After a bit of discussion, I got approval to go to the PICC Conference in Jersey. I’m looking to jump on the storage and NAS/SAN workshops. I little knowledge of IPv6, so I’m going to jump on that session as well. I haven’t gone to a conference in at least half a decade, so I’m looking forward to this.
I’ll probably be the only person who admins a “Novell” network at the conference. 
My wife and I picked up a couple of Droids yesterday. Her phone was broken and mine was up for the new in two. Since they are currently 2 for 1, we took the jump.
This is my first real smart phone. I like it so far. There are a ton of options. I can see why this platform as presented(the normal android interface), wouldn’t be ideal for every day users, and really pointed towards people who aren’t afraid to mess around with their phone.
I like the Gmail integration. The touch screen works better than I thought it would and I have no problems with the on screen keyboard. If I’m doing a bit more typing, I’ll slide the physical keyboard out. Wireless on a phone is great as I’m normally around a wireless AP when at work or at home. The 3G will work fine in between.
There are a couple of things that bug me a bit. Novell is still working on their sync tool for modern phone to replace the GroupWise Mobile server. Outside of the SMTP and IMAP combo, there’s no good way to get your GroupWise mail on the phone. The default GW8 webaccess interface doesn’t work with the default browser or the dolphin browser. You have to switch it to basic mode to open mail. Not that aesthetics are everything, but the basic mode in webaccess is just that, BASIC. For now, I’ll just be forwarding my Zenoss and other SMTP alerts to my gmail account.
I downloaded a task killer tool which I find myself using often. I’m not sure how much I really need to be using it, but to keep the battery from getting sucked down, I’m using it. That’s a bit annoying and takes me back to the old Mac operating system where you had to manage your RAM manually for each application. It’s not the end of the world, but I guess it’s the price you pay for multitasking.
The old wordpress theme was getting a bit stale. I’m mucking around with some other looks.
We recently purchased 100+ Lenovo Thinkpad SL500 units. We ran into a major issue with a large chunk of them having issues connecting to our LAN via the wired Realtek NIC. It turns out there are a couple of fixes, none of which include a driver or BIOS update. Either the IO card has to be completely replaced, or a capacitor has to be soldered onto the IO card.
The symptoms are that when you are on AC power, the NIC will connect at 10/mbps and half duplex. If you force the switchport to 100 full and the computer to 100 full, the unit simply won’t connect at all. The funny part is, if you run the laptop on battery, there are no issues.
Dealing with the tier 1 techs was a bit of a headache. The high level techs at Lenovo have identified the issue but I guess it hasn’t worked its way down to the front line support. Tier 1 support actually wanted me to return all of the laptops because we didn’t purchase on site support. This was the first time I’ve ever yelled at any support person on the phone, which I generally don’t do because most of the issues I have aren’t their fault at all, but I lost it this time. Finally after about 5 business days of constant badgering and being slowly pushed up the support tree, I finally got on the phone with someone who could make things happen. And they did make things happen, FAST. I was up against the wall to deploy these units and they flew a tech out that night to start working on the issue.
The issue was completely over the tier 1 support and I can’t really blame them as they probably don’t often have someone call with more than a 100 busted laptops. I can blame them for not moving up the tree quick enough, but in the end, the issue was resolved. I’m impressed that Lenovo didn’t leave me in the rain and are sticking by their product and their mistake. Too bad software companies don’t follow suit when they release shit software and charge hundreds of dollars to even talk to an engineer.
A while back I posted something about iScsi SANS. What I’d really like to see, once all is said and done, is to be able to virtualize almost every server we have. I’ve been eyeing up the Lefthand redundant storage solution but the price is always an issue. Up until recently, the likelyhood of moving forward with virtualizing our servers and storage has been out of the question due to funding. Now, I’ve seen a small crack of light from the door accidently being opened up a crack so I’m just going to pretend it’s going to open and I’ll be showered with budget numbers and blank purchase orders.
I just noticed a post by a netapp employee, Dave. I haven’t thought of running VMWare over NFS to a NAS. To me, without looking at pricing*. Any thoughts on this?
*Sales people, when someone from a K-12 Public School District calls for pricing, it’s not because they’re ready to buy. We’re calling because if we can’t afford it, we’re not buying it. I don’t even bother getting too deep into a possible project without knowing the pricing because that’s the bottom line regardless of features. To the bosses, it’s as simple as why and how much? When I see “call for pricing”, I cringe. When someone tells me I have to sign an NDA to get pricing, goodbye.
I’ve always been a fan of web based message boards since UBB came out many moons ago. Doing a quick google showed a few forums out there, some part of bigger boards like ars, and some that have seemed to be pretty dead.
If there isn’t anything dedicated to sys admins our there that is active, I wonder if there would be any desire to see one here?
Linuxscrew.com posted a nice Cisco cheat sheet list:
http://www.linuxscrew.com/2008/10/10/15-must-have-cisco-cheat-sheets/
Matt over at http://standalone-sysadmin.blogspot.com reminded me of http://www.theydailywtf.com. If you’re in Sys/Network admining or are a developer, you’ll get more than a chuckle out of this website.
Opensuse 11 was officially released a couple weeks ago. I’ve install it onto my work laptop. Overall I like the distro. Compiz works well right out of the box, at least with my hardware. I even got the wireless to work, sort of. Unfortunatly, the network manager applet doesn’t seem to work all of the time. When I boot up, the laptop might or might not attach to the wireless network. There’s no ryhme or reason why either, it seems completely random. The applet also doesn’t seem to like it when I try to delete and add the wireless network connection profile. It tells me I need to use YaST. Ok then. This causes another problem to become apparent. Whenever I try to make a change to a NIC, wired or wireless, a software update process tries to run. And in my case, if I’m mucking with network configurations, chances are I’m not connected to the network. Since I did a “network” install, it needs to access the internet to run the updater. Someone screwed that one up. Wireless continues to be the only barrier that keeps me from using any Linux distro and going back to Windows. Windows support for wireless still beats the hell out of Linux in general. I’m not even refering to hardware support but rather the ability to actually connect to a wireless network and possibly provide errors when a connection failed.
I’m getting a new boss. I’m not entirely sure what to expect. My fear is that the person will come in and start making unilateral technical decisions based soley on past history(exchange, active directory, sharepoint!!!1one). Conversely, this person might be forward thinking and push for some things which I think would help with our server infrastructure. Mainly things with SAN and “virtual servers” within the same context.
I convinced the boss to let me replace my frankensteined hp proliant server turned workstation and my tired laptop with a new laptop and dock combo. I opted for a Lenovo Thinkpad T61. I had a few requirements. First of all, I wanted something that was durable, and the Thinkpads are known for their sturdy construction. Second, I wanted to go with something with the intel VT chip so I could run Xen and use the laptop as a mobile learning lab. I want to start playing around with OES2 ad in particular, the virtualization pieces. That was impossible with any spare equipment we have lying around. Finally, I needed at least 3gb to properly run the virtual machines I was planning on running. My only possible mistake was that I opted for the 7200rpm 100gb drive. That might not end up being enough in the long run, but it’s good enough for now.
The laptop came in early this week. I now have three operating systems installed on it. Windows XP for my day to day work, opensuse 10.3 for a testbed with a Linux workstation, and SLES 10 for my Xen host. The laptop is nice and quick. The build quality seems very good. I’ve had it on my lap for an hour and it’s only gotten warm. My last laptop would literally burn my legs(it had a P4 chip) . The construction is also very solid; when I lift the unit up with one hand, it flexes less than any laptop I’ve handled before. Thinkpad touchpads and keyboards have always been among my favorites, and the T61 is no worse. The integrated intel 965gm graphics chip is good enough to run Xgl/Compiz on opensuse, which is spiffy.
My next step will be to start reading the OES2 docs and get my hands dirty…
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