Major losses

It's been a bad week for tech. First, Steve Jobs and now Dennis Ritchie. The former made a huge difference in making technology relevant to everyone. The latter was instrumental in making make that possible. RIP.

Cu > BT

This is awesome: BT worth less than the scrap value of the copper it owns. Technology marches on.

Mount an ISO in Windows 7

I needed to mount a .ISO image to run an installer. I'd used Virtual Clone Drive in the past and it worked fine. I'd read good things about Pismo File Mount Audit Package and it worked very well for me. The explorer extension is nice and I like that it puts the mounted drive in a folder instead of a separate drive by default and has a command line option.

NAS

Although my ReadyNAS systems have been great (very reliable and easy to manage), I'm going with a Synology rs411 as my new NAS system at the data center. The RS411 was a bit less expensive than the ReadyNAS 2100 and had a couple of features that look interesting (back up to S3 being one of them). Since the reviews were positive, I decided to take a chance. I'll know more when receive it later this week.

EDIT: Received the system on Thursday and plan on installing tomorrow. More to follow.

Age

The release of AoE Online brings back some good memories. The original AoE took up a lot of my time back in the day.

Backup fun-n-games

I run Citrix XenServer in our data center for virtualization. In general, I'm pleased with it but have run into a big problem with the way space is not reclaimed during snapshots. It seems that when a snapshot is deleted, all of the space is not freed up when are using iSCSI storage. This is a big problem because you eventually run out of disk space and can't create any more snapshots to backup.

I've tried following the Citrix solution to reclaim space, but it doesn't seem to work. The results are always something like:

coalesce-leaf -u 36b672b6-302e-0b2a-84f1-9b74f00f88f7
VDI to consider: e9915854-773a-4c22-a873-5697a5561add
VDI to consider: 47e9730d-66d1-4e04-94fa-c64f43c8de27
Processing VDIs: ['e9915854-773a-4c22-a873-5697a5561add', '47e9730d-66d1-4e04-94fa-c64f43c8de27']
Finishing regular GC/coalesce work for SR 209f ('iSCSI nearline disk1')...
Failed:

I've managed to clear up about 200GB of space by running the coalesce-leaf command and deleting out some VMs that I don't need any more. Plan B is to move everything off of that iSCSI unit and move it back in. Not fun, but I think that's going to have to happen over the weekend if the backups don't run tonight.

NAS fun-n-games

We have a couple of ReadyNAS 1100 units in our data center. They have been very reliable and easy to support for the 3 or so years we have had them.

The only issue is that we have used up all of the disk space. Part of the appeal of the ReadyNAS products is that they use something called XRAID which allows you to expand the space by adding new drives. The process is simple: you add larger hard drives one at a time allowing the RAID to resync each time and once you have replaced all of the drives you have a bunch of new capacity. Pretty slick.

I checked the hardware compatibility list and bought some 2TB WD WD20EADS drives on the list to replace the 1TB drives we have. However, I should have read the fine print. There is a flaw with those drives that causes them to eat themselves pretty quickly because they put the heads to sleep to save energy (green, right?) every 8 seconds but then have to wake immediately back up to do work. This results in high load cycle counts and early disk death.

There is a fix: you can use a little tool called WDIDLE3 to set idle time to a longer interval. I went through the process on the WD20EADS using an old system I had and it seems to have worked for all of the drives. Now, I just need to figure out a way to test them without putting them back in the NAS...

Signature

Spent the day doing a little tutorial with a client on SAP PI. We are running the test systems on AWS and they work pretty well, but we keep running into some annoying problems with the ESB which is a JNLP application. When you try to launch it, it gives an error about the JAR files being signed by different certificates. I had already applied patches to the AWS image that was supposed to fix it, but it doesn't seem to stick.

The fix is to go into Administration on the Process Integration page then to the Repository tab and pick the Java Web Start Administration link. From there click the Restore Archives and Generate New Signatures button and then click the Execute link towards the top of the page. This will open up a page that tells you to wait and kick off a process to resign all of the archives. Open up the process monitor on the system and wait for a couple of minutes until the JAR signing process stops (it will take a minute or two) and then try the Execute link again. It should launch the ESB application. If it doesn't work, rinse and repeat.

Runtime

We have some systems that we run in AWS for developers to train and experiment on without breaking our core systems. It works great, but you have to be careful to make sure you shutdown these systems when done using them. To run SAP PI, you need a pretty beefy system and it costs about $1 an hour. If someone forgets to shut it down for, oh lets say three weeks, you are looking at a nice $500 bill.

I either need a tool that alerts me that they are running every day or so. Or, maybe I just go buy some AMZN stock...

Finally

I finally got Solution Manager to do what it promises to do and calculate the files needed for an upgrade of one of our SAP systems. Now, I'm faced with the task of actually upgrading the system. SAP seems to have a pretty nice tool for that: SAPehpi.  I went through guides and the main notes around it this morning got it running along. I'm sure the first attempt will result in failure, but I've got my backups and I'll keep my fingers crossed.

Complex

I've been implementing some of the functionality of SAP Solution Manager to help with system upgrades in our environment and it is incredibly complex. SAP has been having trouble getting customers to adopt Solution Manager and now I know why.

All I want to do is add my systems to a landscape and let the tool help me figure out what files need to be downloaded from SAP to get to a given service pack level. Since they now have a configuration wizard, you would think that would be about a two week task of installing and doing some configuration and then it would just work. Wrong. I've been at this for over a month and it still isn't quite there. It's been a series of patches and errors and patches and errors just to get the systems connected. There has to be a better way.

Why doesn't SAP maintain a Solution Manager lite environment at service.sap.com that we can just register our systems in and have it figure out what files we need? Why should every individual customer have to set up an on-premises tool for this? For large customers, there might be a lot of other benefits of having the system on site, but for us, it makes no sense and is just frustrating.

Secure

I enabled 2-step verification on my Google account this week. It went fairly smoothly with the only confusion coming when I had to create single use passwords for my phone and Eclipse plugin.  I'm using the Android app to generate the keys and I like that it will work whether or not I have service. I'm a little worried about what happens if I'm traveling and get all my stuff stolen (both phone and wallet containing the backup codes) and don't have ready access to call the US. I guess I'll have bigger things to worry about in that case...

Hammer

Tomi Ahonen drops an absolute box of hammers on Nokia's move to Windows Mobile. He is certainly right that it looked like they were onto something with the N9 and MeeGo and you can't argue with the really bad financials.

But they needed some kind of shakeup. Symbian was dragging them down and they had to get away from it. The Microsoft move was bold but they really might not make it through to the other side. They really couldn't go to Android.

At $6 USD per share, they have a valuation of $11.7B USD. Microsoft just ponied up $8.5B for Skype. Can they swallow another one?

S3

I've thought that Amazon S3 would be an excellent backup media for a lot of businesses. But, they charged something like $0.10 USD per GB which just doesn't work when you are backing up a couple of TB of data on a regular basis.  However, they have just changed their pricing model to eliminate the fee for data transfer in. You still pay to get data out ($0.12 USD per GB out), but that is (hopefully) much more rare if you are using it for backup.

I did a quick test this morning to move a XenServer VM snapshot to S3 using the free version of S3 Browser  and it took 12 minutes to move 1.24 GB of data from our data center to S3. That is probably too slow to use for a TB of data (~200 hours assuming it is linear), but the pro version of S3 Browser will parallelize the upload and allow you to have more than 2 upload tasks at once. If it is 10x faster, then it becomes workable for a once-a-week archive.

Wireless

My trusty old ZyXEL x-550 router started to give up the ghost so I was in the market for a new wireless router. After long and deliberate consideration consisting of reading an email blast from buy.com, I went with a TRENDnet TEW-639GR (I would put a link in but apparently, this model has been discontinued) It was $40 shipped for a Wireless N router, so I figured it was worth a try.

So far, so good. Installation was a snap. I think it took me longer to figure out where to plug in the wall wart than actually set up the router. Basically, it was unplug the old and plug in the new. I haven't tested extensively, but so far, I have a strong signal and it hasn't dropped me once even though I am all the way across the house in a place that was always a trouble spot for the x-550. The only thing that I might miss is that it doesn't support DD-WRT which I would like to experiment with.

I'm continually amazed at the sharp improvement of price to performance in wireless networking gear. I think I paid twice as much for half of the performance when I bought the X-550 about 5 years ago.

X8

A month ago, I ran across a great deal ($159) on an unlocked Sony Xperia X8 on newegg.com. I've had an interest in trying an Android phone and this seemed like a good way to test the waters with minimum risk.


I wasn't quite sure what to expect, but I've been impressed with the phone so far. It is about two generations behind the most recent phones but it does the basics pretty well. The screen is small but sharp and responsive to gestures. I especially like the form factor which is quite small and fits in a pocket quite easily. The industrial design is simple - basic black with a minimum of frills and decor.

Probably the most disappointing aspect is that the phone is pretty underpowered compared to modern phones and can take a few seconds to respond to commands. But, for the price, you really can't beat it. I'm impressed enough with Android (I also have a rooted nook - more about that later) to put it at the top of my list for my next major phone upgrade. Blackberry, it's been nice knowing you.

Finnished

It is well documented that Nokia is struggling and now I have a clue why. I found a great offer online where they would take a phone trade-in and give you $130 off of a new X6 16GB Drivers Edition phone. Since we are planning a trip to Costa Rica, I thought this might be a cheap way to get a SIM-unlocked phone that had a decent camera and navigation that we wouldn't care if it got stolen or broken on the trip.

After going through the trade-in process and finding that my old T-mobile Dash and Blackberry were worth about $90 + $130 rebate meant that the phone would only be about $55 out of pocket, I was pretty excited. So I went over to the Nokia store and tried to by the phone. No dice. It wouldn't allow me to add it to the cart although the site said it was in stock. No big deal. I'll call the 866 number and just order it over the phone. They don't answer the phone until 10:00 AM on Saturday.

So, I'm annoyed with the Finns now and understand why they have been struggling. Wasting a potential customer's time is not a good way to gain market share.

Ubuntu Redux

I liked Ubuntu 10.04 so much on my old desktop, that I decided to install it on an old Dell Inspiron 8500 laptop that was gathering dust. It's probably about to give up the ghost (it recently rejected one of its two memory sticks which is usually a sign that the motherboard is getting warped and the DVD drive makes horrible noises) but I can get a little more use out of it yet. I'm getting the hang of having the close button on the left hand side...

Ubuntu 10.04

I've got an old Ideq 210V that wasn't being used for much, so I decided to install Ubuntu 9.10 (Karmic for those who like the Ubuntu lingo) on it a month or so ago. Everything was going swimmingly. I had configured it to connect to my VPN for work and had even set up the SAP GUI on it. It was actually quite useful.

Then I read some reviews of Ubuntu 10.04 which sounded like the bee's knees. Upgrading seemed a cinch, so I gave it a whirl. Unfortuately, I was only able load up the failsafe GNOME mode, which seemed to limit some of my options (for example, I couldn't find the network manager icon anywhere). I thought it might have had something to do with a botched upgrade, so I did a complete reinstall. Same thing.

I was quite vexed and just set it aside for a couple of days. Then I started wondering if it was the amount of memory dedicated to the IGP in the BIOS. I fired it up, set the shared memory to 64M (the maximum) from 16M (the minimum) and it works!Now I just need to get back to where I was a week ago...

SSTP

Installed a new Windows 2008 Server in our network the other day and configured SSTP. It wasn't as easy as I would have hoped (needed a secure certificate and all of that), but it works great and I'll roll it out to the masses as soon as I can get it documented.