The Lone Sysadmin

Dear IBM,

At SHARE a couple years ago you were presenting the new stuff going into Tivoli Storage Manager 5.3. A number of us ganged up on your staff afterwards and told you we need transport encryption. Not total encryption of our data, but just something like SSL so that we could move data on untrusted networks.

You asked why we couldn’t just encrypt all of the data, which is a feature you offer. We didn’t like that because there are a lot of other gotchas there. The biggest gotcha is when our customers forget their encryption key. Yeah, we know, they’re dumb, but it’s a real-world problem. When they forget their TSM node passwords we can just reset them. We can’t do that for the encryption key.

We talked, you listened, and you thought transport encryption, like SSL, was a swell idea.

It isn’t in TSM 5.3.

Could you add it? I still really need it, and I’m guessing that the ten other guys in the swarm after the presentation still need it, too.

Thanks.

…Bob

So I’ve spent more time playing with Omea. I love some of the details, like the setting to mark an item read once it’s been displayed for 2 seconds. I don’t know how many times I’ll errantly click something, or scroll through, and not having things marked as “read” is nice. The use of favicon.ico is nice, too — it helps me visually sort the blogs. Plus the app looks nice. Vyacheslav Lukianov from JetBrains posted a comment here yesterday, which I think is really cool. It’s now obvious to me that they’re watching to see what people think of Omea, so I thought it fair to follow up with my impressions after the first 24 hours.

I was going to write about Omea not wanting to update anything, but then I noticed that it had a red exclamation point in the bottom status bar, which seemed to indicate things weren’t all good. A simple restart took care of that. I didn’t look carefully at the errors. I’ll worry about it if it gets weird again later. I’m always willing to give an app the benefit of the doubt, especially when it just got done indexing stuff that was imported from another app. I hadn’t restarted the application at all at the point where this happened, and it’s been flawless since. I didn’t notice if there were any other indications that there was something wrong. A change in the system tray icon might be a good way to indicate that something is wrong.

I did find a bug, which I reported via their web site. Cancelling out of the “Select Category” dialog causes the application to hang (Edit View->Add a category exception->”New” in the Select Category dialog->Cancel->dead…). Undoubtably just an oversight, as users probably define a category if they go in there. :-)

I absolutely love the custom feed views. I sort my feeds into two categories, which I’ve made into “feed folders” in Omea. The categories for me are: “I will read your blog every day” and “Your blog is annoying in some way that makes me not want to deal with it except when I have time.” Blogs in the second category usually have so much content per day that it’s a full time job to read them, or sometimes it’s a blog that doesn’t post the full content of their articles in the feed. If you write a blog that makes people go to your website, um, stop it. Or figure out a way to put your ads in the feed.

I really like that I can make a custom feed view that lets me exclude the feeds I don’t want to track on a daily basis. I just wish I could select a feed folder, rather than having to specifically exclude every feed I don’t want. Now, when I add another feed to the “annoying” list I’ll have to update all my views. Not the worst thing in the world, but if the user is grouping stuff let them filter on the groups. :-) Vyacheslav, if you’re reading this, that’s a feature request. :-)

One of the first things I did was unload all the plugins except the RSS feed one. I also customized it so that it would open all URLs in my OS default web browser (Firefox set to open new windows as tabs). And I set the default update interval for everything to be 1 hour.

So, after 24 hours of using it, I’ve concluded that this isn’t a feed reader my mother will like. However, it is a feed reader that lets me organize all the information I get, and despite my mother I love it. Besides, my mother isn’t into blogs. Yet. :-) (Actually, I bet she would be if I found a quilting blog for her). Good job, JetBrains!

Dear all OS vendors: Provide DVD images.

Seriously. Everybody you care about has a DVD burner. Everything has a DVD drive. Well, almost everything. Some older equipment might not, so yeah, you’ll have to keep the CD ISOs around. But I hate burning five discs when I could just burn one DVD. I hate keeping track of five discs when I could just keep track of one DVD. If customers don’t have a DVD drive, suggest that they spend $25 and get one.

Now, if you’re one of the vendors that doesn’t even provide ISOs to your customers, CD or DVD, here’s my message: die, die, die. Take IBM, for example. IBM, technology giant, hasn’t figured out that letting customers download AIX in ISO form will ease their support pain. Internet? What’s that? About three years ago I was part of a panel at an IBM function about software distribution. The only thing I wanted was ISOs. Here’s how that went:

“What would you most like to see improved about software distribution?”

“I’d like to see IBM follow Sun’s lead and let customers download ISO images of AIX.”

“Can you explain what an ISO image is?”

“Sure — the standard for a CD is ISO 9660. You can take a CD and make a file out of it, and it’s known as an ISO image, after the standard. You can use standard software tools to turn that file back into a working CD.”

“With your idea, how would customers get these files?”

“Um, they’d download them from your web site.”

“To make these CDs, what would people do?”

“They’d use a product like Roxio’s EZ CD Creator, or Nero, or any number of tools that can burn CDs.”

“What do you mean ‘burn CDs’?”

“Burning is the term for creating a new CD.”

“What if customers didn’t have this software?”

“Then they wouldn’t take advantage of this. However, nearly every tech has a CD burner in their desktop computer by now.”

“Does this require a special device?”

“Well, technically, yes, but nearly all PCs have been shipping with these devices for a few years now, including PCs from IBM.”

“We cannot require that people buy a device to use our OS.”

“That’s not what I’m saying. I’m saying that all your customers probably have all this equipment already and it’s much more convenient for them than waiting for your software people to ship a box of CDs to them.”

“So, how would customers get the data, if it’s in file format?”

“They’d download it, like off your web site.”

“Oh, we can’t do that. Our licenses prohibit that.”

“Yeah, but aren’t they YOUR licenses?”

“A CD is 650 MB — those files would be pretty large, wouldn’t they?”

“The term ‘large’ is changing quite rapidly. It used to be that a megabyte was large. Then 10 MB. If 650 MB is large it isn’t going to be for long.”

“What if customers don’t have the same high-speed connections you do? How would they participate?”

“Um, they wouldn’t. I’m not saying you should stop mailing CDs to people, just provide an alternative.”

“Well, what if someone wasn’t licensed to run the OS, and they downloaded it?”

“So secure it so only people with a support contract can download it.”

“Well, what if they have the files stored on their PCs and their support contract expires?”

“So what? What happens if they have the CDs you sent them and the same thing happens?”

“What if they try running these ISO files on a different type of hardware?”

“Tell me what other hardware can run AIX. You can’t be serious. And besides, who cares? It isn’t like it’ll be supported.”

“I’m pretty sure our customers wouldn’t really understand how to convert the files into CDs.”

“Don’t take this the wrong way, but I’m pretty sure they do. Especially if they’re also customers of Red Hat or Sun Microsystems. Red Hat and Sun let customers download their OS to run on their hardware. You can download it on your own time, you can get quarterly OS update media instantly, and you can store the files so that if you need a CD you just make it on demand. If you want to check this out spend a couple hundred dollars on a license for Red Hat Enterprise Linux and check it out.”

At this point the moderator cut me off, ostensibly because we were out of time. It’s now 2006 and IBM still doesn’t have downloadable ISO images of their OSes. My prediction: Sun and Red Hat customers will be downloading their stuff in whatever format succeeds HD-DVD before IBM will even think about this.

Internet? What’s that?

Dear VMware,

I’ve noticed that your flagship product, ESX Server, doesn’t support Red Hat Enterprise Linux 4, Fedora, Solaris x86, or FreeBSD 5.x. RHEL 4 was released on February 14th, 2005. FreeBSD 5.0 was released in January 2003, with releases of 5.1, 5.2, 5.3, 5.4, and 6.0 spread evenly until today. Fedora has been out forever, it seems. Solaris x86 10 is pretty recent, but with all of the talk last summer of Sun and VMware teaming up I was expecting something to happen.

I am mostly concerned with support for Red Hat’s products. Back in the summer of 2005 you told me that support for RHEL 4 would come in ESX Server 3.0, which, at the time, was estimated to be done in time for VMworld. This fall you told me that ESX Server 3.0 would be out in Q1 of 2006. Now you’ve sent me email saying that ESX Server 3.0 will be out in July 2006 (yeah, first half, I know how that works).

Seventeen months is a long time to wait for support for a commercial OS. Three years is a little long to wait for any OS, even if it is open source. You don’t support Linux distributions like Fedora or Gentoo Linux at all, and you don’t support Solaris x86 on ESX Server.

I’ve been really happy with ESX Server, VMotion, and VirtualCenter, but I cannot wait until you get around to supporting the OSes I’d like to consolidate. I have customers and I have things to consolidate, and Xen is looking pretty sexy. Please make support for some of this available in an interim release.

Thank you.

Dear IBM, EMC, and Hitachi,

Your storage virtualization devices are pretty neat. They let me buy lesser disk arrays and treat them as a pile of disks. They let me have different classes of storage and shuffle things around without the hosts ever knowing. They let me add cache to my storage architecture to make things even faster, and do intelligent caching in front of the arrays. And they let me do remote mirroring for storage arrays that wouldn’t do it otherwise. Sure, some of you use weird, proprietary, hard to maintain approaches like embedding the virtualization in the SAN, but that’s okay.

From time to time I need to do maintenance on my storage arrays. Because I use EMC disk arrays I end up always having to take a complete outage on the array, but all arrays have maintenance that is best done without I/O load. While your virtualization devices maintain a remote mirror, I still have to take an outage to cut over to the copy. I usually choose just to take an outage for a little while and get the work done. If you’d just make your devices capable of actively using a mirror my servers wouldn’t know the difference. Just like a RAID controller in a server, I’d like to pull the plug on an array and have the other array pick up the slack. You could even do neat RAID 1 things like spreading the read I/O out between the active copies, or keep track of changes during an outage and intelligently resync the copies afterwards. Call it SAN RAID or something. While you’re at it go all out and let people do SAN RAID 5. I bet there’s some crazy out there with a ton of data that would love to do that.

Wouldn’t that be cool? I bet you could sell some more devices that way. I’d buy a few.

I’m sitting here pondering why I drank so much on the eve of New Year’s Eve. What better way to pass the time while the aspirin kicks in than manually syncing my iTunes libraries?

Um, no. You know, if there’s one thing I wish iTunes had it’s the ability to sync the libraries across multiple computers. I have four machines I do work from, all of which have iTunes on them. There’s my home PC, a custom-built machine running Windows XP. There’s my work PC, a Dell running Windows Server 2003. There’s my work Mac, a dual G4 running 10.4, and then there’s my laptop, a Dell running Windows XP. Apple already lets me authorize all of them for playback of my stuff, so why not carry it a little further and keep the libraries in sync for me? Not just one way, either, but multiple-master. That way when I buy a song at work it’ll just magically appear on my laptop, and then my home machine. When I rip a CD at home it’ll migrate to my other libraries.

It should also sync the metadata, too, so when I’m bored sitting in an airport and I rate all of my songs, those ratings appear in all the libraries later. Ditto for the last play times and play counts, including synchronization with my iPods, so that if I play Imogen Heap’s “Hide and Seek” 485 times on my drive to Minneapolis all of my libraries will know that and increment themselves. If I create a playlist on one machine, have it appear on the others, too. I don’t even care if the RIAA-mentality one-way iPod file sync is still around, just go both ways with the metadata. If there is a conflict between devices let me establish priorities, so my ratings on my iPod win over the ratings on my work PC.

In short, if I have authorized iTunes using valid credentials all of my iTunes instances and iPods should act as one, maintaining copies of the data on discrete PCs for backup and mobility purposes.

I could rsync the libraries together. I could sync them all to my main Linux box running Samba and then sync each off of there. All of that would require a significant effort to ensure that the music files and the metadata stayed in sync, and that I had a record in the library for each file. I’d have to reimport everything, though, which trashes my custom playlists. I could rewrite the iTunes Music Library.xml file but I’d have to reimport it again. That’s what syncOtunes does, but only between two libraries, and a reimport isn’t seamless. I could get the libraries all in sync on one machine and then copy everything, including the iTunes Library.itl file, to the other machines, but then I don’t have multiple-master capabilities anymore. I want seamless, Apple magic, the kind of “holy crap it just did the right thing” sort of feature Apple is famous for.

Apple, I know this is a doozy of a request, but please save me from library management hell!