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Demos. When everything goes wrong..

by | Jun 4, 2007 | Evangelism, travel, Uncategorized

I’ve been demoing ZENworks Configuration Management to partners across Europe for two weeks with no problems at all. Mainly running a live demo from my set of servers at home.

It’s risky – I might have a power outage, WAN outage, local issues – but so far so good.

I’ve also got a fully virtualised demo on my laptop incase things go bad.

Today both failed.

Internet access was via an authenticated proxy – and for some reason I couldn’t connect to my servers at home. Then my virtual demo started to get sick. Firefox kept hanging, Windows went slow, DNS stopped working. It all pointed to a networking conflict of some sort.

Eventually the technical team opened up their firewall so I didn’t need a proxy – and the demo looks great.

Two things I’ve learned again:

  1. if something is going to fail – it will do. Big time.
  2. always have a plan C (death by powerpoint) and maybe a plan D…

Urg – Tripod

by | Jun 3, 2007 | evilzenscientist, Uncategorized

One of Grania’s activities uses Tripod for hosting. Grania is now looking after the online stuff.

It’s crap.

The previous incumbent had painstakingly written about 10 pages using FrontPage; everything was static.

Editing requires patience. Mass changes are impossible.

I knocked up a replacement in WordPress in about 5 minutes.