Apparently according to some other blog or site I came across, categories are “The shit” (I’m paraphrasing) and thus wordpress is VASTLY superior to all other options forever and ever amen.  For that reason I’m putting my IT thoughts in here.  Maybe I’ll accidentally help someone as I brain dump ideas and processes as I do my work thing.

Today I’m trying to get a storefront 2.1 to 3.0 upgrade done on my VMWARE lab.  It is slow going because apparently my white box likes to purple screen, and it boots slow (not as slow as it used to once I figured out it was pointing to a DNS server on the host…and that guest was offline when it booted).  This is on ESX 4.1?

Trying to use the “ARR” special for my test member server was a bad idea.  Turns out MS is kinda awesome and they had an evaluation copy out there for me to try.  I know MS gets  a lot of crap on certain forums, but honestly they’ve been awesome to me.  Yeah stuff bugs out, sometimes support doesn’t listen…but I have a career thanks to that company.  Yes I’m a dirty dirty windows admin, but I’m employed and generally happy.  Someday I’ll play more with linux and become a real boy.  Actually this cbtnuggets netscaler lab has a few linux based web servers for me to play with…so it may actually happen.  For now though, lets focus on this storefront project.

INSERT FANCY SCREENSHOT HERE

just kidding…ain’t nobody got time for that!

I was gonna activate this eval copy of windows as it has 10 days (with 5 re-arms…and bless you cat sneezing underneath my legs) but I just want to do this SF upgrade, so I can feel more confident when I do this at work in a production environment.

For this particular lab environment, I’ve got the following stuff:

-1 Netscaler evaluation (which I need to fix up since it expired…I use my 1 telework day a week to do this lab stuff; also I have a cat butt on my ankle, you’re welcome)

-1 DC

-1 Member server (2k8r2) [plan to make this one a storefront server]

-1 windows 7 client

I do plan to setup a more complete citrix environment (Xenapp 6.5 to replicate what I support at work).

Lets give this server a manual IP,  even though I know a dhcp reservation would be superior…I just don’t want to log into my router/modem for a lab.  The reservation i setup for a demo copier yesterday was kinda awesome.  Especially coming from my old environment where I had tons of IP addresses on spreadsheets to track.  IT is art and science.

Remind me I need to fix the time issue on my lab.   It might be a cmos issue on my lab machine.  Keeps changing despite what I put on the ESX host.

Cat licking my toe.