Gatlinburg Out of Office Message
Greetings!
I am currently on a family vacation in Gatlinburg, TN with 17 people. If all goes as planned and we stay civil to one another, I will be back in the office Monday June 27th. That is, of course, as long as I am not attacked by a bear while hiking.
You know me, I’ll be on email, but it may be a slightly slower turnaround than to what you are accustomed. I will only be checking and responding to urgent messages as time and bear attacks allow.
If you have an urgent service request or technical issue, please e-mail our support desk.
If you need immediate assistance, please contact our service desk at (513) 469-6500 option #1.
Thank you.
The Need for SPEED
Recently, I was talking to a client about performance issues they were having with their primary database server. Their business has taken off in recent months and they have added additional staff. That has resulted in an increase in both the amount of data in their system, and the number of users accessing it. They had come to me a while ago about ways to speed up some workstations that they use for CAD work. I had suggested trying solid state drives. They followed my recommendation and saw drastic improvements in the performance of those systems. Because of that positive experience, they wanted to try the same thing with this database server. But, putting solid state drives in servers with large storage requirements can be a much more complicated and expensive undertaking than putting one in a laptop or PC.
We initially investigated solutions from the major SAN and server manufacturers, but the costs were two to three times what the customer’s budget would allow. We then started brainstorming alternative solutions. I knew that Intel is one of the best manufacturers of solid state drives. I also knew that they have been winning awards with a new line of servers. So, I looked into the Intel solution and found the perfect combination of price and performance. It was exactly what the client was looking for. To make things even better, Intel had a case study of another organization that had implemented the exact server configuration we were considering.
If you are still reading this, I appreciate it. Here’s where it gets interesting. The case study is about a photography project called Paris-26-Gigapixels by Kolor. It is the third project of its type in the world. Read the rest of this entry »
Solved: Mozy stuck at “Loading Settings…..”
I have been using Mozy for a couple of years now to backup my laptop whenever I am connected to the Internet and it is idle. I have never had a problem with it. But for some reason a few days ago the application would get stuck saying “Loading settings……” I am running on Windows 7. I went through a bunch of troubleshooting, but no matter what I did it would still get stuck. Finally I stumbled across this information, and it solved my problem. I figured I would share it:
1. Click on Start Button
2. Go to All Programs-> Accessories and right on Command Prompt and select “Run as Administrator” from context menu.
3. Copy the following and paste it into the command prompt window: netsh winsock reset catalog
4. Now copy this command into the same window to reset the TCP/IP stack: netsh int ip reset reset.log
5. Reboot
6. Run a Manual Backup
I don’t know why that fixed the issue, but it did. My backup started to run perfectly after the reboot.
SCCM Right-Click Tools
If you are dissappointed that Microsoft seems to have left out some basic tools in SCCM, download and install this free add-in:
http://myitforum.com/cs2/blogs/rhouchins/archive/2008/04/09/sccm-right-click-tools.aspx
One of the more basic items that it offers is the ability to shutdown or reboot a system through a simple right-click menu.
I also ran across this nice collection of tools for SCCM:
Cyber Wars
In Star Wars Episode I: The Phantom Menace the Trade Federation used tall, thin, skeleton-like battle droids in many large-scale attacks. These battle droids blindly carried out commands sent to them from centralized control ships. The droids were unthinking and would follow any orders given to them.
It seems like something you would only see in a science-fiction movie, but just like battle droids, there are armies of zombie computers all around the world being centrally controlled to wage wars. These “botnets”, as they are called, are used for varying types of criminal activity like attacking other computers and sending spam. There are some botnet armies that number in the millions, but most are in the tens of thousands. When the Wikileaks website was recently attacked, it was by some of these botnets. And when Paypal stopped allowing donations to Wikileaks through their website, botnets attacked and took down credit card websites in retaliation. Read the rest of this entry »
Save Your Precious Data!
Today was my son’s first day of first grade. Like any proud parent, I took a bunch of pictures to document the momentous occasion. Like any digital photographer, I downloaded the pictures to my computer where I have year after year of my life documented in photographs. If you have a digital camera like most other people these days, you also have those priceless photos stored on your home computer. As important as those photos are, they are dangerously close to being lost forever.
All those priceless photos of birthdays, graduations and vacations can be lost in an instant if you have a hard drive failure or virus. A family member could accidentally delete them. Someone could steal your computer. A fire could incinerate your memories, or a tornado could wipe your computer from the face of the earth. Almost all of the possibilities I have described above have happened to people I know. Typically the first question I always ask is: Did you have a backup? Unfortunately many times they did not. What a terrible loss. If they would have only taken some simple steps, the loss could have easily been avoided.
Thanks to broadband Internet access and cheap online storage solutions, you can easily backup your data AUTOMATICALLY for little or no money. Read the rest of this entry »
My love for solid-state drives is SOLID.
I was talking to a colleague today and the topic of solid state drives came up. He had been considering using a solid-state hard drive, but had heard too many “horror” stories about performance or data loss. I was surprised to 
hear this. I have been using solid state drives for well over a year now and have had nothing but success. When I originally investigated using a solid-state drive, I read many poor reviews on certain models of solid-state drives. So when I selected my first drive, I was careful to read all of the reviews I could, and check all of the specs. I settled on a drive from Corsair that had excellent reviews and decent specs for the price.
The first system I built with a solid-state drive was a terminal server for demo purposes. That was the fastest terminal server I ever worked on. The server would boot in about 30 seconds, logins took 2 seconds, and applications would launch instantaneously. From that point forward, I was sold.
I am currently running a Lenovo Thinkpad T500 with a Corsair CMFSSD-128GBG1D solid state hard drive. I swapped out the standard hard drive that came with the laptop. It was as simple as Read the rest of this entry »
Are you down with DIIOP? Yeah, you know me…..
I upgraded a client’s Domino server last night. Today we discovered that they use Axiom Groupware Integration for a service they receive from Rearden Commerce. It is a service that allows them to book flights, rental cars and hotels at a discount and have those items be pushed automatically to user’s calendars over the Internet. It is a pretty nice service from what I saw of it. Here is the website with more info:
http://www.reardencommerce.com/
Here is information on the Axiom component:
http://corp.americanexpress.com/gcs/travel/us/land/axiom.htm
So ever since the upgrade was completed, none of the appointments were being created automatically like they were supposed to be. We looked into the logs on the Tomcat webserver that Rearden uses to submit the appointments to Domino and found this error:
2009-07-22 17:42:57,171 ERROR [groupware] [http-8080-2] – createAppointment error NotesException: Could not get IOR from Domino Server: http://ServerName:63148/diiop_ior.txt
That Tomcat server receives the request from Rearden over the Internet, then uses a DIIOP connection to the Domino server to create the calendar entry. As part of our normal upgrade process, we had hardened security on the Domino server and we had disabled Anonymous HTTP access to the server. It looks like this requires that to be allowed. We turned anonymous HTTP access back on, restarted HTTP, and everything was working again. Looks like we will have to see if there is a way for this to work without the need for anonymous HTTP access. But at least for now they can update their schedules.
Another problem solved!
How much is a petabyte?
I stumbled upon this fascinating presentation by Mozy:
http://mozy.com/blog/misc/how-much-is-a-petabyte/
Not only does it do a good job of visually explaining how big a petabyte is – it also has some interesting facts about the amount of power and storage space our worldwide computing resources consume. Enjoy!
