Adventures of a Technical MasterMind

We elected to trial one office upgrade with a new phone system, on much different technology than myself or my colleagues are used to. We decided to go with a Fonality system. The support seems great, the product is very advanced, and the price is VERY good. We are doing our first SIP turnup and phone system install in the Paris office this weekend. I hope it goes well. If this works out we'll be rolling out Fonality across the company over time. Munich is next on the list. It's essentially a modified asterix system. Fonality also manages the development of Trixbox, which is the largest distribution of Asterix on the market. Looking forward to seeing it in action! Really amazing features and I like the fact that we can use almost any supported phone provider. (Cisco, Polycom, Grandstream, Aastra) Fonality PBXtra - http://pbxtra.fonality.com/

I have been using Office 2010 for about 6 months now. It was a bit rough the last 4 months or so. I was also very sad that I didn't have my favorite addins such as plaxo, xobni, and others. I have been running them on a desktop I can remote into if I need them or need to sync my outlook data via these extensions. I got the new build installed after having to mess with the uninstall process. It was really annoying but it worked out. The new beta build is very nice. It's more stable, and there are several items added which didn't exist previously. You can also see in outlook how they are starting to integrate social media into email, something xobni has been doing very well for quite a while. The Microsoft social media integration isn't complete or even really working, while the xobni version is very advanced and works great. I wish that Microsoft built some kind of wrapper to allow the previous addins to work with outlook, but I guess that's not going to ha...

This is really upsetting me. I keep seeing this as I read my news tonight: http://www.betanews.com/article/Sophos-study-suggests-Windows-7-UACs-default-setting-is-selfdefeating/1257455306 I was one of the only ones who seemed to think Vista was a good user interface and OS upgrade from XP, of course it could have been more optimized and even better, which is what windows 7 is. I also found the UAC feature in Vista to be very good, and similar to those of us who use unix are used to working. You su to root when you need to do something elevated, otherwise you operate at user level. The typical end user complained "it keeps asking me to elevate so often, I don't understand what this means". On windows 7, Microsoft decided to elevate only under certain cases (by default), and of course the inconvenience of the extra click, otherwise known as security, was removed essentially. This makes Windows 7 in its default setting much less secure than vista. Being a systems a...

We finally launched the new platform, its been pretty difficult both pre and post launch supporting the business, developers, QA folks, doing perf testing. Lots of stuff to fix, and I'm really looking forward to the cleanup part. Its always fun to recover space and processing power which is not needed on the new platform. Things are progressing well. http://www.techcrunch.com/2009/11/02/mfg-com-takes-off-the-cuffs-with-manufacturing-marketplace-redesign/ We have to move a couple offices in the near future, and we're trying to open one in India. All of that planning and work is keeping us busy as well. I am very happy to have a new global helpdesk manager onboard. Great addition to our team!

I'm happy that solarwinds has released a major upgrade to ipmonitor. Too bad they didn't notify me my maintenance expired about a month ago. I'm renewing it now, and looking forward to v10. This product is excellent, cheap, and does a great job with agentless monitoring. You can also tweak it to monitor pretty much anything as needed. Such a good deal for a great all around product. Speaking of maintenance, I also just investigated and found out that our F5 Big-IP maintenance expired in April. Glad we have a HA pair in case of issues in the next little while, but I don't understand why vendors and resellers don't keep on top of customers. It's essentially free money they aren't going to get if they don't chase folks about it. Vendors who do a good job with maintenance: IBM Oracle Sybase HP Software Cisco Vendors who are horrible with maintenance in my experience: HP hardware Dell F5 What cisco does that's really cool is they integrate mainten...

I decided that when we built out the netapp gear that we would put low volume and QA data on the SATA disks and save the FC disk for databases, VMware, and other intensive stuff. Now looking at performance on the QA VMware boxes with the SATA disks and I'm thinking I shouldn't have done that. It's been quite good in general, but when there is a backup running or other disk intensive actions occur it grinds to a halt. I really need to figure out a way to move onto a FC aggregate at some point.

I had support on the line for a while to fix my errors with the reports. They finally fixed it, it was some obscure bug which is fixed the the next major patch for Vsphere 4. It was a complex fix they had to do, but it works finally. Nice job by support.