Sheep Guarding Llama

Woke up late today, again, but still in time to get in to the office on time.  Just had to rush a bit this morning.

Work was pretty busy today.  One of those days where I feel like my head is a bit spinning and I have a hard time getting a good grasp onto everything that needs to be done, is being done, etc.

I worked through lunch which I have been doing more and more lately.  I just don’t seem to have the time to get to everything if I take a break in the middle of the day.  To much to do.

Dominica’s P90X exercise program that she got for her birthday arrived today and she did her first day of exercise.  She is really happy with the workout.  I am thinking about doing it as well but not today for me.  Too much to do.

A cool present arrived from Unitrends today.  Dominica messaged me at work to tell me that a large box had arrived.  I’m excited, can’t wait to get home to see what it is.

After work I hit the gas station and fueled up the jalapeno-mobile and headed for home.

The new package turned out to be a 1U Intel-based VMWare ESXi server built for me pre-loaded with the brand new Unitrends Enterprise Backup NFR software.  Very cool.  I’m among the first (or possibly the first ) to be running with it.

I didn’t get much of a chance to play with the Unitrends toys tonight because they didn’t send me a password for the box.  So I’ll have to talk to them tomorrow.  It’s a rack mount unit which will be perfect for my rack lab in the back room.

We went out to Brookhaven for dinner tonight.  It is kids’ night.  Both girls were perfect angels tonight.  Both did a great job of eating their meals, being quiet, sitting still throughout the meal.  Luciana was so cute, she walked over to the kids’ table to tell us that she wanted a cupcake when her meal was done.  It was adorable.

After dinner Dominica wanted frozen yoghurt so we drove up to Frankford and got some froyo up there at Yogurtland.

Dominica’s birthday present arrived today, she got the P90X exercise videos that Jeremy has been using.  She has been excited to get into P90X and get started on some extreme exercise.  So she started doing that today.  I am planning on starting that myself in a few days.

It was almost Ciana’s bedtime by the time that we got back to the house.  We got the kids off to bed.  Tonight Liesl and I finished reading the first book in the Winnie the Pooh series.  She has really been enjoying me reading those to her every night.  There are almost two weeks of stories in one book.  Tomorrow night we will likely start on “The House at Pooh Corner.”

Tonight Dominica and I watched The Rebound on Netflix.  Not bad.  Not great, but not bad.  Good actors.  It was cute.  Then we watched My Girlfriend’s Boyfriend but that wasn’t very good.  Then off to bed.

Liesl woke me up this morning pounding on the bedroom door.  I awoke with a start and realized that the sun was up.  I lept from the bed and realized that I was already late for work as it was a few minutes after eight thirty.  I never wake up this late.  I ran into my office by the garage, logged in to the “office” and sent an email saying that I was working from home.  Didn’t really matter much, my boss was so busy that he didn’t even acknowledge that email until late afternoon.

I don’t normally work from home on a Monday or a Friday so it kind of felt like a three day weekend, which was nice.  I got  a bit done today including some catchup on SGL.

I was in the office pretty much all day, not much time to pop out and to see the family.

I am tired today after a very long and stressful weekend of getting PBXs working but, while I am worn out, I get the relief of knowing that the phone system is working and not hanging over my head today at all.  Better to be relieved and tired than well rested and stressed out.  At least in my book, most of the time.

Still absolutely no peep or hint of information about Saudi Arabia.  We are starting to get really suspicious about this at this point.  We are still keeping positive, but the chances that this is real are deteriorating rapidly.  I have a “go bag” sitting by the door so that if the call does come in that we can simply grab the bag and walk out the door.  If it goes through we will all have to get to Houston as quickly as possible and sit there, for up to a week, while visas are processed and the moment that they are we will be on a flight for Saudi Arabia.

After working on building a working 3CX PBX yesterday we finally came to the conclusion that there are technical limitations that for our somewhat uncommon and incumbent network infrastructure cannot be overcome so this morning the decision was made to revert to working on an Elastix-based Asterisk PBX instead.  The upside to Elastix is that I know it cold so this is way easier.

So my entire day, and thus my entire weekend, was spent building another PBX.  It took a bit of the day but I got it done and up and running without outside trunks in under an hour, that was easy.  Then a little bit of time to migrate stuff over from the old system and everything was working except for the trunks.

Due to some changes in how Elastix 2.3’s version of FreePBX handles trunks, there were some issues there and no documentation that I could find from the trunk provider or online would get the trunks up and working.  It took many hours before I got incoming calls working and outgoing, well that will just have to wait until some later date.

It was a long and exhausting weekend and I feel like I got zero time to relax.  But at least the phone system is up and working.  And the system is a brand new one, costs less and is easier to maintain than the old one.  So overall, it was a win.

So once I got up this morning my project for the weekend is to work on the phone system that went down yesterday.  The decision was made that since the phones had gone down we don’t want to rely on, or spend the extra money on, the PBX being hosted on a cloud in Chicago but instead we want to put it in Toronto where the platform is already paid for completely.  Plus we are making an attempt at migrating from Elastix to 3CX for the phones – this will be interesting.  I had kicked off some work on 3CX last night but it didn’t work out well and so we have to redo that work today.  Fun.  I could build an Elastix system from soup to nuts in about an hour but this is taking forever.

I spent the entire day sitting in the play room working on the PBX.  What a long day.  I did get the 3CX up and working today and it is pretty neat.  I learned a ton today from working on it.  But, at the end of the day, it looks like it is not going to work for us.  It lacks the networking robustness that we need.  That is disappointing.  So my day was pretty much just a learning day.  Tomorrow I will be focusing on building a new Elastix 2.3 system from the ground up, again.  At least we get a fresh start.  Ha ha.  I just wished that I hadn’t burned my entire weekend on this.  I just don’t have that kind of time to spare these days.

 

Today is Friday and it is a pretty nice day out.  I’m looking forward to a relatively relaxing weekend at home.

We managed to go all week without any additional information on the project in Saudi Arabia.  For all of the panic that they put us through to get us ready to go they sure aren’t bothering to let us know anything.  I’ve had so many projects like this fifteen years ago, this is following the pattern of so many bad consulting gigs.  I’m losing faith quickly.

It was a more or less normal Friday.  At the office today.  We are getting pretty strong information that we are relocating to another facility a few miles away in a few weeks but we really don’t have very solid information.  I hear this stuff so often, I am not holding my breath.

Chris and I went out for lunch today.  It’s Friday so I almost never go home on Fridays.

This afternoon turned into a crazy one when we discovered that many of our servers were down including the phone system.  That was quite a rude afternoon awakening.  Now suddenly I have a lot of work to be doing this weekend.  Not going to spend much time worrying about it tonight but all weekend I am going to be working on the phones.

This evening, after the girls were asleep, Watson, Andrew and I went to Redneck for late night drinks.