It’s been a while since I’ve last posted here, and I want to share the reason for my hiatus. Over the past two years, I’ve been fully immersed in pursuing my MBA at Post University. It’s been an incredible journey filled with learning, growth, and a few challenges.

During this time, I had the opportunity to dive deep into various aspects of business, from strategic management and leadership to finance and marketing. The experience has broadened my perspective, equipped me with new skills, and ignited fresh ideas that I can’t wait to explore and share with you all.
Balancing coursework with life’s other demands wasn’t always easy, but the knowledge I’ve gained and the connections I’ve made have been more than worth it. Now that I’ve completed this chapter, I’m excited to return to the blog with renewed energy and insights.
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I just wanted to let you know that you'll see more posts from me soon.

This weekend I added the UPS, (APC2200) and did a little more cable management to really clean things up. Some thoughts and future work. I was thinking I was going to buy a much smaller, and less heavy, UPS. After going back and forthe I ended up getting a 2U APC 2200. I had NEMA 5-20 already for the equipment so going with a nice biug UPS was not a problem except that there was no way it was going to be supported in the rack in the 2U space that was open. So I used my vertical rack mount for servers and put it right there and it worked out perfectly.

However, now that I have that extra 2U in the rack I am kicking myself for not using 2U cable management as opposed to the 1U. So yes there will be a future where i replace those 1U cable management with 2U Cable Management and probably need longer patch cables than I have but that will be for another day!!! 

Now for the UPS when I first got it all running it was saying 1hour 10 minutes for run time and i was kicking myself for buying this big hulking UPS and wonder where I calculated things wrong. However after a calibration test I was down to 36 minutes runtime. I had targeted 30 minutes with a little overhead so pretty dead on!

Very long evening Friday and all day Saturday. I finished the patching and cable management, I did a little electrical work but still need to spend a bit more time on that. I also handled all media connections - 14 x RG6 connections and 5 zones of whole home audio, each including left and right speakers and 2 ethernet control drops. The SONOS devices are a lot more happy. I need to do some work to allow my SONOS visible on my main user VLAN as with all these changes I finally moved my Sonos to my iot VLAN - Going to try this technote from packetmischief.ca .
I found a nice rackmount for the Intel NUCs and upgraded my rackmount power supplies. I also moved my NAS to a much more convenient location. Phase 3 will consist of some additional electrical work (probably will not be visible) and I really need to get a much bigger UPS for this

I completely forgot to take a picture before, so this is shortly after I started. But ugly - The cabinet was packed, yet all the patches came in and out to it. So it was time to do it right now - I'm still kicking myself for not just using 19 racks with std patch panels—time to fix my mistake. With the family gone for the weekend, I began by re-terminating everything onto 19-inch patch panels. However, these were unique patch panels that used keystone jacks. Using keystones jacks was extraordinary in many different ways. First, I had room to work as I terminated the individual jacks. Second I would never have a problem where a port on the panel breaks, and now I have to work around it - My OCD brain does not like that. Lastly, it helped keep the network running as I could keep port downtime to less than 5 minutes. Uptime did not matter as everyone was gone, but I realized I could have done it with the entire family home with little interruption. 

After a full day of re-terminating all the cables and moving my core network equipment over the panel, I was finally done with Phase 1. 

While this still looks like a mess, it is better than I had before. But it's only phase 1. Phase 2, Planned for next weekend, will hopefully add some cable management and updated patch cables. Then, as time permits, I may tackle phase 3, including rack mounting and cleaning up all home audio and video capabilities!

I recently completed a research report on the "Effects of Technology on Libraries". Please check it out under my research section. As many of you know I am a huge advocate of libraries and all the things they do for our communities. 

My new book is finally all set to order from Amazon. We had a few hiccups with Amazon getting it all set on the site but it's finally all set. I am also starting work on my second book which I am hoping to have ready in the spring/summer of 2018.

Just received an advance copy of the new book - Publisher is still working out some issues with Amazon but hope to get a link up here soon. I'm very pleased with how it came out and very appreciative of my Co-Author Bob Perciaccante's work and all the work from ​Packt Publishing.

I am very excited that after several months of work my first book will be released in the coming weeks - Still waiting for some things to update shortly but will share more information as soon as I can.

Welcome to the new home of my blog - I just moved it over so it will take me a bit of time to get going but hopefully you will comeback and find some really useful information. Feel free to look around I plan on getting most of the static content up and running first!