Round Table Session 1 Notes

Cool Tools:

  • BombBomb
  • RoyalTS
  • RDTabs
  • MRemote
  • LovelyCharts
  • SpiceWorks
  • Kiwi/SolarWinds
  • Likewise
  • Mobiscope

Volunteers in IT:

  • How do we recruit volunteers?
  • Volunteer Fairs
  • Be clear about requirements
  • Background checks
  • This is a production environment, not a training ground
  • As leaders, we need to define the scope way ahead of time
  • Give your volunteers a tour, show the blinkenlights
  • Good opportunity for people out of work to keep skills sharp, feel valued
  • Weekend Announcements

Offsite Backup

  • Backups are for the weak of faith — bryson
  • What needs to be backed up, how often – not an IT decision, but a business decision
  • Control/security of offsite data
  • What’s the most important to leadership in case of a disaster?

Live geoanalytics – need help!

I’m looking to put together a live map for seeing where people are coming from on our live stream. One format of this map would be a full-screen display at the ops console, the other would be a small map on the website itself. If you’re using this kind of technology, Id love to know how you are doing it, whether it’s with a monthly service, or you rolled your own code.What I’ve looked at so far:

Google Analytics: Doesn’t come anywhere close to realtime. Looks like about a 24-hour waiting period for your data. Looking at the historical data for the live site, it doesn’t seem to be all that accurate either. Numbers, locations, and durations of visits seem to be way off what we’re seeing in our feedback and in our logs.

W3Counter: Seems interesting, but their site performance/availability is a major problem. I smell scalability issues.

VisiStat: Very nice product, but a little spendy for what I’m after, considering its shortcomings. Live map doesn’t appear to have the ability to specify a timeframe. Either you refresh the page and it adds new visits to a blank map, or you leave it up and nothing falls off the back.

Feedjit: I use this for my blog, and it’s great for that (see widget in the sidebar). But I can’t see using this for a “real” site. I greatly dislike the inability to customize the widget beyond text color (I really don’t want it showing the geoblogosphere link, it’s completely irrelevant and a distraction). It too seems to lack the ability to restrict the map by timeframe.

None of these products appeared to have the ability to customize the map display, most of them had a map that was ridiculously small and didn’t scale with the browser window.

If you rolled your own, how complex was it? What was the cost for the geolocation data?

EDIT: Forgot about Woopra… Looks awesome, but it’s still vaporware.

EDIT^2: OK, so Woopra isn’t technically vaporware, apparently real people are using it, but it’s been in “beta” for a very long time.

We interrupt regular geek programming…

…to bring you this important public service announcement regarding child car seat safety.

My friend Christine asked our state troopers about carseat safety rules here in Kansas. Here is his reply:

Hi Christine,
britax-duo-plus-isofix-car-seatmy name is Trooper Tim McCool. I’m the Troop B (Topeka) Public Resource Officer. I’m also a Child Passenger Safety Technician/Instructor. I can appreciate your question, our current law is somewhat confusing. The origins of our current law start back in the 1980’s and the law has been revised several times over the years. Our legislators have tried to keep up with the current recommendations but have not always been successful.  As law enforcement officers we try to look at what is recommended nationally and try to apply that to our local law. Our law doesn’t say you have to use a forward facing seat at one year of age it says that you must be using a seat properly, and if you follow the national recommendations then you should be using a rear facing convertible to its upper weight limit rear facing. What also leads to confusion is that the AAP currently recommends that the minimum you should turn a child around forward facing is now at 18 months and 25 pounds in weight. As you see, lots of information. Best rule of thumb, that will keep you  out of trouble is to always secure your child in a CPS seat and follow the national recommendations. If you meet a law enforcement officer, most of the officers will defer to one of us that is a CPS Tech. and will support the national recommendations. Again, we law enforcement officers don’t make the laws here in Kansas, we only enforce them. If you or anyone else would like to see our law changed then I would suggest that you contact your local legislator and make your feelings known to them. If they don’t hear from their constituents, they won’t know that there is an issue. Please feel free to contact me if you have any further questions.

Tech. Trooper Timothy I. McCool
Public Resource Officer
Kansas Highway Patrol – Troop B

So, there you have it. 12 months and 20 pounds is now outdated information. Remember that 18 months and 25 lbs is a minimum, the reality is that you should keep them rear-facing as long as they are within height and weight limits of the seat (which for most is 33 lbs). We had to turn F around at 12 months on the dot because she was 34 lbs. C is still under 33 lbs, but she’s a lot taller than a rear-facing seat can handle. We didn’t flip her around until she was about 2.

Naturally, make sure the seat is properly installed in the car, and your child in the seat. If in doubt, get it checked. 95% of all carseats are improperly installed.

March Madness: The Network Plumber’s Perspective

Web video is clearly here to stay. Heck, I currently have 40% of my time dedicated to producing and delivering web video of our weekend worship services. I think this is tremendously cool stuff, and traditional one-way RF-based video delivery (a.k.a. TV) is pretty lame. My kids have no concept of a broadcast schedule. Their content world is one that is immersive, interactive, and on-demand.

We’re now coming up on that season that we network admins have begun to dread over the last few years: March Madness. With networks advertising live web video of every. single. game., those of us charged with the care and feeding of our WAN pipes are blanched in abject terror. We know that 95% of our staff is going to want to watch them while they work. It doesn’t take much math skill to figure out that multiplied by a couple hundred people, even viewing one event means that the remaining 3 people in the organization that don’t really give a hoot about hoops aren’t going to be able to get any work done and pick up the slack the rest of us are leaving.

When you do internet video on the scale of the NCAA tournament, or a news network during a major news event, you’re relying on the performance of your CDN. Naturally, you want to accurately count eyeballs so that the advertisers pay you appropriately. A lot of time and effort goes into engineering thse things, and it’s quite remarkable how well this works.

CNN’s approach using Octoshape is a creative one, that really pushes P2P technology into the mainstream of legitimacy. I was present at the creation nearly ten years ago [+] [++]when Gnutella was leaked to the world, and changed the rules of the multimedia distribution game, and recall thinking how interesting things were going to become. Out of the Gnutella proof-of-concept came LimeWire and others, and then BitTorrent figured out how to dial the concept to a global scale. Now the same idea is being integrated into mainstream CDNs with Octoshape and other “cloud” applications.

It seems to me that the CDN operators should be able to find a way to engineer their networks such that a corporate network admin (such as myself) could download a piece of software onto a spare piece of gear and run a node of the CDN, internal to the corporate network (or, for that matter, run it as a VMWare virtual appliance). This not only softens the blow to my WAN pipes, but also lightens the load on the public parts of the CDN. The only thing then going across the WAN connection is a single instance of each stream being requested by clients internal to the company. Then it simply phones home with the proper client count for advertiser tracking, and bingo, people can get work done, as well as watch their favourite team make a run at the Final Four.

…Or we network admins can simply block the CDN in their content filters and tell their users that we’re mean party poopers, depriving them of their hoops and depriving the webcasters of their revenue.

More on the FX160

It’s been a while since I did any serious banging on our FX160 seed unit from Dell – mostly because I’ve had a lot of other things on my plate with considerably higher priority.

I’ve discovered that the FX160 with 1GB NVRAM is functionally useless if you want to do anything with it other than the standard out-of-the-box configuration (RDP, XenDesktop). Most applications these days are written for full XP and are consequently bloated bigger than a whale that’s been left on the beach too long. Hardware vendors seem to be particularly bad about this. I’m talking about YOU, nVidia and Creative. There is no reason a device driver for a USB Audio device should complain about disk space with 200MB free. Would a little code optimization kill you people?

My current experiment is to turn this device into a simple videoconferencing terminal, using a Sony EVI-D70 camera, a USB capture device from ADS, and a Creative QuickCall USB Speakerphone. Initial tests seem to be promising, although installing the Creative drivers is proving to be complicated due to its insatiable apetite for disk space, which seems to have been bypassed by manually extracting to the stick much like I had to do with .NET 3.5.

FX160, Deeper look

Now that I’ve had a chance to play with the FX160 a little more, here are a few things I’ve discovered:

When the service manual tells you to remove the two screws from the back of the unit and then “slide the cover toward the front and lift off”, what they really meant to say is “Give the cover a good glancing whack with the palm of your hand toward the front of the unit and then lift it off.” The reverse is also true when putting the cover back on. It needs more than mere sliding, it needs a good whack.

Under the cover, we find that Dell has indeed done a great job with this unit.

  • Flash interface is SATA and held in place with an actual screw, compared to HP’s really lame locking plastic tab that makes it a pain in the butt to swap the module on and off its PATA header pins. SATA FTW.
  • There’s an additional SATA port on the board, as well as a power connector for said SATA. Dell could make this even better by providing an optional eSATA port on the back (and maybe even go all Apple on us and make a matching eSATA chassis!)
  • There’s another power header on the board for a CPU fan. I’m guessing this is for the dual-core units.
  • Despite its teeny size, this little guy uses standard desktop DIMMs. It came with one of the two slots populated with a 1GB module. The system supports up to 4GB acccording to the technical guidebook, but I’ve seen elsewhere that it can handle 8GB. Given that the CPU options support EM64T, this is an interesting prospect.
  • Mini-PCI slot for wireless. The Technical Guidebook says Dell 1397 only (802.11g), but I’ve seen other mention of the Dell 1510 card (802.11abg) also being supported.
  • Jumper #5. From the factory, this comes unjumpered, locking out BIOS setup. Since the lid can be locked in place with a standard cable lock or even a small padlock, Dell’s done a very good job with security.
  • Front USB ports (mounted on the board with all die blinkenlights , audio, and the power switch) is connected through a standard 2×5-pin system board connector, as is the audio. If your application requires a USB security key, it should be easy to mount on internally by disconnecting the front USB ports and adding a little pigtail. Props to Dell for designing it this way, rather than a single cable for the entire front panel. Dell could take this a step further by adding an internal USB port on the front panel board for mounting such a key. There’s plenty of physical space for it. This would be a huge bonus for POS systems that require these keys.

On the software side:

  • I can add and remove programs with… the Add/Remove programs control panel application. What a novel idea. HP, You fail at this. Having Altiris be the only mechanism to add or remove packages is… sub-optimal.
  • XPe is still Service Pack 2. Microsoft does have a SP3-based version of XPe out there, and that would be a good thing.
  • Administrator account has Start->Run disabled. Booo! Luckily, I can just as easily start up IE and type the command there.
  • .NET Framework installed is 2.0, no service pack. In order to install 3.5, I have to install .NET 2.0 SP1 first. There’s no real reason these can’t ship with .NET 3.5 from the factory.
  • I just checked free space on the flash… 60 MB. Yikes! I can see why Dell pushes the 2GB flash option for these. Some of that may be due to the .NET install going on.
  • The system ships with a software reload DVD. This is good. I hope Dell will provide frequent OS image updates through their support site. HP does this, and it’s a happy thing.
  • Altiris agent on the unit isn’t playing nice with my existing Altiris Deployment server set up for the HP thins. Hopefully this will be easy to resolve.

Dell support for Altiris: Doesn’t exist. They flat out told me they don’t handle support and that I need to call Altiris directly. I’m not sure how this is going to go. The process with HP (I’ve had to explain it to HP support agents enough times) is that the call to Altiris has to originate from HP. This process sucks, but it is what it is. The first thing the folks at AltirisSymantec ask you for is a contract number or customer number. Altiris has already kicked the ball back to Dell. Not looking good so far. Back to Dell support, and they really don’t know what the process is.

Definitely would recommend the 2GB flash if you’re buying one of these. the OS alone takes up almost 70% of the flash. This is clearly a much more substantial install of XPe than what’s on the HP machines.

Dell Optiplex FX160 – first impressions!

(Edited at 4:45pm to add some additional information about power supplies)

Today, I got the FX160 demo unit from Dell that I’ve been salivating over for several weeks now. We’re looking at buying a number of XPe thin clients next year, and, while I like the HP thin clients, HP support alone is worth making the jump to Dell. Despite being pretty sure that this was our next thin-client platform, I still wanted to try one out, and our Dell rep was able to get approval for a seed unit to help solidify the decision to buy the Dells. These hit the market at the beginning of December, and they fit in a number of niches in Dell’s desktop product offering. Our particular niche is light-duty computing and kiosks.

Here are my first impressions of the unit. I haven’t had a chance to do extensive testing yet, but I’ll be sure to let you know.

The Unboxing: Like most Dell packaging, the box is nothing special like it is from Apple. Dell shipped the unit with one the optional desk mount bracket. This is a good-looking unit, and the first thing you notice when you look at the connections is the dual displays (one VGA, one DVI), followed quickly by the IEC power connector, telling me this thing doesn’t have a line lump power supply like my HP thin clients. (It should be noted here that the HP 12V power supply has the exact same mechanical interface as the 20V power supply for a Zebra label printer. When you hook up the wrong one, magic smoke comes out and the unit has to be sent to HP, taking it out of service for 2 weeks). Also visible is the spot for the antenna for the optional built-in wireless (which this one didn’t have – I wonder how easy it is to retrofit? it’s mini-PCI)

Dell also was nice enough to send me a 22″ UltraSharp display (which Clif called dibs on). Mysteriously, though, it shipped without a stand. I stole one from one of the 19″ displays on my desk and hooked it all up, casting a 5720 used for Arena Check-in development onto a nearby shelf.

I hit the power button and the smooth face starts blinking. Ooo, blue LEDs. Nice touch. They turn orange if something is amiss, though, just like you’d expect them to on a Dell. The usual set of Dell 1/2/3/4 diagnostic LEDs is present, as is the network link indicator for the gigabit ethernet port.

The system boots up to a user desktop that blessedly allows me to right-click and change the display settings. I adjust to match the big shiny monitor and fire up a browser and cruise over to Hulu, where I am pleased to discover that the stock load on this beast includes a recent version of Flash. Sadly, this thing just doesn’t have the horsepower to run the Simpsons in full-screen, and definitely not the HD version of The Office. After trying its performance on video (it does just fine on lower-bandwidth stuff, but if you buy one of these hoping for good graphics performance, you’ll probably be disappointed).

I decide to log out of the user account and go poke around under the admin account so I can see more of what’s under the hood. I do the usual holding down of the shift key while I log out, so that it doesn’t auto login back under the user account (configured as “User1”).

This is where I run into problems. Dell hasn’t documented the default password anywhere with the system, so I head over to Google, which doesn’t help me much either. HP was at least up-front about its default passwords. Dell, this is highly annoying. Please correct this. I’m cutting you some slack because this is a new product for you guys.

So, the thing’s been out of the box for less than an hour, and It’s already generated a support call. Fortunately, Dell’s support on these is up to their usual standard, and I’m able to get a hold of someone at ProSupport on their support chat system.

<HP RANT>HP, are you paying attention here? This alone is enough to make me buy these. This beats the socks off of your process of having to slog through your pathetic IVR system that doesn’t know what “Thin Client” means, picking a random support group, and then having them tell me in a thick Indian accent, “let me transfer you to the correct support group,” followed by at least one (and frequently more) heavily-accented techs who can’t figure out the process of getting me Altiris support without me explaining it in detail. Especially since your chat system doesn’t know what a thin client is either, and when I tell it it’s a desktop system, it tells me the serial number is invalid. </HP RANT>

Another huge advantage of the Dell unit and the associated support is that if the system board is relieved of its magic smoke (much harder to do than the HP), I’ll get a part in my hands the following day, rather than paying to ship it in for depot repair and waiting a few weeks to get it back in service.

The Dell tech on the chat finally gave me the default passwords, after insisting on verifying ownership of the unit (??? I just want the default password, not the keys to NORAD). For those who don’t want to go through the trouble of contacting support to gain access to the box they just purchased, the administrator password is the ever-so-creative “dell” (all lowercase) and the User1 password is equally original: “password”. Apparently there’s also an “Admin1” account that also uses “dell”. I ask about the monitor, telling him it doesn’t have a leg to stand on. I’m told it was ordered without one. Huh???? Gonna have to get on my rep about that.

On gaining administrative access, I see that this unit shipped with the single-core Atom 230, as well as 1GB each of RAM and flash (which Dell calls NVRAM). The performance tab on the Task Manager tells me this proc is hyperthreaded and presents it as 2 cores to the OS (confirmed by Intel – this proc also supports EM64T).

The XPe-based FX160 comes with the same Altiris-based  remote management that the HP thins do, but I did notice that, while it detected my existing Altiris install, it didn’t connect to it due to a licensing issue. I hope I can simply add the Dell licenses to my existing Altiris install rather than do a whole separate one. I suspect this is going to generate a call to support as well, so we’ll see how that process compares to getting Altiris support from HP. My guess is it will be a whole lot less painful, simply because it would be extremely difficult to make the process worse than HP has)

That’s about as far as I got yesterday, and I’m taking today off. I’ll report back in soon on what the factory load contains, and how well it does with some of our applications. Hopefully, Clif won’t have stolen the monitor by then.

I think Dell’s got a winner here, barring some unforeseen discovery of a major showstopper problem with the OS load. The FX160 comes with a wide enough range of options to fit a lot of business needs (the dual-core unit with a hard drive could be a good low-end desktop). The @DellServerGeeks have also been helpful and tweeted a few links about desktop streaming and the FX160.

Stay tuned. I suspect we’re going to be buying some over the course of the coming year.

To Our American Brothers in Arms

This is from a blog post from a french infantry unit stationed with a US unit in Afghanistan. I’ve translated it for the benefit of those who don’t speak French (and as an exercise for my own language skills – it’s been a while!)

TO OUR AMERICAN BROTHERS IN ARMS

For some time now we’ve been sharing our lives with two units, the first and the fourth company of a prestigious American infantry battalion which shall remain unnamed due to military secrecy. To the average person, it’s a unit just like any another. For those of us who live with them and have gotten to know them, we know now that we have had the honor to live alongside two of the most famous units of the U.S. Army. Units that were presented to the world in a series of films about “Ordinary men. Extraordinary times.

Who are these soldiers from across the Atlantic, what are their daily lives and what support they provide daily to the men of OMLT? Few of them belong to Easy Company, the company that is the focus of the television series. It is now known as ECHO Company, and has become a support and logistics company.

A distinct accent. They are American. Not to say that they do not speak English. How many times did I need to write down what I tell them rather than lose precious minutes trying several pronunciations for a word seemed trivial? Whatever the state they’re from, each has its own accent, and even they admit that in some situations they have trouble understanding themselves.

Norman cabinets (Note: I’m not familiar with this particular idiom, but I’d take it to be roughly analogous to “built like a fridge”). Raised from an early age on Gatorade, protein and creatine, they are all two heads above us and their muscles remind one of Rambo in his finest hours. So not only do we already have this handicap that amuses them so, but we are often confused with the native Afghans: We’re but small fry, even for the beefiest among us.

Core values. Here one discovers America, as it often is depicted: the values they have here are brought to a climax, amplified by closeness and loneliness of the post in the middle of this Afghan valley. Honor, Patriotism. Everything here is a reminder: the American flag flapping the wind above the outpost just as it’s depicted on the care packages. If recruitment is often at the heart of the American inner city, dominated by gangs, nobody here has any other purpose than to carry high and proud the star-spangled banner. Each one knows they are supported by an entire nation, which does them well by anonymously sending them everything a soldier could find in short supply at the front: books, chewing gum, razor blades, powdered drinks (Gatorade, of course!), Toothpaste and so on. So much so that everyone knows he is supported in the difficult mission he is assigned. This is the first clash with preconceived notions: the American soldier is not an individual. The team, group, and the battle are at the center of all of his attention.

And what soldiers! We haven’t encountered a bad one. It’s strange how critical we can be! Even if some of them appear a little pudgy, they all give us lessons on daily life in the infantry. Beyond the wearing of the battle dress which seems to never bother them, (helmet, goggles combat rifle) long hours of guard duty at the outpost does not seem to bother them too much. The sole presence is a one square meter platform on a wooden tower above the stockade walls for 5 consecutive hours with night-vision binoculars, always focused on the direction from where the danger might come. No distractions, no breaks, standing like real statues. Ditto for the outpost as soon as night falls. All movement is in the dark with only a few red lights indicate the presence here and there of a soldier on the road. Ditto for vehicles whose lights are blacked out. Everything is done in the dark, fully understood at the JAPY pump. And in combat? If you saw RAMBO you’ve seen everything: always there to come to the rescue when one of our teams is in trouble, and always in a very short time. It’s one of their secrets: they can go from casual t-shirts to full battle dress in three minutes flat. When they arrive near the enemy position their mode of action is simple and confusing: they charge! Experts at the assault landing, they shoot first and ask questions later, which puts a damper on procrastination.

Here, seldom with raised voices and from 0500 the common tasks are done in short order and never grudgingly. In short, what we have been able to see, the helicopter en route, stopping next to a broken-down vehicle to see if all is well in the combat sections who stand in support of us even before knowing whether the mission is perilous, the American soldier is a fine soldier, a worthy heir of those who liberated France and Europe.

For those who do us the honor to welcome us into their combat outposts and every day demonstrate the finest qualities of military, for those who feel every day the heavy deployment of the U.S. Army on Afghan soil, for all those we owe this article, hoping to never discredit them and to continue to hear that we are all the same “band of brothers.”

Ramping up for Election Night

While I’m on the topic of Slashdotting, I had a conversation with Clif the other day about what it takes to scale up sites to handle the onslaught of traffic generated by people looking for web coverage of Election Night. It’s one of those nasty scalability problems where if you get it wrong, you’re utterly screwed and don’t get a do-over or a few hours to fix it. If you’re in the business of selling eyeballs and your site goes dark during the Big Game, you’re pretty much hosed. And broke.

Data Center Knowledge has a neat article about what goes on behind the scenes to ramp up for an event of this magnitude.