ll follow-up with you.