Talon’s (Micah) Blog

Yep, my new job search is over.  I interviewed for and accepted and will sign the contract on Tuesday for a Tier 2 Server/systems support/administration for a small Data Center, just a few doors down from the Microsoft DC’s.  I start on the Oct 20th for 3 months of contract work and then Lord willing, hired Full Time, I’m will be working M-F 8-5.  I’ll have my evenings and weekends back

We’ve got ACP coming up and my last day at the Microsoft DC will be Oct 9th, as I’ll be leaving for ACP on the 10th.

So you know how you get all those career builder match emails suggesting jobs for you to apply to based off key words? Well I look at those and I found a job that says “System administrator (Gaming)”. How perfect is that.

The job add pretty much is what I do now, being a small time system admin of gaming servers and a small farm. Hosting several high traffic websites off the server farm, email systems and DNS. I’ve already implemented a CIFS file system cluster to link all the server boxes together with soft mounted file shares onto the local linux file systems for various file storage and backup storage. Plus with my experience and best practices while working as a Server tech at the Microsoft datacenter and my knowledge of the latest server hardware I could really be an asset to this company if they decide to hire me.

I know the pains and struggles of trying to run game server boxes and doing tech support to support those boxes all the time. Plus I’d be an awesome liaison with a 3rd party data center. When I mentioned I work at Microsoft as a server tech my data center makes my stuff highest priority and gets it done immediately for a fellow DC server tech. I know what being a DC server tech is like first hand (I’ve done it for 8 months now) and know how to talk tech talk to DC people to get stuff done fast and right (either for CLI linux systems or windows).

That and I’m always willing to pull extra hours and work late to get stuff done, skip lunch to work on things. For the better of the clients and company. That and I know how to do stuff on a tight budget and get the best bang for the buck, either buying a sever from a vendor or building 1 off newegg. The scripting I’ve done could also help out the company and clients, plus I have experience with firedameon for windows based game servers.

Well after a lot of playing around, bench marking I decided to go with a 6 disk raid 0+1 instead of raid 5. The raid on the mobo is pretty much junk and performance on the raid 5 was ~12MB/sec read and write. I wasnt expecting great performance for the integrated fake raid but not that bad. I debated to either just take the bite and go with a 6x 500gig raid 0+1 with 1.5TB usable space or spend $250 on a HighPoint rocket card with 8 Sata ports PCI-E card.

The performance on the integrated mobo raid on 0+1 is around 25MB/sec write, 80MB/sec read, which is fine with me, I’d rather not spend a ton of money to just get another 300gigs gain going to a raid 5.

I’m constantly bouncing on less than 10% free space on my file server. And I’ve got 1.3TB’s of usable space (850gigs is actual raid 1 space). So I just ordered a new mobo with 6 sata ports and onboard nvidia raid 5 (I know its cheap and fake raid, I wont get much performance and it will use CPU cycles for data transfer but I just need a raid 5).

Bought 3 more 500gig sata hard drives (to go with the 3 already in it). 1 will remain out of the server as a stand by spare in case 1 fails I can slap in a new 1 immediately to rebuild the array.

So after format size, raid 5 I should have 1.9TB of usable space, more than doubling my raid storage space and being relieved 350gigs of it will be fault tolerant instead of running on a single 500gig drive with no backup.

I’ve changed shifts from sun-wed to wed-sat at my work. This means my weekends are sunday through tuesday (reason being, so I can make church sunday evening).

On a side note: someone notified me css3maps.rar is corrupted, I’ll be replacing this today.

Ever since I started my job at a Microsoft Vendor I’ve had little or no free time to do anything.  Between lunch and transit time I’m pulling between 50-55 hour work week in 4 days and have 3 day weekends.  Between having to run my errands on weekends and working on servers I had no time, now I’ve reduced my server work to a few hours a week and picked gaming back up.  Gaming is very important to me, its my relaxation and relief from the work week.  When I dont get any game time, like the last month, I crash and burn like I did this last week and miss a week of work.  Thats no good, so i’ma have to do like 10 hours of gaming every weekend to keep me going.

It’ll be nice to get back into Guild Wars also.

My file server (p4 2.4ghz, 512ram, 5 yr old emachine system) finally bit the dust this week.  The mobo/bios quit.  I dont get anything on the screen or any beep codes when I pull memory out.

So I ordered a cheap AM2 mobo with a 4000+ x2 and I’ll take the extra 2 gigs of ram out of my comp and pop it in the new file server, along with a thermaltake 430w PSU.   I’ll finally get a chance to upgrade the hdds from 3×250s, 2×160s to 3×500s, 2×250s when I get the parts.  I had to also buy some 36 inch IDE cables to get the drives to reach my RAID card in my 4u case.

So i’ll soon have

2×500 in RAID1 (for my TV server)

1×500 no RAID (for my movies)

2×250 (including OS) RAID1 (for my backups)

That makes a total of  675GBs of usable RAID1 space and an additional 465GBs of non-RAID for movies for a grand total of 1.14TBs

… at my new job.  I am shadowing for 2 more weeks until I start my training beginning of January.  Its kind of boring right now just sitting and waiting to follow someone to go do something on the server floor.  Once I get done with training and working it will be fun I think.  I dont like working Sundays but I imagine after 6 months I’ll move on and go somewhere else.  That is unless I can move up in position to a shift lead or supervisor.