A few of us had lunch with EMC today to talk about some stuff that is going on. And lets face it, we use enough of there stuff so lunch is not allot to ask for. Actually our rep who is pretty cool was the one that suggested it. Like Jayson and I, he likes to eat! Well at least eat at a halfway decent place! the problem with vendor lunch’s is that they take forever. We learned allot, so it wasn’t a waste.
Work
Nagios
Rob has gotten allot done with Nagios. Hopefully by the end of the week he should have basic system monitoring (up and down) plus disk space checking on all gear at our data center. Once that is done we can roll out more locations as well as add functionality. He is doing great with it so far. I know Danny wanted to work on the project but he is busy with other issues. I also know Danny would have done a great job on the project, but when he works on stuff like this it seems like it takes him forever to complete stuff. Rob is able to churn out product allot faster. For a time sensitive project like this I am happy with the quick response.
Hopefully this program works out better than our old whatsup system. I can’t wait till the end of the week.
Technorati Tags: nagios, network monitoring, snmp
Content Management System
I am looking for a content management system to use at work. We want something that will be easy to allow end users manage and update content on. So the goal is to get something setup by technology that we can simply hand off and not worry about the management of the site. At first we thought a wiki was good enough to setup, but media wiki required too much learning curve to use. This project is a side research project right now, but it would be nice to figure something out and get it up sometime soon. I think I am going to play with a few CMS’s on my own website and see how the functionality looks.
Technorati Tags: CMS, content management system, mediawiki
Windows Vista RC1 Take 2
I know I said I thought I was pre-determined to not like Vista in my original post about it, but there are plenty of annoying things that just scream out at me. Some stuff looks nice also, but all that I have found that I like are all UI things. No real substance.
My first major complaint is that the control panel is different. For example all the elements you could previously get via the display control panel are now separated. So you have to go looking for the control panel option for the screen saver, screen size, desktop, etc. It is annoying. I also looked for 15 minutes and could not find where the option to NOT let Vista log me out after an extended period of time is kept. In XP and older versions it was configured in the screen saver options.
The major thing that drives me crazy is how you have to install software. Since at work everything is on a network drive I have to say ok to launching something from the network, and then I have to say it is ok to install something, since Microsoft likes to ask me if I really want to do what I am telling the OS to do. That is nice in theory, but if you get too many dialog box’s you tend to just say yes to them and not read them. I thought they (MSFT) figured that out with 2003, but apparently they didn’t learn their lesson. In fact they decided to take it a step further. Jayson says this all the time, but by turning off all the options of a browser by default does not make it more secure. Users will just say yes to the warning box when they try to run something. They will also look less at each box the more of them they get.
Now on a good note, I was surprised how quick Office 2003 applications such as word and excel opened when launched. I didn’t get a chance to use the apps since I really don’t work on a windows box anymore, but I was happy with the snappy performance. Of course the performance better be that nice on a 64bit AMD 3000+ with 2gigs of RAM.
Technorati Tags: office 2003 on vista, vista security settings, vista rc1, vista ui, windows vista
Mooing Macbook Pro
My Macbook Pro has been causing me problems for almost a month now. It sounds much louder than it should during normal operation. Every once in a while (more often than not now a days) it will start getting much louder like an engine for a while. After a while it eventually goes back to normal, but as I said normal is still way too loud. Last week I got fed up with the sound (when my office is quiet all I hear is this dam laptop and it drives me crazy) and had it taken in to a Apple service center. I got it back in the middle of this week, and early on it was apparent that the replaced fan did not do much good. Yesterday when it started sounding really loud again I knew whatever they replaced didn’t fix the issue.
I called Apple support today and spend almost an hour on the phone. At first the level 1 support guy was giving me the normal song and dance about how they need to bring it to a depot and take a look at it. He couldn’t shed any light on what was going on. Something must have clicked because after a while he put me on hold and sent me to a specialist. I actually spoke to someone who knew what he was doing. Now it is hard to explain a noise problem. The system functions without any issues, but it is just abnormally loud. I can’t localize the sound. It seems random when it gets really loud, but it is constantly emitting a low hum that it should not. I know it shouldn’t because at work we have a few Macbooks and Macbook Pro‘s. My luck that my personal computer would be messed up. The guy I spoke to supposedly made some special notes on my ticket and I am now waiting for a box to arrive to send it in. They said something about the logic board, but they will run it for a while when they get it to see if the can reproduce the issue. I hope they can, but based off of how often it happens to me I don’t think there will be a problem with them reproducing it.
Now I have to go without my work computer for probably another week. It isn’t too bad since I have my personal Macbook I will bring to the office. The downside is that I normally leave my Macbook on at home when I am at work and run a bunch of different processes. I shouldn’t complain too much since I at least have a laptop to use. I know I get a bit spoiled with the gear I have access to at work. I just hope this unit comes back and works. More news when the unit comes back!
Technorati Tags: apple, mac, Macbook, Macbook Pro, macbook pro noise
First Thoughts on Windows Vista RC1
I downloaded RC1 of Windows Vista over the weekend. I have been hesitant to test it out, but I finally broke down and got it. This is the first release of Windows since I have had a computer that I will not use as my main OS. I don’t count Windows ME in that last statement. I may not want to use XP anymore, but before I became a Mac fan I used it. 2000 was good, NT 4 was stable, but not much hardware would run on it. 98 (all flavors) was slow and crashed, but it was an improvement over 95. 95 was better than windows 3.1, but still wasn’t awesome. The more that I look back the more I realize the pain I went through over the years with these OS’.
I look at Vista in a different light since I look at it not to be my new electronic home, but to see what it is about and see if or when it will have a place at the company I work at. I honestly go into evaluating it, not expecting to like it. I admit I am biased against it based off of everything I have read. My initial assessments reaffirm that fact.
I decided to test it on a physical machine, since I was concerned about the performance of it in a virtual machine. I took a brand new HP desktop that we are deploying and tried to install the Vista DVD. First thing I learned is that our brand new AMD 64bit desktops don’t have DVD drives in the stock configuration. My trusty external drive came in handy. I then learned after 2 attempts that I could not install vista by booting the computer and getting the DVD to load. It started to work, but every time the install UI tried to load the dam computer blue screened. This happened twice until gave up and just loaded the XP build I had on it and just started the install from within windows. I don’t like to do this, and when the process was done I had a windows.old directory. What I would give for a clean install!!!
The install once I finally got it to work, seemed to take forever to run. It honestly took like 2 hours on brand new hardware with 2 gigs of ram. I wasn’t sure about this hardware being fully compatible with Vista since it has an integrated video card on the mother board. Everything did finally install.
Initial performance thoughts are mixed. It didn’t seem faster than XP. The UI did seem sort of cartoonish. It is like they tried for the slick UI that the mac has (and newer linux distributions) but just didn’t get it. They did have some cute UI features like blurring some of the text of items that are visible behind some transparent windows.
The install pains I had alone where not a good start. I didn’t get to do much further testing on it before I went home for the night. I am interested to see how bad IE 7 is. Jayson put a version of IE 7 on an XP box and had only bad things to say about it. I will see if I have time tomorrow to do more testing. I will have a follow up posting with more feedback. For now I can safely say unless Leopard is total crap I will stick with the Mac for now.
Technorati Tags: AMD 64bit, mac, vista ui, vista rc1, windows vista
Novell Zen
I am not new to Novell’s Zen product suite. I used Zen about 10 years ago at one of my first technology jobs. Looking back I would consider myself to have been closed minded about technology. I was all about Microsoft OS’s and discounted Novell’s NDS. That was difficult for me since at the time I worked for a company who used Novell, and Microsoft was just gaining a footing in the network department. My first real promotion was when I got taken off the help-desk and given the task of dealing with our growing NT environment. As a side aspect of my job I was to head up any special projects that came up. I know that the special projects aspect was just my boss Jeff wanting to be able to get me involved in anything he wanted to put me on. I was one of a few people who he liked to use to just get stuff done quickly.
I bring all this up because one of the first projects I got involved with was Novell Zen. When I was on the helpdesk I got involved in desktop image building, and then projects related to installing applications. I remember spending countless nights with a team of 10 people running around floor after floor upgrading software. I swore there was a better way. One day I was complaining to someone in our network dept and they where like “yeah we have something that would speed that up”. They where talking about ZEN, or Zero Effort Networking. At the time it was a new application from Novell that we owned, but no one wanted to deal with it. My big mouth got me in charge of looking into using it. If after all I had an issue with how we deployed apps, why didn’t I try this out and see if it would work. I remember that most people looked at me funny when I talked about using it. Everyone was skeptical, including myself. But the potential was huge. I ended up leaving that company before we could roll out every application with ZEN, but we had gotten to a few of them, and the fundamentals where down.
The next job I went to ended up having their own packaging system that the put together from an off the shelf app. When you are a group at IBM Global Services you can do such things. The project I was on was a fantastic example of automated application deployment, but I am getting off topic a bit.
In the end after Global Services I really didn’t get to play with any software deployment tools again until recently. The jobs I took for a while where not desktop management related, or where too small of an environment for them. Where I am now has grown enormously since when I started. A few years ago we kicked around using Microsoft SMS, but it never got out of the testing phase. I just wouldn’t do what we wanted. We always talked about how awesome ZEN was, but we thought that you needed a Novell network to run it, and we where all Windows so we never gave it much thought.
That was until last year. My friend Joe who is a big into Novell software said you can get ZEN to work just fine with a windows environment. Our interest was peaked. It wasn’t until Scott (another Scott, not me) started that we had the kick in the ass to look at ZEN. he had some experience with it and finally convinced us to seriously look at it. That was earlier this year. I am amazed at the potential of this application. We are in the middle of rolling out client desktops with ZEN and the Novell Application Launcher. Most of the products we use are packaged, and we are working on the rest of them. What is amazing is that we have eDirectory (Novell’s version of Active Directory, or shall I say AD is Microsoft’s version of Novell eDirectory since Novell has had their directory services around for years before Microsoft’s) getting all its information out of our 2003 domain and it really does work!
As I said we are in the middle of a ZEN deployment at one of our offices. it coincides with a new hardware roll out so it makes life easy to enable all new machines to use ZEN. Next up is doing the same roll out in our larger office. We have only cracked the surface with ZEN. Right now we are using the imaging function that works great. We have the remote control feature setup but as of yet I am not sure if we have actually used it on anyone. That makes supporting people between two offices nice since we can have support staff in either office help just about anyone if they have ZEN configured. We also have the packaging part of ZEN down pretty well. That of course was the driving force to use the product in the first place.
Next up is finishing re-deploying desktops and laptops everywhere in the company using ZEN. Then it is on to inventory control and more frequent updates (allot more) of the software suite. Now that we can package and quickly update images we can make changes faster with less down time. it is amazing stuff. I must sound like a Novell poster child? I sing the praises of products that work. Now it wasn’t all sunshine. We had our setbacks, and it took allot longer than we had planned to get as far as we have, but it DOES WORK!!!
It is weird going from mocking Novell, to being a person looking at other products they have going, hey this stuff may be just what I was looking for. And on the flip side I have come to question allot of Microsoft’s moves recently. Not all of them, but it says allot that I am writing this entry on a Macbook Pro, and I find myself looking at linux based applications more and more.
The moral of this entry (yes there is a moral to this) is that I shouldn’t mock any technology because one day it may be just what you need!
Technorati Tags: Desktop Management, Novell, Package Distribution, SMS, ZEN Works
August Recap
So where have I been?  I kind of took the month of August off from writing.  Not sure why.  I did think about writing something.  I even had a few good post ideas, but I never brought myself to sit in front of the computer and write.  There was of course sitting in front of the computer.  Just not any blog entries.
So what happened to me in August?¬† On personal front, not a whole lot.¬† It was dam hot in NYC last month, so I neglected to do more bike riding, but when it is 90 and you are a person who likes it at 65 you tend to avoid outside activity like riding around for miles.¬† I did take a sick day early in the month.¬† I had a bad cold, but Cold-Eeze works like magic.¬† I am not sure why I don’t use that stuff more often.
On the work front allot went on.¬† it wasn’t as bad as the months leading up to our move in July but it is hectic with a¬† big project due date coming up so my team and I need to be ready to assist with it.¬† We also have our own projects going on.¬† I will talk about some of the cool technology stuff in other posts, but Jayson, Rob, and I had to go to our other office for a few days mid month to get a roll out of some new software underway.¬† Then there was the usual problems and some not so usual issues going on throughout the month that keep the stress level high.
I am going to try and make an effort to continue to write something every day or so.  I want to, and I truely like writing before I go to bed.  it helps me unwind.
Sleepless Night
I got woken up at 3AM with a problem with our phone system. Dan seemed to think the voice mail being down the day of the picnic was the end of the world. Turns out it wasn’t voice mail that was screwed up but our AC unit in one computer room was acting up again. Kai ended up sending Ian out to the office at 5AM to get the Unity server up and the room venting so the rest of the equipment didn’t over heat. yet another facilities issue that is not resolved.
My sleep was totally screwed up today because of the early morning calls. They where necissary but my team needs to learn when it is necessary to call 4 times in the middle of the night and when it is ok to send an email update or wait till later.
The Perpetual Upgrade
Since I am perpetually upgrading I am now sporting a new Apple Macbook Pro. Well honestly it is not mine. it is my new work computer. I have given up the small size of my Powerbook 12″ for the power and the Core Duo intel chip of the 15″ Macbook Pro. It is big, but that means the screen is also big. I am hoping not to carry it home every day like I did with the Powerbook. That may make me not care so much about the size. Every so often I swap back and forth between wanting a nice size screen and a small form factor. Neither are perfect, so I never know what I want. I am at a point where I want a nice size screen so I can work off the laptop anywhere.
Technorati Tags: apple, Macbook Pro