The Trucking Nerd

As some of you recall I had an issue in the server room a few months ago when the AC went out and we nearly had a meltdown.  I went scouring for a cheap solution to be alerted of the ambient temperture in the server room and quickly found out a good cheap solution didn’t really exist and thus was born the Temperature Scan product.

I was excited the other day to get a testimonial from Arizona from a customer who wrote in to let me know that my hard work developing the temperature scan saved him a lot of potential grief.  In his words:

Pretty cool seeing such a simple and stupid idea yielding fruit for others!

Popularity: 19% [?]

Over a year ago I started planning a vision for the next step in the evolution of the network and systems architecture at Tradewinds.  The vision was to migrate from a physical to a virtualized infrastructure.  One where servers are no longer tethered to physical machines.  One where flexibility and disaster recovery options are abundant.

We worked crazy hours the past month preparing for the final stages of the migration and worked through this past weekend rolling out the new landscape and making the necessary systems changes.  I had expected a massive issue list when everyone returned Monday, but to my surprise, the issues were relatively lightweight, I guess that means we did a thorough job executing the plan…or maybe we just got lucky!  At any rate, I did walk away with a few key lessons that may yield value to others proceeding down the path of virtualizing their servers.

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Popularity: 47% [?]

Well, I haven’t written a post in sometime because I was feverishly spending my spare time working on developing a solution to a problem I ran into.  One Monday morning I walked into work, stepped in front of my server room door and noticed a strange noise coming from the room.  It sounded like a high pitch jet engine sound.  I proceeded to open the door and a blast of hot air came barreling out at me.  The A/C had gone out overnight and the server room was approaching 100 degrees.  Not a good way to start the week off.

After I put a fan in the room and started shutting down non essential equipment, I decided it was time to install a temperature monitoring system into the server room.  This wasn’t the first time we had issues with the A/C unit, but it was the highest the temperature had ever gotten, and I know if it gets to hot, things start going south real quick.  I did some googling, and came up with all kinds of results, but most of these systems were very expensive and did a lot more than what I really needed. 

What I wanted was simple (or so I thought it was):

• USB - Had to be a Plug and Play Sensor that works with any computer.
• Un-tethered - I didn’t want something that was connected to any one machine, I wanted to be able to get readings away from machine exhaust so I could get the ambient temperature of the room.
• Paging / Emailing - I wanted a solution that would alert my blackberry and treo of issues in addition to a number of my hundred email accounts.
• Customizable - I wanted to be able to specify my threshold to monitor and how often to monitor it.
• Temperature Only - I know there are technically a lot of other factors that sophisticated data centers monitor such as humidity, but I also know that it is temperature that I have the most control over and can do the most damage if it gets out of control.
• Cheap - Most importantly, it had to be cheap.  I’m at a small trucking company and the economic times right now don’t warrant me the luxury to throw a rack mounted sensor in that does all kinds of fancy stuff.  I was looking for the <$100 solution!

After digging, I decided the solution I was looking for didn’t exist, so I decided to create one.

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Popularity: 54% [?]

I am normally a moderately conservative implementer of new technology into production environments at work.  There is one decision we made back in 2005 however that was a little before the mainstream, but has worked out rather well.  I recently read this article from eweek regarding the cost savings and growing number of VOIP implementations.  Being a relatively early adopter of VOIP, I can attest that it is a worthwhile venture…and a little less risky now.

I get asked from time to time about our phone system and why I like it so much and why I’m so eagerly awaiting the next release of it in 2008 which we’ve got plans to upgrade to.

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Popularity: 70% [?]

I’m not sure how many other small to medium sized trucking companies are making the leap into the virtual server market, but I know we are certainly pushing into this arena. 

If you have not heard of virtualization, you certainly will.  Diane Greene (the CEO of VMware) made the statement last week at their VMWorld conference “A year ago, we were talking about virtualization becoming mainstream; now we’re talking about it as industry.”

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Popularity: 22% [?]