by ezs | Mar 12, 2006 | evilzenscientist, fun stuff, Novell, Novell BrainShare, Uncategorized, ZENworks
Mark Schouls sent me a link to this Tshirt site; I don’t know whether to be worried by this…
Someone in Germany (or maybe Austria/Switzerland) is either surprisingly supportive of the Evil ZEN Scientist concept.. or I have a doppelganger. (I hope it’s not a stalker!)
Reminds me of my good friend Jerry Chadwick – who used to be the engineering manager for Novell Application Launcher. He had ‘NAL groupies’ who would follow him around at BrainShare – even into the restroom. 🙂
Written at: London Heathrow Airport, England
by ezs | Mar 11, 2006 | evilzenscientist, fun stuff, Gonetoutah, travel, Uncategorized
Wow – I went out for dinner tonight in Birmingham, England with my sister.
Birmingham is renowned as one of the curry capitals of England; the original home of the Balti.
This evening I chose to visit a recommendation – Lasan in the Jewelery Quarter.
Put simply – the food was superb. Modern, classy Indian, served with style. Very tasty, extremely high quality ingredients – and they cook parathas to order 🙂
Highly recommended
Written at: on the train between Birmingham, England and London, England.
by ezs | Mar 11, 2006 | Uncategorized, ZENworks
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Many of you may have seen the immense media hubbub regarding the ‘Origami Project‘; many news and gossip sites have been speculating what the Microsoft and Intel project really could be.
The hardware device itself was showcased at CeBIT in Hanover this week – and honestly reviews have been mixed.
My biggest question to you – is this just another gadget? (After all – it’s just a small form factor Windows XP Tablet Edition box.) Do any of you expect to see these appear in a corporate setting? Will any of you be expected to manage these devices!
I wager $5 that someone has SUSE Linux running on one of these things within a day or so of ship!
Written at: Birmingham, England
by ezs | Mar 10, 2006 | blogging, evilzenscientist, Novell, Uncategorized
Novell Cool Blogs finally went live and public this week – we’ve now got half a dozen regular posters – and seemingly hundreds of readers.
The next challenge is keeping up the quality and quantity of posts; we also plan to add other Novell people to the blogosphere – and finally got out and tell the world about the site!
One challenge we have is making the blog ‘less corporate’ – but still remaining a trusted and valuable source of information.
Written at: Birmingham, England
by ezs | Mar 10, 2006 | Uncategorized, ZENworks
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I spent the morning with a large, strategic Novell customer who asked a seemingly simple question:
“Can you give us a quick overview of ZENworks for Servers – we have it as part of our MLA and are wondering what to do with it”
A good question isn’t it?
Well – we talked for over an hour about three of the main roles that ZENworks 7 Server Management can play in an enterprise environment. I’ll cover these in a series of posts in the next week.
To start I’ll describe a common administrative headache – updating NetWare.
Written at: Edinburgh, Scotland
Patching and Update for NetWare
Sounds simple eh? But think about what really happens when you have to patch a NetWare server.
Most customers today (the ones that are not using ZENworks) download the Support Pack from Novell, unpack it, test it and then manually copy the Support Pack to servers (lots of XCOPY, batch files and crossed fingers here).
Next notify users that service will be interrupted (even if it is 3am in the morning).
Then it’s RCONSOLE to your server, unload NLMs, start the installation process, reboot and fingers crossed you have a good experience.
That takes time. It’s also not efficient and for everyone concerned about consistency, reliability and uptime this method doesn’t stand up.
Sound familiar? Are you the administrator stuck in the office at the weekend working into the small hours to patch servers?
The answer is to use ZENworks Server Management.
Novell are providing more and more patches and updates for NetWare in the ZENworks CPK format – examples include NetWare support packs, updates for the NetWare Java Virtual Machine, eDirectory – and – the newest addition – ZENworks Support Packs.
My colleague Martin Irwin has also worked to produce a migration from NetWare 6 to Open Enterprise Server using this technology!
Testimony from customers like yourselves really shows the value of this. I have worked with customers who have used ZENworks Server Management to automate NetWare and ZENworks Support Pack installation. They have taken the time needed to deploy from ‘weeks’ to ‘days’ – with a corresponding saving in time and effort.
Let me know your experiences with ZENworks Server Management – there’s a lot more information to share. Next time I will write about how Tiered Electronic Distribution can make the desktop administrators life easy.
Written at: Edinburgh, Scotland
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