However, right now, this exact week, is a brief period which I could only characterize as the calm before the storm. My calendar is unusually quiet, email has been manageable, and it feels like I’ve got a good handle on things. However, starting next week, I will be hitting the road and won’t be in the office much for a couple weeks. First I will be in Colorado Springs attending a regional CTE (Career Technical Education) conference. Then the following week I will be in Omaha for a Fortinet boot camp, a statewide network operations meeting, and then finishing the week presenting at the annual NETA (Nebraska Educational Technology Association) conference. Unfortunately, I don’t see things slowing down much in May or June either.

Having some time now to organize myself has been invaluable. I’ve been able to tie up several loose ends and prepare myself for everything that is on the horizon. I am ready to face the challenges ahead.

I started making a list of all the services we needed to migrate to new solutions. Some were easier than others. One of the most critical services that I was struggling with was DNS. The acronym DNS stands for Domain Name System. It’s the technology that translates every web URL you type to a numerical IP address. For example, when you go to wadegibson.com, DNS is translating that to this web server at 192.163.202.246. Without DNS the internet would be a jumbled mess of unintelligible numbers. It’s a fundamental underpinning of nearly every technology we use today.

So, what does any unknowing tech guy do when you are trying to find a solution to a problem? You Google it, of course! I started searching for managed DNS providers and read every article or review I could get my hands on. Four years ago the market space was fairly limited in this area, which helped narrow things down quickly. One company name continued to bubble to the top with glowing positive reviews – DNS Made Easy.

I commend their team for coming up with such an ingenious name, which couldn’t be more fitting. They have really hit a home run with this service. Their interface is unbelievably simple and easy to use, they have great help articles and videos, and their price….it will shock you how inexpensive it is. We have 72 domains managed in our DNS Made Easy account, and it only costs us $166. Per year. My colleagues always ask, “You mean per month, don’t you?” No. That’s really all we pay. I can’t even pay for the electricity and cooling for one server at $166 per year, let alone buy hardware, maintain the operating systems, and everything else that goes along with on-premise hosting.

This was a no-brainer, and truly one of the best decisions I’ve made. I’m such a fan of DNS Made Easy that I practically evangelize the product every chance I get. A number of my ESU colleagues across the state have now adopted DNS Made Easy in their environments as well. I even have a personal DNS Made Easy account for all of my own domains.

Finding DNS Made Easy was a pivotal moment. It proved to me, and others, that we could find affordable, first-class solutions to meet our needs. Having solutions like DNS Made Easy makes it easier for me to focus on delivering quality services without having to worry about our infrastructure.

For the past ten years, we have been using a product called Web Help Desk. At the time it was one of our better options, offering most of the features we needed at an attractive price. However, over the years the application has dated itself, and it still looks and functions just like it did ten years ago. It had gotten to the point that for the past few years we only used it when we needed to track a ticket for billing purposes. Everything else was handled solely via direct email and phone communications.

As a two-man support team we had managed to make this model work, but we lacked any data to quantify the scope and breadth of the work we do on a daily basis. I knew we needed to make a change and begin tracking all of our support requests through a more modern ticketing system. In early December we fired up a trial of a product called Freshdesk. I was familiar with the Freshworks family of applications from a few years back when I dabbled with their accounting platform, Freshbooks. I knew they had a solid reputation in the industry and their interfaces were always clean and simple. Unfortunately, our trial expired over the holiday break before we had a chance to really dig in under the hood. Luckily a quick call got our trial extended by a few days so we could see if Freshdesk would be a good fit. Within 24 hours I had issued a PO and we were rocking and rolling with Freshdesk.

Since we were moving from an email-based reporting system, the ability to have forwarded emails converted to tickets was crucial. Freshdesk handles this easily, and even finds the original sender of the message to mark as the requestor. Additionally, Freshdesk allowed us to create Companies for each of our Districts, and anytime it sees a new user from a specific @schooldomain.org address, it automatically associates them with that Company. On top of that, users can easily login with their Google account to create tickets and view the status of any existing tickets. This is very slick, and makes user provisioning a breeze!

So far things are progressing nicely. I’ve already been shocked at the sheer volume of requests that we field every day. It’s taken a little bit to get acclimated to the process of logging phone calls, walk-ins, etc., in addition to traditional email requests. Luckily the process is quick and easy, and I’m confident that the data we are gathering will be invaluable as we move forward.

I quickly called their tech support and pleaded my case to have them check the memory (the problem last time). Instead, I was escalated to Tier 2 support, and was told to give them 24-72 hours to “look into it”. Meanwhile, I have to keep the masses at bay and hope they find the problem quickly.

I waited 24 hours and thought I would call in to see if they had found anything. They knew nothing and couldn’t tell if anything had been done. I was told again to wait the 24-72 hours.  I was not happy, but kept quiet and took my medicine.

Finally, after lunch on Friday, as the magical 72nd hour was expiring, I picked up the phone and called in. By this point it had been three days, I had heard absolutely nothing from Bluehost, and both my customers and I had lost our patience. I felt advanced sorrow for the poor unsuspecting agent that would draw the unlucky number of me in their call queue. Steadfast, I maintained my professionalism. He first asked how long it had been, to which I happily answered the requisite 72 hours. I waited on hold for another fifteen minutes while he took his best crack at the case.

Defeated, he came back online and told me that he had escalated my case to Tier 3 support. “Great,” I replied. “How soon can I expect to hear something?” He replied, “You should hear something within 24 hours.” It was at that exact moment he heard me inhale deeply as I had expended every last bit of keep quiet I had left in my soul. I explained that I had already waited 72 hours, and was not going to wait for another 24 while they do nothing. Our server had already been unusable for three days, and this could not be drug out for two weeks like it was in August.

I demanded to speak with a superior. The agent put me on hold for a good five minutes, presumably to take some of the fight out of me. Supervisor, Brett, answers the phone, to whom I quickly provide the elevator summary of the situation. I asked Brett if he’s ever seen the movie Roadhouse, and in particular, the scene where Dalton tells his bouncers to “Be nice…until it’s time to not be nice.” I told Brett that I was past the phase of being nice, and it’s time to get some answers. Brett chuckled briefly and assured me he would get someone to look at it right away. I told him if they didn’t have this fixed by Monday that I would be leaving Bluehost and would never return.

Apparently my convo with Brett was not at a loss. Within thirty minutes Tier 3 support looked into the issue and escalated it to their Systems Operations team, who eventually escalated it to a Sr. Systems Architect. By Saturday night our server was humming along under normal operation again.

As a person who has been on the receiving end of this situation, I always hate having to strongly assert my point, and yes, interject a curse here and there to drive things home. As Dalton would say, “Nobody ever wins a fight,” but sometimes you’ve got to light a fire under the posterior of the right people to get things moving again.

PRTG Dashboard

Network management systems (NMS) are a key component of any technology infrastructure. They provide real-time monitoring and reporting of a variety of hardware and software components on your network. Over the years I’ve had experience with a number of software packages – Nagios, What’s Up, Zabbix, Zenoss, SolarWinds, and most recently, PRTG.

Some forward-thinking colleagues in other ESUs have been singing the praises of PRTG for a few years, but I wasn’t so quick to jump on the bandwagon. A little over a year ago I had the chance to get in on a group buy with them at a great price, but I still wasn’t sold. I was convinced that I could get what I needed from a free or community supported tool. After floundering in trial implementations with a couple other tools, I finally gave in and bought PRTG.

We’ve only been running PRTG in production for a couple weeks, but I am wholeheartedly convinced that it is worth every penny. In that short time, we have already identified a failed power supply, a degraded RAID array, a bad ROM battery, and other performance tweaks on a number of servers. We also have the most accurate visibility into our bandwidth utilization that we have ever had, which helps greatly when purchasing firewalls, bidding circuits, and buying internet capacity.

One of the things I love most about PRTG is the Maps functionality. It lets you build your own custom dashboards that can show you how things are performing on your network. The image above is a screenshot of the dashboard I have running on a TV in my office all day long. At a glance, I can keep tabs on anything happening in our area. Having this information is invaluable in our line of work.

Right now I am reading two books concurrently, both as part of book study groups. The Innovator’s Mindset by George Couros is the book I am reading with ESU 11 librarians, and Leadership Redefined by Dave Weber is the other book we are reading as an ESU-wide book study. Both book studies are covering one chapter per week, and we post our thoughts and reflections in a Google Community. The schedule has been easy enough to keep, and it’s nice to hear other people’s thoughts as we progress through the chapters.

Most of my reading falls squarely under the non-fiction, professional development heading. I also listen to quite a few audiobooks as part of my daily commute (one hour each way). One of the more recent audiobooks I listened to was What EveryBODY is Saying authored by former FBI counterintelligence officer Joe Navarro. I’ve always been pretty observant and receptive to nonverbal communication, but this book was a real eye-opener.

I do occasionally venture out of the self-help section and enjoy reading for pleasure. Over the Thanksgiving holiday, I finished reading Winging It! which is a stunning compilation of short stories outlining the aviation career of Jack Jefford. Jack is a distant relative in my family, so reading about his trials and tribulations as an Alaskan aviator made for a very enjoyable read.

Not surprisingly, I am also an avid reader and follower of various blogs. This is a great way to stay current with industry trends and news happenings. The byte sized reading is like a modern-day version of reading the daily newspaper. Feedly is my app of choice for reading various blogs through their RSS feed.

Reading is inarguably one of the best ways to grow professionally, learn, and it’s also a great mechanism to relax. I spend a lot of hours each day glued to a screen, so cracking open a paperback is a welcome release for the eyes and mind.

I searched the ends of the internet to find a customizable Family Feud game. There are a number of free PowerPoint templates available, but by far the best one I found was from a site called Rusnak Creative. This site has a slew of PowerPoint templates for a variety of game shows, and they are all top notch. Many of these are fully editable, and come complete with instructions, sound effects, the whole shebang!

I knew that I wanted my Family Feud to be education related, so I found this site that had a full listing of questions from four different seasons of the show. I parsed through them looking for any that had keywords such as teacher, student, class, or school. I was able to build a great activity that got everyone up on their feet, thinking, laughing, and enjoying our time together.

I’ve been able to get a lot of mileage out of this game show concept. I’ve already repeated my Family Feud two more times since then, and it’s always a hit! Plus, it’s really fun to be a game show host for half an hour.

A couple days later I had a report from one of our schools that their website was also loading slowly. After doing a little digging I noticed that all sites on our VPS (Virtual Private Server) were intermittently loading slowly or timing out. I began running a ping to our server and noticed that it would drop offline at random intervals. “No big deal,” I thought to myself, as I quickly remoted into the server to give it a reboot. We have had our BlueHost VPS for years, and it’s always just worked. The server rebooted and things seemed better initially, but the problem quickly reappeared.

Thinking the problem was surely some WordPress plugin gone awry, I began the process of disabling plugins one-by-one, then waiting a minute or two to see if the problem reappeared. Much to my chagrin, I could not find a plugin causing this issue. I then began running WordPress in debug mode to see if I could get to the bottom of things. This sent me down numerous rabbit holes, none of which resolved the issue.

Frustrated, I finally gave in and called tech support. They were happy to assist me, but quickly realized that I had already exhausted all of the usual suspects. A level two engineer joined the call and quickly pointed the finger at one particular WordPress plugin. I waited until off hours to fully disable the plugin and even contacted the developer to report the findings of the engineer. Lo and behold, this did not fix the issue either.

After getting back in touch with support, they said that the problem had to be with one of my sites, and that I should go through and begin disabling them until I find the culprit. I relayed to them how difficult this is when you have a multi-network WordPress installation. They insisted that was the problem, so I begrudgingly complied. That weekend I decided to take a more drastic approach and moved all of my websites into a quarantine folder, inaccessible by the web server altogether. Within minutes the VPS was still losing connection, so I knew the issue was not with any of my sites. I quickly fired off an email to update the ticket with my findings and requested that they move my account to a different server.

Days went by with no reply. My frustration grew as the issue became more prominent. I sent more ticket updates as I thought of anything else to try. I got passed to different engineers, who all found something the other had missed, but the problem persisted. I was ready to jump ship from BlueHost, already researching other VPS providers. Finally, after more than two weeks, I get an email update from an engineer saying they found a bad stick of RAM in the host server, and that I should be good to go. And that’s all it was. A bad stick of memory that is now forever stuck in my memory.

This sent me down a path explaining the theory (or to some, myth), of the magical land known as Inbox Zero. A quick Google search of the term defines Inbox Zero as the following:

Inbox Zero is a rigorous approach to email management aimed at keeping the inbox empty — or almost empty — at all times.

The same article attributes this technique to Merlin Mann. If you have the time I highly suggest watching Merlin’s Google Tech Talk on the subject. It’s a powerful technique, that keeps your psyche free for higher level thinking. Not to mention, it’s far more efficient than reading, then re-reading an email multiple times while you try to figure out what to do.

I once heard someone make the analogy comparing your email inbox to your physical mailbox. They noted how unusual it would be to go out to the curbside, open your mailbox, start sifting through letters, opening some, shoving others back in the box, and then returning to the house with only a few. Yet many of us do exactly that with regards to our email. For our postal mail, most of us typically process that in some fashion or another. I start by bringing it all into the house, then I might quickly discard some things into the trash, open others and sort into things that need action, like paying a bill, or others I may read immediately, or possibly sort it into another pile to be read later.

The same processing could, and should, be applied to our digital mail as well. When a message comes in we need to decide what to do with it. A popular method for this process is called the Four D’s – Delete it, Do it, Delegate it, or Defer it. This is a simple way to quickly plow through that bloated inbox and get it down to something more manageable.

Keeping your inbox clean is a liberating feeling. I admit that there are days when this is just not possible. Life happens and we have to respond. But the sooner we can wade through our email (pun fully intended), the sooner we can get back to being productive.

Zoom with Dual Monitors

I’ve recently been looking at traditional video conferencing through a new lens, both literally and figuratively. One of our projects this summer was to update a mid-sized Conference Room in our office. This room has been outfitted with a Polycom HDX-7000 and two 50″ LG plasma screens for a number of years. This Polycom unit was from a different era, and was difficult for most anyone other than IT staff to navigate the remote and settings.

My plan for video conferencing in this room revolved around a few key components. To get started, I purchased a Logitech Group system with a high definition Carl Zeiss PTZ camera. This is the Cadillac of USB connected video conference systems, and comes in right around the $1,000 price point. Having a high-quality audio and video session with PTZ presets was key in supplanting our H.323 system. The Logitech Group system delivers on all those points.

Zoom with Screen Share

This camera system is connected up to a modestly equipped Mac Mini (~$800) that is tucked away in an equipment cabinet. A bluetooth keyboard and mouse make it easy to interact when needed. The built-in HDMI output is connected to one display and the second Mini DisplayPort is connected to another HDMI display via a dongle. Being able to run true dual monitors to separate video and content is another longstanding H.323 feature that I could not live without.

Lastly, enter Zoom. I cannot say enough good things about this product. It is simple, intuitive, and it just works. It has become the defacto standard for video conferencing in our area and across the state. I grappled with the idea of setting up a Zoom Room but ultimately decided to configure a generic Zoom Pro account for this setup. It does everything we need it to do and is a familiar interface to navigate.

The Mac Mini is configured with automatic login, and the Zoom app automatically launches and signs in. Enabling dual monitors in the Zoom preferences is as simple as a checkbox, as is entering full screen automatically when starting or joining a meeting. Now when someone starts sharing their screen, one monitor will automatically go to full-screen content and you can still see video participants on the other monitor. You can also toggle between Gallery and Active Speaker as well, which is handy.

All in all, this sub-$2,000 setup rivals many of the high-end and high-dollar video conferencing systems I’ve used over the years. I’m anxious to see how this works going forward, but early indicators point to a huge success!