Tuesday, July 9, 2013
Vacancy Announcement
If you are interested in spending quite a bit of times sitting on a plane and racking up frequent flyer points, the State Department is now hiring for a Diplomatic Courier.
Wednesday, July 3, 2013
Warning: Geeky Post Ahead
Soon after Deb and I got married, I found out about a real cool product by Microsoft called Windows Home Server. This was a servery operating system (based on Server 2003) that was targeted towards home users. It came with preset shared folders (Music, Pictures, Software, etc) as well as "personal" folders for each user that you set up on the server. Plus (and this was the two big selling points to me) it had an application you could "push" to Windows machines in your home environment that would "back up" those machines daily as well had a feature called "drive extender" that took all of the hard drives you installed on the server and "pooled" them together to make one "big" drive (it copied data among all the drives and if you lost one drive, your data was still protected).
You could purchase the software for $99 and I set it up on an old Dell desktop I had. We then began a process of going "all digital", ie any paper we had we scanned it to files. Time consuming, but it saved a lot of space.
Well, in typical Microsoft fashion they released a new version of Home Server and then decided to cancel the program all together. Our old server was still churning along so I kept well enough alone. That is until I got offered my position in the State Department. Our server was pushing 10 years old, and while it was working fine there was always some concern in the back of my mind on what happens if a piece of hardware dies on the server. Since it was a Dell workstation, and it had some proprietary parts, would I be able to replace them? I started searching for a new solution.
My first thought was just to buy the biggest portable USB drive I could get and dump all of our data to it. It would be small (small enough to fit in a backpack if we had to get out of town quick), and fairly inexpensive. The downside was speed (USB, even at 3.0 isn't that fast), sharing between multiple computers and what happens if the drive dies. Most of those portable drives you cannot service yourself, and if it dies you could loose all of your data.
Option 2 was build another server. I was thinking about purchasing an HP Proliant and running something like FreeNAS on it. I had used FreeNAS on a previous project as a proof of concept to set up clustering/shared storage in the lab. This would give me the opportunity to have some redundancy (multiple discs in the server) and the ability to upgrade. The downside is I would have to devote time to setting it up and configuring it. With our upcoming move, time was something I really didn't' have. Plus, it was getting on the big side, and it wouldn't be something we could quickly take with us.
A few weeks ago, I got a daily alert from every computer geeks favorite store, NewEgg. They had as a daily deal a Drobo 5N on sale for $150 off of retail price. I had been looking at Drobos for a while. It had everything I wanted (multiple drive bays, easy to set up, small/portable and had a network interface). Usually the price was out of my ballpark. However this was too good of a price to pass up. I placed the order along with an order for a Western Digital Red 2TB hard drive which was also on sale. The WD Red series are designed for NAS (Network Attached Storage), ie they are designed to be "on" 24x7x365 and have a high MTBF. In our old server I had 2 x 1TB Western Digital Green drives. the WD Green series are designed for low power consumption. I had read some reviews where people who used them in NAS devices had issues with them Green drives dropping out of the drive pool when they go in to their power save mode. I never had any problems. I decided to recycle those drives in the Drobo, so I would have a total of 3 drives (with two spare drive bays for expansion).
I got the Drobo as well as the drive in. Hooked it up and within 20 minutes it was up and running. I did the initial configurations and created shares just like we had on the Windows server. I made a copy of all our data to a USB drive we purchased, just in case something bad happened. Then I xcopied all of the files from the Windows server to the new Drobo. Within a few hours, all of our data was copied over and everything was working perfectly. All of our computers could see the Drobo and shares (we have Windows and Mac). I decommissioned the old server, re-installed XP and donated the computer to Goodwill.
So far everything is working fine with the Drobo. We have it set up in our temporary housing (ie my parents house). We will take it to DC with us for training and then it will travel with us overseas. I just ordered another 2TB WD Red drive (got in onsale from Newegg) so we will increase our storage capacity.
My next task is to try and see if a cloud storage provider will allow backups "from" the Drobo. That way we will have an offsite copy of all our data.
You could purchase the software for $99 and I set it up on an old Dell desktop I had. We then began a process of going "all digital", ie any paper we had we scanned it to files. Time consuming, but it saved a lot of space.
Well, in typical Microsoft fashion they released a new version of Home Server and then decided to cancel the program all together. Our old server was still churning along so I kept well enough alone. That is until I got offered my position in the State Department. Our server was pushing 10 years old, and while it was working fine there was always some concern in the back of my mind on what happens if a piece of hardware dies on the server. Since it was a Dell workstation, and it had some proprietary parts, would I be able to replace them? I started searching for a new solution.
My first thought was just to buy the biggest portable USB drive I could get and dump all of our data to it. It would be small (small enough to fit in a backpack if we had to get out of town quick), and fairly inexpensive. The downside was speed (USB, even at 3.0 isn't that fast), sharing between multiple computers and what happens if the drive dies. Most of those portable drives you cannot service yourself, and if it dies you could loose all of your data.
Option 2 was build another server. I was thinking about purchasing an HP Proliant and running something like FreeNAS on it. I had used FreeNAS on a previous project as a proof of concept to set up clustering/shared storage in the lab. This would give me the opportunity to have some redundancy (multiple discs in the server) and the ability to upgrade. The downside is I would have to devote time to setting it up and configuring it. With our upcoming move, time was something I really didn't' have. Plus, it was getting on the big side, and it wouldn't be something we could quickly take with us.
A few weeks ago, I got a daily alert from every computer geeks favorite store, NewEgg. They had as a daily deal a Drobo 5N on sale for $150 off of retail price. I had been looking at Drobos for a while. It had everything I wanted (multiple drive bays, easy to set up, small/portable and had a network interface). Usually the price was out of my ballpark. However this was too good of a price to pass up. I placed the order along with an order for a Western Digital Red 2TB hard drive which was also on sale. The WD Red series are designed for NAS (Network Attached Storage), ie they are designed to be "on" 24x7x365 and have a high MTBF. In our old server I had 2 x 1TB Western Digital Green drives. the WD Green series are designed for low power consumption. I had read some reviews where people who used them in NAS devices had issues with them Green drives dropping out of the drive pool when they go in to their power save mode. I never had any problems. I decided to recycle those drives in the Drobo, so I would have a total of 3 drives (with two spare drive bays for expansion).
I got the Drobo as well as the drive in. Hooked it up and within 20 minutes it was up and running. I did the initial configurations and created shares just like we had on the Windows server. I made a copy of all our data to a USB drive we purchased, just in case something bad happened. Then I xcopied all of the files from the Windows server to the new Drobo. Within a few hours, all of our data was copied over and everything was working perfectly. All of our computers could see the Drobo and shares (we have Windows and Mac). I decommissioned the old server, re-installed XP and donated the computer to Goodwill.
So far everything is working fine with the Drobo. We have it set up in our temporary housing (ie my parents house). We will take it to DC with us for training and then it will travel with us overseas. I just ordered another 2TB WD Red drive (got in onsale from Newegg) so we will increase our storage capacity.
My next task is to try and see if a cloud storage provider will allow backups "from" the Drobo. That way we will have an offsite copy of all our data.
Thursday, June 27, 2013
IMS Vacancy Announcement
For anyone interested, Department of State has announced they are accepting applications for Information Management Specialists (IMS). This is the same position I have taken. Click the link for more information: IMS-2013-002 IMS Vacancy
Sunday, June 16, 2013
Fun Good Bye
Aiming at the camera
The instruction of just shoot the camera not the photographer didn't go so well.....
Ok....no one sees me, time for a sneak attack! (watch your back!)
Aahhh man, he got you!
Little Sis in the mix....Clarissa didn't like the cold water all that much and wasn't strong enough to shoot at anyone....
Refill time!
Girls defending their castle from those boys.....
Boys plotting how to take over the castle....
I think all the kids ran around for 2 hours straight...most will hopefully sleep in tomorrow and give their dads a little father's day rest....Mason was able to pass out his 'business' cards with his contact info/ blog site (hence I'm blogging so his friends can see the fun they had!) and I confirmed their mailing addresses so they can all work on their cursive and spelling while being pen pals......Thanks to all the friends that could make it!
Saturday, June 8, 2013
Friday, June 7, 2013
So it has begun...
So now that you all know the big news we were about to share that I had mentioned here . You also have a better idea as to why we started this blog to begin with....it really drives home the why oh why we did make this blog.....because all our family and friends are going to be super far away.....(and maybe a little bit of that's what the cool kids in the FS do...).
So school and all school related events are done.....so now time for me to get a move on and getting ready to move.....the purging has begun! Some stuff is easy (that t-shirt from a certain frat party in college that has gotten a little holey over the years....adios)....other stuff is trickier, you know there may be that partly cloudy day when the sun is at a 94 degree angle and because we are now in the southern hemisphere this ____ is going to come in real handy....must say adios as well.....
In our purging, I'm trying to not donate everything to goodwill (we did make 4 trips there one weekend....oops). I want to spread the love. So, I'm trying to help organizations that really need special things. So I packed up 17 boulder holders from college/single days and shipped them off to Free the Girls ....really cool way to help those women get on their feet (which I heard about this organization from a fellow blogger....).
Next stop....all the baby stuff/toys/outgrown clothes... Lowcountry Orphan Relief. They had come down and spoke to the students at FBS and then set up collection boxes one year....so I looked them up. They picked up one load already that we gave away our stroller, pack and play, clothes, shoes, some toys, blankets, etc. Now we are setting aside another load. They really helped us motivate Mason too....little Man has an affinity for stuffed animals as well as the memory of an elephant....so in the past during our semi-annual purges I've tried and tried to get him to give up stuffed animals with no luck. A couple weeks ago, we started telling him, we can't take all his lovies with us...told him about the orphans and how giving these lovies away could mean so much to a scared kid (btw, thank you christmas movie Search for Santa Paws.....used that to help him visualize). So I am extremely proud....he found 16 lovies to give away! The rest...well we had to sort them....we gave him the categories of storage for 2+ years, those going by boat, those going by plane, and those in your suitcase. He did a really good job (I question some decisions....but hey we took pictures and documented 'who' was going where).....then the fun part.....space bags!
That's just cool.
So our last donation destination of choice is Donation Town by searching their website, they determined that the National Children's Cancer Society will come to our house (post yard sale) and take any furniture, household goods and clothing we were unable to sell....done and done!
** <added Aug 16> When Mason was younger, he had some childhood wheezing. We haven't had to use his nebulizer for several years now.....so I found that the American Lung Association will take them. They can give them to school nurses that need them to give treatments to students so they student doesn't have to lug their machine back and forth between school and home...how cool is that!!
Now if we could only get our house sold......not so much a purge but a giant sigh of relief.....so please say a pray, do a rain dance (TS Andrea is producing a good bit of rain, today would be perfect!), or send some positive juju this way.......
Speaking of rain...rainy day fun while also prepping the kids for some apartment living while we are in DC....
So school and all school related events are done.....so now time for me to get a move on and getting ready to move.....the purging has begun! Some stuff is easy (that t-shirt from a certain frat party in college that has gotten a little holey over the years....adios)....other stuff is trickier, you know there may be that partly cloudy day when the sun is at a 94 degree angle and because we are now in the southern hemisphere this ____ is going to come in real handy....must say adios as well.....
In our purging, I'm trying to not donate everything to goodwill (we did make 4 trips there one weekend....oops). I want to spread the love. So, I'm trying to help organizations that really need special things. So I packed up 17 boulder holders from college/single days and shipped them off to Free the Girls ....really cool way to help those women get on their feet (which I heard about this organization from a fellow blogger....).
Next stop....all the baby stuff/toys/outgrown clothes... Lowcountry Orphan Relief. They had come down and spoke to the students at FBS and then set up collection boxes one year....so I looked them up. They picked up one load already that we gave away our stroller, pack and play, clothes, shoes, some toys, blankets, etc. Now we are setting aside another load. They really helped us motivate Mason too....little Man has an affinity for stuffed animals as well as the memory of an elephant....so in the past during our semi-annual purges I've tried and tried to get him to give up stuffed animals with no luck. A couple weeks ago, we started telling him, we can't take all his lovies with us...told him about the orphans and how giving these lovies away could mean so much to a scared kid (btw, thank you christmas movie Search for Santa Paws.....used that to help him visualize). So I am extremely proud....he found 16 lovies to give away! The rest...well we had to sort them....we gave him the categories of storage for 2+ years, those going by boat, those going by plane, and those in your suitcase. He did a really good job (I question some decisions....but hey we took pictures and documented 'who' was going where).....then the fun part.....space bags!
Before
After
So our last donation destination of choice is Donation Town by searching their website, they determined that the National Children's Cancer Society will come to our house (post yard sale) and take any furniture, household goods and clothing we were unable to sell....done and done!
** <added Aug 16> When Mason was younger, he had some childhood wheezing. We haven't had to use his nebulizer for several years now.....so I found that the American Lung Association will take them. They can give them to school nurses that need them to give treatments to students so they student doesn't have to lug their machine back and forth between school and home...how cool is that!!
Now if we could only get our house sold......not so much a purge but a giant sigh of relief.....so please say a pray, do a rain dance (TS Andrea is producing a good bit of rain, today would be perfect!), or send some positive juju this way.......
Speaking of rain...rainy day fun while also prepping the kids for some apartment living while we are in DC....
Thursday, June 6, 2013
Meanwhile in SC....
Yep, it's hurricane season. 6 days in and we're under our first Tropical Storm Warning of the season!!
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