Adventures of a Technical MasterMind

Let me start off, by just saying that this site is great, its always entertaining and filled with great data : http://get-admin.com/blog/ I'm very happy that Vmware released 4.1 recently. After the horror stories I read about 4.0U1 we decided to skip them and wait for 4.1. There wasn't a lot in the updates we cared for anyways. There are quite a few interesting features in 4.1, and one of the good things that Vmware has done is finally killed off ESX (after this release). ESXi has been great for us over the last couple years, and I haven't had any complaints with switching over to it from ESX in previous years. I found using update manager was not the most reliable when moving from 3.x to 4.x on the physical systems themselves, so we opted to use the host upgrade tool. This is not a supported method to move from 4.x to 4.1. We will probably have to give the update manager another run, which concerns me. At least its not as complex as upgrading Hyper-v J I wi...

Bigfix makes some excellent products, and they have been moving in great directions over the last couple years. They have moved out of pure remediation and into configuration management and control. I would have loved to have purchased them for use at my current company, but the pricing was a bit higher than I'm using for Shavlik HFNetchk Protect, which is another good product, but is far more limited. I wanted to have one tool to patch Linux and Windows systems. IBM has been really struggling to provide a good provisioning and patch management tool for years and years. First they were pushing TPM which is probably the worst product I have seen IBM release. Unfortunately a company I worked for previously was obsessed with using this product that most Tivoli enterprise customers get for free and completely disregard. I spent a good amount of time looking at the product and its capabilities, or lack thereof. I'm concluding my rant now, but its happy to see IBM adding a su...

Now that the workload has reduced a bit over the last month or so we can spend time doing project work. It's always been my philosophy to simplify as much as possible, this is normally because I end up having to fix messes, which are normally caused by undue complexity. Complexity can affect performance, availability, and manageability. Automation can often create complexity, as can requests by various people in the business who don't necessarily plan the projects or requests they make of others (especially development and operations). This being said I often get blocked when I try to simplify things, because people want to build things out in a more redundant manner than is required for the business needs. There are a lot of ways to create a redundant system without creating complexity, you just have to step back and look at the overall configuration and requirements to come up with the best solution. We get a lot of requests from our QA team to reload various Resin app s...

We are building a services tier which will be based on ActiveMQ JMS, and our standard Resin webserver/app servers. We are building this with 2 nodes sharing each on the nodes. They will use a shared file system. We have a few services to start with, which are internal only at first. Should be interesting. We are also working on some new products, and we are pretty close to selecting Endeca search for the indexing engine and SEO engine for it. More on that as we get along with development and implementation. The product looks pretty cool, so it should be fun.

    I have been using Office 2010 for a while, and moved from the preview, to beta, and now I am finally on the release. We decided corporately to stick to 32 bit even when we are on 64 bit windows 7 on our newer systems. The main reason for staying on 32 bit was the all of the addons in the market are written for 32 bit only. When I was testing on 64 bit, I wished I had just stuck to 32. The released version has been stable for the last few days, but I didn't have much issues with the beta release either.     Now that we have office underway we are beginning upgrades to the other 2010 products we use from Microsoft. The first one was Sharepoint, which we are MOSS 2007 right now. The migration was slightly painful, and here are some of the pointers that I found helpful in the migration. Run Powershell as admin http://manish-sharepoint.blogspot.com/2009/11/error-while-working-with-powershell.html Batch Upgrade Visual Styles (the new look and feel for sharepoint) http://...

We have decided after some pain to give Tridion another go over here. We have some really sharp guys helping us from the firm, and they have helped us immensely. We just upgraded to the newest version, and after the struggle to get it running initially it's gone very smoothly and simply. Within a couple hours we moved everything over to the new version and its working flawlessly. It was very simple and good to see the quality of the installers. They handled pretty much everything without any additional manual steps. We are looking forward to moving to the new version later this summer as we beta test for them.     Lots of the issues with the product were due to the implementation that was designed for us. We will be redoing our site and building it properly using the new version. I think with proper guidance and a good technical team we will not have the issues from the past. We are also moving a lot of our custom code from the current codebase into a web services layer t...

Just wrapping up a week of pretty intense work here in our datacenter, here is a list of some of the fun projects we accomplished. Disk upgrades to netapp Netapp locally here in Switzerland went out of their way to fix issues caused by my purchase in the US. Last time I buy in US and ship overseas. Netapp also looked over the system and made some very good corrections and suggestions, much appreciated the great customer support. Reconfigured network Move 10GE to other subnets Change netapp network config Several other additional cables and infrastructure was built out Firewall Upgrades F5 Upgrades from OSv9.4.3 to OSv10.1 Install 3 New VM Servers Install memory in systems (DB, VM) Cleanup of office, and build other infrastructure Major failover testing of netapp, firewall, and loadbalancers Now we are trying to get home with the volcanic ash situation in Europe. It looks like we will be driving our rental car to Barcelona, and taking a flight from there. Should be an interesting lit...