Sorry for lack of updates, lots of stuff

Have been in Geneva for the last 3 weeks now. Been busy over here getting things in order and making sure we are ready for a major product launch over here. I am also working on some staffing and support issues for here in Europe.

Our CEO was just on CNBC, and he did an awesome job, yay Mitch!
http://www.cnbc.com/id/15840232?video=1169688483&play=1

Upgraded our Vcenter servers up to Vsphere 4. The upgrade of the servers themselves went well, but I tried to do a hypervisor upgrade, which failed. I have a case open with Vmware on the upgrade. I'm also have some strange connectivity issue on one of my physical systems. The new product is very cool, the new alarming system is a much needed improvement. Overall very happy with it so far. I am looking forward to testing the performance with the new hypervisor.

Some cool stuff my team has done. Integrated all of our linux boxes with winbind to AD. Its much easier to admin them and control access now, very good stuff. We can give developers granular access to QA and Dev systems now.

We are also building a syslog infrastructure which is similar to the one I built in my previous company. Essentially its a syslog-ng frontend to splunk, where we can forward and log streams as needed. The cool thing is that my sharp engineers at work are figuring it out on their own and learning new stuff in the process. This is the kind of thing that makes doing infrastructure and systems cool.

Working with Microsoft on a spooler issue thats been annoying, printers are so fussy.

We closed a deal with HP to get a bunch of new software. My team will be working on implementing some new technologies to add onto our existing HP investments. We currently use HP Performance Center, HP Quality Center, and HP Quicktest Pro. We added more users into Performance Center. We also puchased HP Real User Monitor (RUM, which requires BAC... I thought I got away from BAC at my last gig). We also will be implementing HP Diagnostics for Java, which should be a very useful tool for us leading up to our new product release.

That should do it for now :)

In Geneva

Just trying to wrap up a few things, and get some more help on my team here. With the language barrier I face in Geneva, meeting and spending time face to face really helps a lot. I'm headed up to France for my brothers wedding for a few days, then a week back in the office and headed home. I will post more info on my trip and some details of the projects and such I have going on when I am back (or flying across the ocean and not sleeping). Been working long days, and long nights. I have been here almost a week now, but it seems like 3 days. I miss home :)

Production Java Profilers

I have been looking at java profiling tools. Mostly focusing on the following vendors:

1. Precise – Good on java, Superb on the database, no RUM capability
   
   1. Would make a good tool for us, to help upgrade our current toolset of Idera SQLdm (which is a great product as well, but more limited).
      
2. Dynatrace – Great on java, no DB, Superb RUM capability
   
   1. Coradiant brought me into this tool, which I had discounted due to a previous bad experience (about 2 years ago) when the product was very new into the .NET space. Product has a lot of similarities to the way that the Identify Appsight works, where you export a file and the developers open the file and do the deeper analysis.
      
   2. I also see they just announced the partnership today here : http://www.prweb.com/releases/Performance_Management/solution/prweb2464644.htm
      
3. Wily – Best on java, no DB, not sure on RUM
   
   1. Put together a great deal for us, but I'm not sure how well the RUM products work, since they are new to the game.
      
   2. Not sure I want to give up my Coradiant…
      
4. HP Diagnostics – Good on java, no DB, no RUM
   
   1. Best pricing, since we already do business with them, but I didn't see a lot of advancements in the tool since HP purchased them.
      

So that's the current project, along with a new helpdesk/bugtracking system (JIRA) we are building. We are also doing some additional work on our SEO. That sums it up other than that just the standard engineering work, support, and smaller projects.

Cool post from Alistair

Big fan of what Alistair has been up to, and he has a new site here: http://www.rednod.com/ I really loved this post, and the overview of the process and software needed to build software : http://www.rednod.com/index.php/2008/12/07/testing-and-launching-a-web-app-what-every-startup-needs-to-know/

Lots of what big companies do in this space are overly complex, or missing key parts to the process. Using these types of tools will save time and create better software.

Been a good week – Windows 7 and Engineering Update

Sorry I haven't been posting as much as usual. Last weekend, I had some free time, and ended up re-installing one of my desktops at home with Windows 7. I liked the OS so much I ended up doing the same on my laptop. The OS is very responsive, and although I do like Vista, I agree that Windows 7 is a major improvement in many areas. The new taskbar took some getting used to, but the search and overall responsiveness are welcomed.

In more fun server news, I have been working on lots of different issues/engineering tasks:

1. Tape backup drive is hosed, and I've been eating lots of time with Dell on this issue, I wish they would just swap it out. Annoying, but the service is much improved from what it was before when I was dealing with them previously.
   
2. Redoing a bunch of stuff on the netapp to get ready for the new product release, its all coming together now J
   
   1. Having some odd issues with multi-protocol permissions and such, also having an issue with some of our NFS exports not showing up in the web gui (Filerview) but showing up on the CLI. Strange one.
      
3. Put up a MSSQL cluster, but had a strange issue. Debugged it with Microsoft for a few days.
   
   1. Issue creating failover cluster - Getting Event ID: 1570.
      
   2. Tried to turn on the firewall as per microsoft's recommendation. I don't see why this matters, but we did it anyways. I had to make some custom ports for UDP 3343 and TCP 3343.
      
   3. Ended up having a user in AD with the same name as the computer account. This was giving us the access denied error. Renamed the user, and the cluster was fine.
      
   4. Was on the phone and email for too long with the engineer, but happy it got resolved.
      
4. Getting a new conference calling solution for cheaper calls than what we pay now with BT. We use the conference calling internally since we have offices in Europe and Asia. We prefer and try to use Skype as much as possible.
   

Have to head back to Geneva next month for 3-4 weeks, which should be a good useful trip! Looking forward to working with my company over there, my main engineer has been there for a week, and will be there for another 2 weeks. He has been really fixing things up in the office, which are all much needed improvements.

Last item… Go Celtics! Go Bruins J

Been a bit crazy

I have been travelling quite a bit for work, I spent some productive time in Geneva, and Munich. I have been gone for about 3 weeks total. I had a nice weekend in Amsterdam as well.

The weeks consisted of a datacenter move, some engineering and upgrades, and fixing some issues in our other offices as well. Overall the trip was good, but a bit too long of course. Made some good progress communicating with our core development team, and nailing down a lot of things on the table. I'm happy to be back, and looking forward to the big push coming to a new product launch. There is always a big project on the horizon that we work towards.

I've also been trying to beef up and implement for centralized storage in order to properly utilize our ESXi implementations. We have a homegrown NAS for NFS in one office, an older AX150i in another office, and I'm looking to get some more storage in the other office. I wish we could afford to put netapps everywhere and replicate... maybe next year :)

Speaking of Netapps, it seems that the upgrade about 11 days ago from 7.3.1 to 7.3.1P3 has finally fixed the weekly crashing issues we have been having for the last 4 months. It took a long time to get it fixed, but glad it seems to be fixed.

I have one last sonicwall I am trying to get upgraded with the sonicwall trade-in program, then i'll be fully single firewall platform finally. Should make things easier to manage and to train the staff on. They are also great products and nice to work with. UTM is the way to go.

Anyone have any comments on good replacement tools for acrobat pro (editing PDFs). Please spare me the mac user comments.

In Geneva

Finished some moving around of servers and one of our products this past weekend.  Also did some cleanup so we can vacate some older cabinet space.  It runs much faster on the new environment, and we are doing lots to optimize it even more.  We have plans to VM a lot of it, which should help with management and scalability.  Everything went really well over here, we had some issues but not a ton.  Learned a lot about the other environments and how we can streamline a lot of it. 

I’m going to spend the rest of the week meeting with various people, and spending time with my engineer over here.  He’s pretty excited about a lot of what’s going on, and that’s great.  Its always nice to teach eager people.

I’m headed to Munich office next week to fix some ongoing connectivity issues, we have a DSL line which is over ISDN (Annex B).  Its been very problematic, and we’ve had connectivity issues.  I’m also installing a new firewall to get them onto the corporate standards, as well as deploying a new access point. 

Been working non-stop since I arrived last Thursday morning, I hope the rest of this week isn’t as long days.  I think I worked 28 hours last weekend alone.

Cool Skype Addons

We use a lot of Skype at work, and it’s just nice and easy especially with the Skype Polycom speakerphones (http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/B000GG0EFY), I love them.

I was searching for two nice apps for use with skype. We really like Zoho meeting (free 1 on 1), but I wanted something with better features similar to the glance application we use in sales over here. I found this app Oneeko (http://www.oneeko.com) which is really slick, and has excellent skype integration. It’s by far the coolest skype/screen sharing type app I have used.

I also wanted to record my skype conversations to mp3 versus having to pay $20-$30 to buy an app, I found a pretty decent app called Callgraph (http://callgraph.biz) which works very well and puts all my conversations and meetings into mp3.
Now I am all set with my new tools :)

Released new CMS, Wireless

A couple weeks late, but we finally launched the new CMS for our corporate site. Its good marketing is in control of the site now, but the CMS has some major issues. I’m not going to get into the details, but it doesn’t seem like the right technology for most people who want to implement a CMS. We changed our main domain, and further split the marketing site from the application, which makes my team’s lives much easier in operations. Glad to have Coradiant in place, its very handy for these kinds of moves. Also happy that we put in Omniture with this new CMS release. I would like to test Coradiant Edge and the Omniture integration at some point.

We have been putting in sonicpoints to replace the hackjob dd-wrt I tried to put into place. I really like that product, and its very nice for my home use, but its got some issues with the N radios I guess, not too sure. Anyways the sonicpoints allow us to control them from our NSA appliances from Sonicwall. Makes security and implementation easier and faster. They are also very cheap, so that’s another positive. Trying to get them rolled out fully this week. Bought some for our Geneva office too, I’m headed there in a couple weeks.

I also implemented some new Netapp monitoring and such which is also pretty cool.

I’m headed to London on Tuesday night for some vacation and to spend time with my brother and his fiancé. Will be back a week from tomorrow (Monday), so you probably will not get another post for at least 10 days.
Have a good week.

Updates – Netapp, HP, Coradiant

Our netapp (one of the nodes) is still crashing even after upgrading from ONTAP 7.3 to 7.3.1 . So far there is no advice from netapp on the issues. Obviously I am not happy since this has been going on for 7 weeks now. I just had a meeting with my Netapp rep, and he introduced and assured me the support would be better. I hope this is the case as its been pretty bad so far. Speaking of bad support the HP support is pretty much the worst support of any company on the market. I’ve had so many support issues just trying to get licenses and upgrades for all the HP (Mercury) software that we own for QA. Its been very painful. I’m trying to switch off HP support (aside from software upgrades) but we shall see.

Finally got the Coradiant box hooked up in Geneva, and I just did an upgrade this morning to the newest OS. Its working well. I have no idea what’s in the release notes, but I will soon find out 