The Lone Sysadmin

Microsoft stopped selling Windows XP Professional and Home yesterday. For as much as people complained about XP in the beginning it evolved into an OS that was solid and consistent.

Sure, Vista has succeeded XP in just about every area, but Vista is a design and usability nightmare. The Network control panels are a great example of the half-assedness of Vista. Especially anything having to do with IPv6. Or, seen another way, I find it a lot more difficult to talk my mother through things on her computer now that she’s running Vista.

Even the six different ways to shut a Vista machine down are confusing, and how hard is that to do right?

Goodbye, old friend. Our seven years together wasn’t perfect, but we sure did get a lot of stuff done.

You’d think someone would have come up with a solution to this by now:

Perhaps the solution is, instead of splitting the primary monitor, split the SECONDARY monitor and put the image there. Having not messed with big displays like this I have no idea, but it seems like there isn’t a lot of thought going into the screen many thousands of people are looking at.

I saw that at Summerfest in Milwaukee yesterday. I was over there to see Michael Franti & Spearhead, as well as Jack’s Mannequin. As a lighting designer I tend to watch the lights during shows, and the addition of a hazer to the stages, and a bunch more moving lights, makes for a good show. Franti is always a good time, Jack’s Mannequin sounds a lot different than in the studio but their energy is incredible, and I also stumbled into Ryan Shaw’s performance. That guy has an amazing voice, and proves to me that while I’m not usually a big R&B fan there’s parts of every genre I enjoy. Good beer, decent weather at the end (cool, not raining), and great crowds made for an excellent time, even if I did get home at 2 AM.

P.S. Sorry for the crappy photos, I left my camera at home and the iPhone doesn’t cut it.

“What, you just sit around all day browsing Wikipedia?”

“Excuse me?”

“What are you looking at in Wikipedia?”

“The article on X-Men.”

“Tough day at work, I suppose.”

“Um, I’m trying to figure out a naming scheme for the 10 new servers I’m bringing in. That okay with you?”

“Oh, sorry.”

Just because you think I’m not doing work doesn’t mean you’re right.

(also, great site for naming schemes: namingschemes.com)

My friend Terry’s slightly unorthodox take on cloud computing:

To hell with cloud computing. Clouds are puffy crap that float lazily by. Is that what you want out of your service provider? Just floating by without a care in the world?

It is time for tornado computing. Or hurricane computing. Real wrath of God type stuff. I want an architecture that knocks me off my feet, whips my apps around and hurls them half way through a tree. I don’t want my data intact for some script kiddie to steal. I want it like a frog in a blender; unrecognizably processed with a taste only I care for.

So to that end I am setting half of my air handlers to “Freakin’ Steaming,” the other half to “Ice Storm,” and locking the doors until the screaming stops. By this time tomorrow you should have some form of cloud computing in the data center, maybe a squall somewhere over the mainframe if you’re lucky. Viva La Revolucion!

Interestingly enough, that pretty much sums up my feelings, too. Service providers don’t seem to address the DR, legal, privacy, and security concerns that corporations have, don’t seem to care, and even go so far as a Microsoft rep telling a coworker of mine that “it’s no big deal as every bit of information about you is practically out there already.” Given that sort of attitude how can I do anything but build my own cloud?

Even though PeopleSoft is part of Oracle (and possibly subject to their anti-VMware support policies) our apps guys checked to see if VMware was an option. As it turns out, PeopleSoft solution 200955472 entitled “Does Peoplesoft support VMWare” has the answer: yes.

PeopleSoft certifies our products (PeopleTools and EnterpriseOne Tools) on certain operating systems (including Windows 2000*, Windows Server 2003, Red Hat Enterprise Linux, etc.), not on specific hardware configurations. Therefore, as long as a customer configures VMWare virtual machines with supported operating systems, we will treat them as though they are independent (non-virtual) systems and provide full support. Our support team will attempt to resolve issues using our own environments with the same operating system. We will treat VMWare virtual machines in a similar manner to any other non-virtual hardware system. That is, we will likely configure independent systems with a supported operating system for web/app/database servers and attempt to replicate a problem. In the event that we cannot replicate an issue on separate systems using the same OS, we will look to EMC/VMWare or the OS vendor to address the problem and will work with them to find a resolution.

It’s cool how just a few words can remove a column of hardware in my data center. Thanks PeopleSoft!

I just bought a new red ink pad for my big rubber ICKY stamp. Hours of fun, wandering the building stamping things. Problem is, everybody knows it’s mine.

Am I missing something here, or is this one hell of a typo? Stealed? I found this last night in the FedEx Kinko’s “What’s your sign?” brochure, while waiting for them to make easy work of my huge icky print job. Click on the image for a larger version.

Maybe the Kinkos guy in the photo is actually taking the banner away from the customer. If it is just a typo maybe the fix could also remove the lame cliches.

So I grabbed a copy of Tripwire’s ConfigCheck for ESX and ran it on one of my test ESX Servers. Sure enough, it found a bunch of defaults that haven’t been changed, and has made recommendations.

Now my question is: is ESX 3.5 an appliance or a host OS? Do I actually want to make the recommended changes? Will it mess up something in the future when a patch from VMware assumes something about my environment that isn’t true because I’ve changed it? Exactly how much do I want to go messing around with things like NTP settings when the recommended way to configure NTP is through VirtualCenter?

I look forward to a time when ESX 3i is on par with ESX 3.5, but in the interim do I change things to gain a little security and run the risk of problems later? Is ESX a Linux distribution or is it an appliance?