Links for February 12th, 2011

by

Tech Field Day – Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia The Tech Field Day Wikipedia entry! Heck yeah! If you’re a vendor working with Tech Field Day populate your own page, would you? stothard Flashcards My 2011 resolutions include actually getting certified on VMware software. Saw this via @jasonboche, saving for post-VCP4 work. 🙂 Ze Ultimate LUN path dead report – Hypervisor.fr The ultimate dead path report — this looks cool. Blog post is in French, let Chrome translate for you. E-mails from an Asshole “One minute you are enjoying a bowl of cereal, and the next you are fighting off attackers with this deadly and disguised weapon.” Some of this stuff is great. I Am Better Than Your Kids Old school …

Read More

Understanding Blame

by

On Tuesday I posted about how virtualization teams are the one-stop shop for blame. There was some excellent commentary on it, from people who represent all areas of IT. Two things became clear: Everybody blames everybody. App admins blame virtualization admins. Virtualization blames storage and networking. Networking blames virtualization and storage. Storage blames virtualization. Blame isn’t unique to one area of IT, or even to IT among the human race. Nobody likes to think that they’ve messed up, and nobody likes to admit an error, so it’s easier to point the finger at others. Heck, often people don’t even know they’ve made an error, so it’s got to be someone else’s problem. A subset of comments I received, some privately, …

Read More

Blame

by

The idea of the “good old days” is usually false, especially in IT. With one exception, there hasn’t been a better time to be in IT or working with technology. The exception is virtualization and blame. Back in the day it used to be the storage guy’s fault, directly, when the storage was slow. Or the network guy’s problem. Or the app admin, with their inefficient apps. Maybe it was the guy who runs the LDAP servers. Maybe it was the OS vendor, or the hardware vendor shipped us a lemon. Now, though, it seems that it’s always the virtualization guy’s fault. For everything. Virtualization has turned IT into a nanny state. Because virtual environments sit between applications and nearly …

Read More

Labels Should Only List Properties of That Particular Object

by

Labels should only list properties of the object to which they’re affixed. This may mean some education about the hierarchy of things, but, with very few exceptions, putting a label on one object with data that belongs to another object is a recipe for problems later. “What problems?” you ask. Well, at the least you’re increasing the amount of work you need to do when you change something. Got IP addresses on your cable labels? Add an IP to a server and you need to change the cable’s label, too, otherwise you have incomplete documentation. Same thing with DNS names, too. Or application information. Incomplete and incorrect data on labels leads to assumptions, and assumptions lead to outages, problems, and …

Read More

Fibre Channel over Token Ring Presentation @ WI VMUG

by

I made a presentation to the Wisconsin VMware Users’ Group on Tuesday, January 18, 2011 on the Fibre Channel over Token Ring Alliance and its role in the future of the technology. It was short and it turned out pretty well, and I have to thank all the attendees, as well as Rod Gabriel, for laughing at the right spots and having a good sense of humor. We need more humor between vendor presentations, for sure. The notes for the slides are below each. I am not aware that a video was made, but if you know of one leave me a comment. Thanks! Put simply, FCoTR is the best features from two proven technologies, married into the storage protocol …

Read More

A Compendium of Concerns About ESXi

by

Over the last few months I’ve been cataloging the complaints I’ve heard about the deprecation of VMware ESX, in favor of ESXi. I’ve been running 100% ESXi since shortly after the vSphere 4.1 release. In the words of Samuel L. Jackson as Jules in Pulp Fiction, “well, allow me to retort!” “I have software installed on the Console OS, and I need to keep doing that.” ESX wasn’t really a Linux box, it was an appliance. Sure, in a lot of ways it looked like a Linux box, but it was missing a lot of useful packages, with no maintainable way to add them. Yes, you could copy the RPMs from Red Hat Enterprise Linux, but then you’d have software …

Read More

How to Configure Remote syslogd on Red Hat/CentOS 5

by

It’s fairly easy to configure syslogd on one host to accept syslog messages from other hosts. This is useful in normal system administration, to keep logs off the original system in case of a security breach that might compromise them, as well as for systems like VMware ESXi which don’t store logs locally due to their architecture. This assumes a basic level of familiarity with Linux, particularly the Red Hat types of distributions (Red Hat Enterprise Linux, Fedora, CentOS, Scientific Linux, Oracle Enterprise Linux, etc.). The concepts are likely the same for other distributions. I used Red Hat Enterprise Linux 5 and I’ll assume you are able to handle the provisioning of a similar host for your purposes. I also …

Read More

Dear Microsoft: One Central Update Framework

by

Dear Microsoft, I really like Windows 7. A lot. It’s most of what I was looking for in Windows Vista, and a worthy successor to Windows XP. You left one big thing out, though. I have, beyond Windows itself, at least 28 applications that automatically check for updates: Adobe Acrobat, Adobe AIR, Adobe Flash, Adobe Photoshop, Adobe Illustrator, Adobe Lightroom, Apple iTunes, Apple Airport, Apple MobileMe, Apple Safari, Autopano Giga, Piriform CCleaner, Piriform Defraggler, Dell Client System Update, Evernote, Google Chrome, Metageek inSSIDer, Oracle Java, Last.fm, LogMeIn Hamachi, Microsoft Security Essentials, Mozilla Firefox, Mozilla Thunderbird, Skype, Tweetdeck, uTorrent, VanDyke SecureCRT, and VLC Media Player. My life is one big parade of pop-ups, warnings, toolbar installation offers, and auto-updaters. Would I …

Read More

How To Create and Measure NTFS & ext3 Disk Fragmentation

by

From time to time I need to test things related to disk fragmentation, like the performance of fragmented versus unfragmented disks, or how well a disk defragmenter works. Rather than trying to find machines with fragmented disks I decided to generate fragmentation on my own. It’s actually quite easy to generate a fragmented disk on NTFS or ext3 filesystems. Fragmentation happens when you don’t have much free space on disk and a filesystem is forced to use non-contiguous blocks to fulfill requests. So we just encourage that behavior by filling the drive with a bunch of small files, then freeing some space by truncating those files to a smaller size. Then we fill the free space again by growing those …

Read More

links for 2010-12-21

by

Scott Hanselman – Configuring two wireless routers with one SSID (network name) at home for free roaming A lot of people know how this works, but a lot don't, either. I've been running with two APs for a long time, one on each end of the house, with the same SSID, on channels 1 and 11. Works well.

+ More Posts +