Links for March 7th, 2011

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Debian Is the Most Important Linux – Slashdot “Without Debian we are nothing. Debian is the most influential and important Linux, and is unique for being the largest, oldest, 100% non-commercial community-driven distro. ‘…just under 63% of all distributions now being developed come ultimately from Debian. By comparison, 50 (15%) are based on Fedora or Red Hat, 28 (9%) on Slackware, and 12 (4%) on Gentoo.’” These conclusions are ridiculous. Other possible conclusions are that the Debian community is so f’ed up that it’s seriously fragmented. Also might be the case that Debian is so flawed that people have to fork it and fix it all the time. Hard to tell from these stats. Petition Cisco for Educational IOS License …

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The Easiest Way To Update A Dell Server's Firmware

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With the advent of VMware ESXi there are fewer and fewer good ways to update your Dell PowerEdge system’s firmware, seeing as you can’t just run the System Update Utility from the console OS anymore. Making things more difficult, I think I’ve seen every failure mode Dell’s iDRAC has to offer, from the inability to log into a local repository via FTP when the password has special characters to persistent errors like “Return code mismatch on iDracWrapper.efi” that completely block the updating process. My journey might have been full of pain and thoughts of other vendors but it’s yielded what I think is the single best way of updating Dell firmware: using the Dell Repository Manager to create a bootable, …

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Xangati Webinar Tomorrow – Still Have Some Room

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If you’ve been thinking about blame in your organization, looking at Xangati’s tools (or wanting some good reasons why you should look at them), and want to be part of a good conversation, you should join Brian, Nathanael, and myself for tomorrow’s “Stop the Virtualization Blame Game” webinar. We’re going to talk a lot about how blame happens, why all the different silos within IT feel left out, and what to do about it. The turnout is looking great, but there’s still some room for more. Sign up now! It starts at 10 AM Pacific / 11 AM Mountain / 12 PM Central / 1 PM Eastern.

Links for February 21st, 2011

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The Geekery » Nagios, web scraping, and PHP as an agent Monitoring is tough, especially if you’re trying to catch errors in web pages. However, with a little bit of scripting fu you can get a workable solution together, and Mr. Angliss has some nice examples. Google Font Directory Web fonts you can embed in your site — very cool. I’ve been pondering a redo of my blog theme, and font selections are very important. For example, I want my blog to look the same on all platforms and I need code to be code. NOAA’s Geophysical Data Center – Geomagnetic Data Important for orienteering & any navigation by compass, and it does change over time (making my ancient chart …

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Excuses

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So I’ve been writing a lot on Blame, Understanding Blame, and Preventing Blame over the last two weeks, and my thoughts have inspired some good discussion. Vendors have even gotten into it, with Xangati and I teaming up for a webinar next Thursday, February 24th to talk about blame and ways to deal with it. The focus will be mostly on different aspects of blame, and there will be a brief product demo of the excellent Xangati Management Dashboard at the end. If you liked their free version it’s a chance to see the full thing and be part of a good discussion. Lots of good reasons to attend so go sign up now!. All that aside, I feel that …

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Reality vs. CxOs

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I made a comment last week on Twitter in response to an HP presenter’s topic of IT Sprawl, at Tech Field Day: “Just because the CxO doesn’t understand what all those servers do doesn’t mean it is sprawl.” I’m not really going to elaborate much more on sprawl right now. What I do want to point out is a little synchronicity in Stephen O’Grady’s post, “Not Dead Yet: The Rise and Fall and Rise of Java,” partly because it’s a good read, partly because I love to hate Java, and partly because it has one of the best Venn diagrams I’ve seen yet this year: I’ve always liked what the RedMonk guys have to say, because they’re developer-focused, and I’ve …

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Links for February 15th, 2011

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YouTube – All Your Base Are Belong To Us @BlackHatHQ reminds us that February 15th, 2011 is the 10 year anniversary of “All Your Base Are Belong To Us.” Managing VMware Tools advanced options: PowerCLI If you aren’t familiar with PowerCLI and are managing a vSphere installation you should make yourself familiar. Scripts like these are invaluable for making installation-wide changes. Thomas Hawk Digital Connection » Blog Archive » Former Flickr Engineer Attacks SmugMug CEO on Blog Flickr is dying along with Yahoo!. If you have content you care about up on Flickr you may want to ensure you have a local copy. iPhone passcode bypassed by security researchers If an attacker has physical access to the system they will …

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Preventing Blame

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I’ve been writing lately about Blame and my attempt at Understanding Blame. I guess I didn’t mean to turn this into a miniseries but there’s been a lot of interest. Including from Xangati – it turns out they’ve been talking about this same topic, in the context of their products, of course, but they’ve got some really cool stuff going on with their Management Dashboards and free tools. I’m glad others think so, too. Though I don’t know if Sean Clark’s calling them “Skynet” constitutes a compliment, though. 🙂 At least the end of civilization will be well monitored. Anyhow, they’ve asked me to help host a webinar on the topic, a conversation & forum on blame, why it happens, …

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vSoup #4 – Big Fat Pipes (With Me!)

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For the first time in a week I plugged my iPhone in to sync, and it’s pulling down what I think might be my first official appearance on a podcast, on vSoup episode #4. I met Ed, Christian, and Chris at VMworld Europe last year, and I have to confess that when they asked me to sit down with them for this episode I was so excited about it that I put it in my calendar wrong. I appeared online, ready to chat, exactly 24 hours too early. Thankfully Ed was diplomatic about it: “Dude, it’s tomorrow.” You can check out what’s being talked about in each episode (and see a great photo of me) over at vSoup.net, and the podcast …

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VMware vSphere 4.1 Update 1

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I don’t know about you folks, but I’ve been waiting for vSphere 4.1 Update 1 for a while. So has my BCS support guy, Mike, since I keep opening up cases on things that are fixed in it. These last few weeks have seemed quite repetitive like that. By the way, none of the problems I’ve reported are listed in the release notes, which reaffirms my thoughts on all software patches: lots of stuff gets fixed in each one, but very few things make it into the public documentation. VMware tends towards less information for releases, leaning more towards security fix information than functionality fixes. Certainly they’re not as bad as Apple, with their terse “fixes and performance updates” summaries. …

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