CobraCARE.net CMS Conversion
One of machineLOGIC's clients runs the cobraCARE.net website. They'd been hosting it with a 3rd party on their proprietary web application but were looking for other options. I proposed moving the site to a WordPress CMS back-end with some custom pages to handle the data gathering requirements. I also coordinated the migration to the new web host and the associated DNS changes.
The WordPress portion was pretty straightforward. I started with a theme that had the the basic look & feel and then customized it a bit to remove the "blog" stuff and use the existing logo. A few plugins were incorporated to handle the member management, secure access and related functionality. Then I made a couple sets of custom Page templates for the data collection forms. They use PHP and JavaScript for validation (pre and post Post) and it all seems to work quite well.
HP DL320 Repair
This was a project that extended much longer than necessary... One of the machineLOGIC clients had a failed drive in one of their backup servers. Usually not a big deal since the drives are in a RAID array. However, as soon as I'd replace the drive, another drive would get marked as failed -- not the original drive (which would still be marked as failed as well).
Nervous about losing everything, I used Clonezilla to make an image of the remaining drive in the boot mirror. That gave us some leeway to experiment.
Called HP support, they suggested flashing everything in the server: mainboard, raid controller, drives and anything in between that could be flashed. Unfortunately, that didn't change anything so ordered another drive with the theory that the first replacement was bad.
Nope, that wasn't it. Ordered another drive. Still wasn't the issue.
Dan, of machineLOGIC, finally called in a regional expert HP tech. Took him a while, but he found that the issue was related to how the server had initially been assembled -- the drive ports didn't match up to the same number controller ports... In other words, I had yet to have actually touched the right drive!
Once that was settled it was just a matter of minutes to get the right drive swapped and the clonezilla image restored back to the server.
Non-Profit Firewall changes
One of the things I noticed when doing the local non-profit's overview was an apparent lack of a firewall. However, upon looking closer I found that it was part of their Cbeyond voice/data plan -- and it had issues.
I spent some time going through the firewall rules, exceptions and port forwarding and then locked it all up nice and tight. It would appear that in the past folks had configured things to allow easier remote access. They had also been hosting servers from within the office... Those servers were all gone but the firewall rules lived on. Things just weren't as secure as they should be.
Non-Profit Overview
A local non-profit corporation had recently gone through some staffing and IT support changes. They invited me out to look over their current hardware and network setup to become familiar with it and make some "road map" recommendations for the future.
I went through all their machines, spending extra time on the servers, to determine what each machine was doing and running for services. Found a few anomalies -- like a server with an external IP address -- and turned off a couple extra DNS and Apache web servers that were running on their Apple Macs. I also spent some time tracking down documentation for their phone system and assisting in some reconfigurations.
After a couple visits I presented them with a current network diagram detailing what each machine provided along with a page of items (prioritized) to focus on for the future.
Quick Project: Site Move
Finished a quick project for Scott's Coach Works (subbed under TeamLogic IT - Northwest valley) this week. Didn't have any access to their current hosting provider but needed to move the site. I took care of the site registration, DNS move and successfully pulled over their content to the new host.
GNU Wget makes these sorts of projects pretty straight-forward. The only wrinkle was chasing down some JavaScript files that weren't included directly in the HTML pages.
Sites
Topics
Access Active Directory Anti-malware antivirus apple backup certification clonezilla CMS conversion CSS database Data Warehouse design DNS ETL firewall HTML mozyPro network nmap open source PHP restore security SEO server SonicWALL SQL SQL Server 2005 support Vista volunteer web wget Windows WordPress XP
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