Where In The World Is Sum1?

Banging My Head Against A Wall

         I spent the past 2 weeks (Okay, past week and a half) in Schaumburg working on upgrading a small radio system I teach.  I really think most any instructor could do this, but most of them don't teach anything on this system, so I take care of it.  It's not all that tough, but there are a few things that needed done.  Upgraded two desktop PC's to Win 10.  This also requires using a special disk provided by Motorola to harden their operating system.  Also upgraded the system routers and switches operating systems & installed new configurations.  The Base Radios, Comparator, and a device called a Site Controller were all upgraded.  That was the easy stuff.


         The hard part came when it was time to upgrade the Virtual Servers.  Right now, we use HP 380, Gen 8 Virtual Servers.  These run on ESXi, a Virtual Machine operating system.  You install that, then create the virtual servers using VM Ware.  Well, this particular machine was 'scrounged' from one of our support labs, and what I thought was a good operating system, wasn't.  I spent almost a whole day getting it partially configured and ready to go, only to find that the hard drives were.... well, I can't say/type that word here.  So the next day, I reinstalled the ESXi operating system, reformatted the drives in the process, and created the two virtual servers that needed to be on it.  The first one was easy, I'd installed the current one three years ago, and still remembered much of the procedure.  The second one?  That's another story.  Luckily for me, a tech from our support lab upstairs had volunteered to help with this, and it's a good thing he did.  To make a long story short, our manuals don't provide a lot of details, and if he hadn't been there, I'd still be trying to get that second VM installed!


         Now that the upgrade is done, I've been tackling a problem we've had for a long time.  This problem doesn't affect the system operation, but I can't demonstrate one thing until this is fixed.  Never had the time (nor knowledge on some of it) to fix this, and am still learning.  It's not fixed yet, but I have a much better idea of what's wrong than I did Monday.  However, I did spend most of the day yesterday banging my head against a wall, getting no-where....  I decided that if I couldn't get it done, I'd come home and relax a little before traveling to Plantation Florida Sunday.


         Til my next entry, y'all take of yourself and your loved ones.  And Write all you can!    Aloha to you all.