First week on the job

The first week on the job went pretty well. On Tuesday I was able to help solve a major problem with a connection from our Microsoft Exchange system to another agencies Novel GroupWise system that is being migrated to our servers. Anyway, I’m not very familiar with GroupWise, so my troubleshooting probably took longer than it should have, that and the fact that it was my second day on the job. It turned out that a directory on the Novel server was missing, this happened to be the directory where the Exchange GroupWise connector dropped the messages.

Another problem at work is an extremely slow Exchange server, which happens to be the main mailbox server for the department. While it will eventually be replaced with some newer systems, that won’t be for a few months. Several times a day users will receive the “Outlook is Requesting Data” pop up box. Where I used to work, if that happened, it was a major issue. At the DOT, it has been going on so long that people are really starting to complain about it. I started really working on the issue on Friday, but couldn’t get very far, one of the main performance counters that I would look for in this situation, is disabled, the physical disk performance object. The problem does seem to be in the disk sub system, but I can’t say for sure without the counters. Added to that, the system is geoclustered, something that I’d never do for a mission critical system, but I guess I’m stuck with it. One of the links to the disks in the other building is down, this could be causing a problem with the synchronous mirroring and making the disks run slow, thus making the Exchange server slow.

The biggest change about my job is the commute; I’m back on the MARC train that makes the trip two hours door to door, compared to my old commute of about an hour in the car. It will work out in the end to cost me a little less, and, in the morning I get an extra hour or so of sleep on the way, but I’m sure it will get to me after a while. I’m glad I got the three weeks vacation, taking that time off will sure be nice.