It's All About the Real Estate

Desktop Real Estate that is.....

A well documented fact is that multiple monitors increase productivity. Not everyone feels that way, usually the manager who thinks that it's a luxury or a "geek" perk. Jeff Atwood puts forth in his Programmer's Bill of Rights that 2 monitors is a Right of the Programmer. Trading Houses have no problem with their Traders having massive 6 monitor setups with two high end computers to make money on the stock market. and they don't spend a dime unless it is to make money.  In IT multiple monitors come from our incredible ability to scavenge and improvise, which means we're using equipment that would of just been sitting or otherwise stored until it was useless.

My current work setup is four screens.

Screen #1 HP 8540 Laptop running SLED 11sp1 and Win7
Screens #2 and #3 HP 6000 Desktop Running SLED 11SP1 with XP running in a VM
Screen #4 KVM attached to a HP 5800 Desktop, a HP 6000 Desktop and a Wyse Terminal

and I use EVERY one , ALL day, EVERY day.

The laptop is used for communication, meetings, and as a "research and code on the move" screen. The biggest advantage on Screen 2 and 3 is that I use 5 virtual desktops on the SLED desktop and switch around in them all day, one virtual desktop runs email and ticketing, another is where monitoring happens, one houses the XP desktop, another is test and the last is for writing code that is tested out on Screen #4. My own dev/test environment in 36sq ft. of cube real estate. When I started doing development I was using an IBM 701C laptop with a 10" screen that was also attached to a 14" CRT. Even then I used both monitors as a way to spread out. As I've gained experience and age, my eyes have lost some sharpness and precision. Larger fonts on larger monitors helps make up for that loss of acuity and allows me to continue to be productive.

And Being Productive is What "IT" is all about .

Novell Datasync

Smart App, good interface, needs to be marketed better.....

We're implementing Datasync because we have an influx of iPhones and tablets starting to wander into our world. At effectively zero cost except for the CA Cert and SAN space it makes it an economic good choice in my book. Right out of the box, it's going to save time and money, down the road we should be able to leverage it to our SharePoint Implementation.

The build is straight forward, build a SLES 11 SP1 x64 box with 8GB of RAM. Fairly steep RAM requirement for a SLES box, but it's running in VMWARE, so it's just a configuration gotcha. We updated the build via our SMT before configuring. We followed the build guide and it worked like a charm. We did upgrade the groupwise back end to 8.02 HP2, this is important since it throws SOAP errors unless you do this update. Mail setup is fairly straightforward an easy. We're currently testing blowing up phones remotely and should be implementing this in May/June.....

It really needs to be talked up better by Novell. Businesses have potential savings in large amounts, either through migrating from Blackberry and BES to Android/iPhone or by adding it as a value added service to their users (never underestimate the value of good will).

If we can figure out how to allow some of our outside users onto Mail clients, this should be a slam dunk

Caveats.

You MUST be running GW 8.02 HP2, anything less will SOAP error your PO into a down state very quickly. For access outside your network get a REAL cert from a cert provider, but on the plus side you only need to expose one port to the outside world, 443.

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........