Welcome to the site, my name is Jeff and I have been working in the IT field since the early 90's. Most of what I post here is related to work that I do for the various companies that I have worked for over the years. Please feel free to look around ask questions or post comments (if available).

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Recent Posts


  • DPM 2007, Windows 2008 R2 and Windows 2008 Core Domain Controllers

    Still bringing services online after our recent hardware upgrade, today’s goal was to make DPM 2007 go. The original server was a PoiwerEdge 1950 with a MD1000 attached. It was populated with 15 750gb drives and housed all of our backup data. As both the server and drive array were falling off warranty we took this opportunity to purchase a new PowerEdge server, but we opted for a PromiseArray with 16 2TB drives.

  • WSS 3.0, MSSearch Service and SQL

    In my previous post I talked about the SQL upgrade that we performed recently. I left out the part that had to do with our SharePoint server. While it is fundamentally related I thought I would share some of the dead-ends I ran in to.

  • SQL Server Upgrade

    In an earlier post I mentioned that we were in the process of upgrading hardware and moving something’s around on the back-end. The end-result of this process would make us feature complete in our stated goals. Well, we had a few hiccups along the way, hopefully in the future I’ll do better at testing all this out. One of the things that needed to happen was our existing SQL server needed to be replaced with something that had significantly more power.

  • Fun with Vmware ESXi

    In the course of rolling out new hardware we encountered some problems with our up-and-running VMware ESXi servers. I won’t go into that now, but I’ll go over the fun things we found out. Most of these are most likely documented already, but I figured I’d put them here that way I have some place to look the next time I need something!

  • Windows 2008 R2 Clustering

    Our current file server cluster falls out of warranty in about a month, and as it was over-spec’d to begin with we made a purchase of new hardware from Dell. We bought several things, two new servers for the file sharing cluster, a new sql server, a new backup server, a new virtual server, and two new iSCSI sans. I’ll talk about these as we get to them, for the time being I’ll talk about Failover clustering in Windows 200r R2.