[Tfug] OT: short contract needed for an MS-SQL wonk...

[Jim March]

Folks,

I support a small computer network for a local law office (downtown
Tucson).  They need to upgrade an application called "Time Matters" (legal
billing and calendaring) from v.9 to v.10.  The latter is more robust but it
needs MS-SQL underneath it and a Windows application server...and I don't
know near enough about MS-SQL.  There are places in the installation
instructions for TM10 that say "make this happen" in MS-SQL without saying
exactly how and I'm clueless.

I think we're talking about a three hour or so gig to work through it all,
together.  They're willing to pay $100 an hour, and if you think it'll run
longer, that's probably explainable.

I've basically kept their stuff running pretty well now for about three
years and this is the first time I've had to say "whoa, I'm in over my head
here".

I'm not really an IT pro anymore...I left full-time IT in 2000.

Here's the state we're in now:

We're going to have three client desks running WinXP, three running Win7 on
some new boxes with decent specs.  The XP boxes are somewhat crappy but good
enough.

The server is something I just built: same as one of the new desktops, but
with 6gigs RAM and a Promise RAID controller with mirrored (RAID1) SATA
drives.  It boots Ubuntu Lucid.  I took the Win7 install that was on there
from Lenovo, "lifted it" with the VMWare tool for same (before installing
Ubuntu) and got it running as a VMWare Player 3 virtual machine with 2.5gigs
RAM :).  This VM has bridged networking with it's own IP address...DHCP at
present as opposed to the static IP for Ubuntu.  The users can all see three
primary shares from the Ubuntu side and a new share I created within the VM
for use by the SQL app - networking issues are 100% stick-a-fork-in-it done
:).  And the Win7 VM has it's own drive letter link into the Linux host disk
structure above it, so we can copy the TM9 data from the current Linux side
where it lives into the VM Windows share where TM10/MS-SQL will need it.  I
also have .net framework installed at the VM server side and all the
clients, another dependency for this thing.

The server (servers, counting the VM?) are not facing the general Internet
at all.  I put everything in the office behind a pretty decent Sonicwall
small business firewall/router that I took some extra care to set up right.

What else...ah.  In addition to the mirrored drives, I have a 1.5tb external
drive that gets an hourly rsync update through BackInTime (basically a
friendly-face-on-rsync kinda thing).  The external hard drive is fireproof
and waterproof :).  ($250 worth of Iomega, I'm very impressed...weighs about
15lbs...)

It's basically a pretty kickin' little setup, if done kinda on the cheap.

Anyways.  Let me know if this of interest.  If possible we could do it
tomorrow evening, or Tues. evening, or ???  Let me know if it seems
plausible.

Oh yeah: installation guides for this turkey, so you know what you're
getting into...we have to migrate the old TM9 data (in some kind of
proprietary funky format) into TM10/MS-SQL, but there's guidance on that...

http://support.lexisnexis.com/TimeMatters10/record.asp?ArticleID=7438

Here's a video on the process:

http://7secondblog.ca/2009/12/time-matters-10-installation/

Thanks,

Jim
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