mcbeen.com

We are finally getting close to finishing our datacenter here. Here are some photos of the power infrastructure along with our HVAC.

Dell Deals For EqualLogic – Forbes.com

If you hear a faint sobbing in the distance. It's probably me.

Equallogic has been one of the two pillars of success in my department. The combination of VMware and Equallogic has been amazing to watch. But in all reality. Any decent iSCSI system would have achieved the same results. We were onef their first customers, and have been very happy with their hardware. But we will not do business with Dell. They still owe us money for not honoring our warentees on hundreds of machines.

I have another meeting with Compellent on the 19th. They seem to have taken equallogic a step further.

Why oh why could they have not been bought by hp or EMC?

We having been using VMware here at work for quite a while now. We have the full setup, and it all works really good. But we have had a very annoying problem with VMware convertor for some time now. It migrates virtual machines to ESX server from Virtual server just fine. Also handles Physical-toVirtual great as well. But after you get the VMs on to your ESX box, and you want to reconfigure them, or move them back to virtual server, you can't. You get this error "unable to determine guest operating system". After search the forums and such, we found little advice. But a small line at the bottom of a discussion board on a third party site had the answer. "unplug your usb drives". What? Bullshit. That can't be it. I took a look around my computer, and sure enough I had a USB floppy plugged in. I removed it and tried again… It worked.

So. If you use VMware convertor… UNPLUG YOUR USB DRIVES BEFORE RUNNING!

I got my iPhone for work back in june for a few reasons.

• I really wanted a touch screen ipod.
• I wanted a video ipod with a larger screen.
• I wanted portable email on my phone.
• I wanted a phone that didn't suck.
• I needed to test out our new external mail system at work.

You can see that none of these issues were related to cost. Good PDAs cost tons. My last ipaq was almost $700.00. A 400 dollar iPhone was no big deal to me. Imagine my surprise when I  went over the phone bills with my boss, and discovered that comparable service through verizon on our Q's was almost $120.00! I currently pay around $70.00 for my service.  Over the lifetime of the service, this really adds up and more than covers the added cost of the device it self.

I'm really confused now about why people are claiming the iphone plans are expensive. Maybe they should double check their overages. 

Once again, I hit a wall when trying to integrate all my databases here at work. This time, I was stymied by the fact that even though Cisco CCM runs it’s database on MS SQL server, the system does not use native date/time formats. Instead it decides to use the industry standard… number of seconds since January 1st, 1970. So I have a huge long integer. No problem right? I’ll just put it through Crystal’s formula engine. Except I get an error telling me the year is out of range.

Turns out the Crystal Date functions are based upon DAYS, not seconds. and the base date is 1900, not 1970. So, in order to make this work, I need to convert our integer from seconds to days, and then offset our number by 70 years. So what’s the solution?

CDateTime ({call manager date value}/(24*60*60)+(Date (1970, 1, 1)-Date (1900, 1, 1)))

You are welcome.

So… there is this really bad nasty out there right now. Fortunately, the researchers have been busy and have found a couple ways to help dealing with this bad boy… but they forgot one small detail. How in the hell are you going to get registry changes out to the thousands of hosts on your network? Well, here you go. it is a GPO extension that allows you to push registry changes out to all of your machines. You will need to install a client GPO extension on each machine, but this is done through a GPO as well. You can find the client extension in the program files folder after you install the admin software on your machine. I have deployed it here on a mixture of xp and 200o machines without trouble. No reboots either. Drop in your changes and a couple hours from now you can rest a little easier.

Seems Dell has taken the most interesting step of deleting their online forums. The Register has a great quote related to the fiasco:

Part of the problem seems to have stemmed from Jeff Jarvis, a columnist on the San Francisco Examiner, who summed up his anger in a letter to a Dell VP, saying: “This machine is a lemon. Your at-home and complete care service is a fraud. Your customer service is appalling. Your product is dreadful. Your brand is mud.”

I could not sum it up better. And I have evidence to back it up… Just search my Blog.

I discovered today, and confirmed with Symantec tech support, that there is a problem running Symantec Client Security (antivirus) on windows XP. Starting a week ago, we began to notice here that random machines were showing up with 20 or more “disconnected” drive letters. I’m not talking about the normal disconnected drives we have had since Windows 95. These phantom drives go no where, and cannot be disconnected or remapped. And they are not nice enough to stay off “normal” drive mappings. If a mapped drive letter is “taken” by this bug, you cannot get it back. And If all driver letters are taken, then you are truly screwed. Attempting to “net use /delete” results in an error telling you the resource cannot be found. Trying “net use \\server_name\drive” results in an error telling you the resource is in use. Fun fun fun.

We tried service packs, hot fixes, deleting profile, and creating new users. No luck what so ever. Luckily, after some brainstorming, I decided to try removing Symantec Client Security v10. This corrected the issue.

Symantec at this point does not know why this problem is occurring, or when a fix may be found. The current estimate is for MR1 in 4-8 weeks.

I got THREE customer surveys in the mail today. JOY! Apple, dell, Veritas… Where to begin. Lets start with dell shall we? I rated the overall call highly, but added this in the comments:

Tech support most of the time is very knowledgeable. The problem is getting anything fixed. I’m treated as though my problem does not matter, or that they simply cannot authorize repair even though I am under warrantee. To add on top of it, most of the time I get used/broken parts that make the problem worse. I buy a new machine, and then when I get a problem a week later, I get used parts. Why would I want to be given parts that failed for someone else? It would be different if I was out of warrantee and was paying on my own dime. In my cases I find it extremely insulting. I have stopped using Dell service parts because of failures after repair. Most parts fail within months after installation. I will not purchase from Dell in the future, and I highly recommend that others avoid them as well until these issues are corrected.

Veritas was a little different because while they are very helpful on things they understand, they are evasive on issues they do not. I still have yet to get satisfaction on my issue related to cataloging my tapes… after being told to delete my catalogs. They have not seen the issue before, and have been slow to admit they have no idea what to do about it. I hated them neutral

Apple was a perfect example of how to handle tech support. I called them as you know about my dead iPod. They referred me to the RMA site for iPods. I filled out the paperwork. They mailed me a box. I mailed it back. Then I waited… About 5 days after I sent it in I got confirmation of receipt. Then I got notification of work. Then I was told a new unit was being ordered. That was last Thursday. Today, I have a brand spanking new iPod. Beautiful. I then receive a survey. Pretty sweet. This is how dell USED to be and how HP is TODAY.

I have yet to have a problem with HP/Compaq tech support. Considering how often I call them it is amazing. Server, Network, PDA, Desktop support is all good with them. I don’t know about consumer though. Never tried that line.