Send in the Tablets

Here come the tablets, working in healthcare means working with doctors and working with doctors means working with users with disposable income.  This lead inevitably to Tablets... Galaxy, XOOM, iPad and iPad2. Android, iOS and eventually webOS, QNIX, and Windows. Portable devices with portable problems. One of the faster growing ways of dealing with this, protecting the data AND still giving the users what they need (which is different than what they want) are the solutions from VMWARE and CITRIX involving their VDI or XENDESKTOP offering. The one issue is that you are trying to handle a windows interface over a touch interface. What we really need is a competent tablet interface, but we didn't have one ten years ago and we don't have one now.  Natively there's too much of a chance of loss of data and in HIPAA environment this is bad. Browsers aren't any better because most of the infrastructure is coded to IE7 (hopefully) or IE6 (most likely).

What we need is a virtual interface that isn't dependent on anything resembling a standard interface that allows IE emulation but on a more stable platform. Win7 isn't it, Win8 is a pipe dream, Ubuntu NBR is a good candidate IF you can get IE to run on it legally.....

points to ponder

IDM and How I learned to love Directory Services

2 months ago I spent some time in Dallas, TX. training on Novell's IDM solution. I've been supporting an IDM system since 2008, but only had training from the implementing consultant and what I could find on Novell.com.  Came back from the training with a new appreciation for what this software is capable of bringing in terms of value to any enterprise.

One of the best things to train up people, in my opinion, is by doing. Living by my own advice I built up a duplicate test environment resembling our production network, and use the edir2edir driver to mirror the users through the new environment. Some small tips arose from this, and it is worth it to put them down here.

Novell Designer for IDM : While the iManager IDM suite works quite well, the Designer from Novell is one of the best tools for dealing with the in's and out's of working with IDM. The ability to export your IDM as a backup is must have.

Apache Directory Studio : A must have for working with Directory Services, a very flexible and free tool from the Apache project. Platform neutral, it runs on most hardware.  I use it to look at the results of various "what if's?" as well as correcting issues.

Terminal, using SSH you can do many things, but the most helpful one was running "tail -f" on the idmtrace logs

Of Disks and Disruptions

We use a Novell Netware Cluster for our file services. We established this cluster approximately 2 years ago. It's been a good network network citizen, quietly doing it's job day in and day out. It's grown from one  400gb partition to multiple ones adding up to about 4TB. the only disruptions we've seen were either due to power interruptions (UPS failed,) or SAN issues. One of the things we've found over the last two years is that if your SAN admin moves the data from one disk group to another , you can NOT move it at 100%,This is a "quirk" with the  the IBM SVC, if you move the disk group at any other speed besides 100%, it's fine.

Brave New World

Today was rather epic. We finally installed our first eDir 8.8.5 server in our tree. We did it on a SLES 11 64bit VM box. My GAWD it's fast. We are definitely on a fast track to OES2 after we upgrade our Identity Manager implementation. Replication times have fallen and several of our "issues" with eDir were resolved by this.

Last week I completed the 3091 IDM course. Great product, the shame of the training was that it was on 3.5.1 and we're moving to 3.6.1. Not a big deal in the scheme of things, and the course was very informative. This will make several of the projects currently in motion much easier.

Now I need to do a crash course in XML scripting and driver logic.

CA Renewal and Distribution

so your tree has been up for coming up on 10yrs...ever redo the CA? then it's time.

In Novell land, the CA is the certificate authority, the place from which all certs come from. There are plenty of TID's at Novell about changing out your CA for a new one, but not much on what to do afterwards. We hit a few snags when we redid ours, but the basic procedure goes something like this....(we got this from Novell)

Export the existing CA (you might need it if things go bad)
Delete the existing CA
Create a new CA, either choose maximum or 10yrs (that way you don't have to do this again for awhile)
Export that to a new cert and save it as rootcert.der

Go to your eDIr Master (if you have more than one, then the one with the most MASTER replicas on it.) and do the following:

1. copy rootcert.der to sys:\public(rename the existing one first)
2. ap2webdn
3. tc4(5)stop (depending on which one you are running)
4. tckeygen
5. java -exit
6. ap2webup
7. tomcat4(5)(depending on which one you are running)
8. unload nldap
9. pkidiag
10. options 4,5 and then 0
11. nldap 
12. reboot

at every step check the logger screen for errors........

 

PMO Infection

Seems to be a recurring nightmare for some people. Project Management becomes a buzz word, the buzz word becomes a desire and the desire becomes someone deciding that EVERYTHING needs to be handled by a PMP.

No, it doesn't.

No.

In the words of Mrs. Reagan, just say no. please?

I am NOT saying that Project Management is bad, it's not, it brings organization to chaos. In day to day operations, if you make something so hard to do, people will inevitably either not do something and blame the PM structure or go around the PM structure and again blame it as their rationalization.  Now with the whole movement to "cloud" computing many projects are firing up, the one that is to move your data to the cloud, use a PMP, the one to reset the nic card on server? just make it happen...

You'll learn eventually that most things are "Just make IT happen" (pronounce "IT" either way, it works)

Experiments in Novell Management (cont'd)

Desktop ended up being a SLED 32bit install. The 64bit was just a bit too much in the day the day maintenance for this site since clntrust and ifolder (2.1.8) weren't working. Used the proprietary ATI driver for the dual monitor setup and then built an XP machine in virtualbox since I still need to do some Windows work.

I like the multiple desktops and the ability to separate out my screens into a more logical workflow. All in All I like it!...like it so much that I also installed it on my corporate laptop.

Wow, after 10yrs of trying, I am running Linux for work.