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Getting old?

.. or blame the jetlag?

I left my (actually Grania’s) camera in the restuarant last night.

Anywhere else and there would be zero sight of it again; lifted and sold on eBay.

In Singapore a totally different experience; one phonecall last night – “Yes – we have your camera”; I walked in this evening and the camera was waiting for me.

The local team told me that this was the ‘norm’ and Singaporeans are very honest. Well – it saved me getting in trouble when I got home!

Trans-pacific internet connectivity

I’m in delightful Singapore this week; with good, fast local internet access.

The trouble is that all of the content I need is in the US.

Ping Plotter

The graph from Ping Plotter tells it all. Locally little latency. The trans-pacific hop adds 200ms to each packet.

The bandwidth itself isn’t bad; just the latency.

Systems Management consolidation continues

HP aquired Novadigm.

Altiris acquired Previo, Computing Edge, Wise, FSLogic, Bridgewater Tonic and Pedestal.

Symantec have aquired Ghost, Powerquest and On Technologies.

Novell aquired Ximian and Tally Systems.

LANDesk was aquired by Avocent.

Microsoft aquired Softricity and Desktop Standard.

Now Symantec have spent again and announced the intent to acquire Altiris.

Training room fun

Ah – this takes me back ten years to 1997/1998 when I was training Intel LANDesk 2.52 and 6.x to customers.

I’m in Singapore and training about 20 partners and internal people. 4 of the training room machines have hardware failure. It seems that about 20% failure rate is normal; the other two Novell tracks are also seeing hardware problems at that rate.

As always – it’s the wear and tear of the training room regime – lots of uptime and rebuilds; as well as the additional shock of running in a high temperature, high humidity environment.

I remember training in Wymeswold with Netman and having 50% failures after a cold weekend – totally different problems.

100 days of ZENworks – Windows only management

I’m in Singapore at the Asia Pacific Partner Academy; we are training partners on the forthcoming ‘ZENworks Pulsar’ release. It’s just gone beta 1.

One question that came up:

How do I integrate ZENworks 7 with Active Directory?

Well – here are the links.

Here is a really cool article from Novell Connection Magazine; it’s from December 2004 and refers to ZENworks 6.5 – but the concepts are valid today.

Also take a look at the Novell Wiki.

Here is how to integrate the ZENworks Middle Tier with a Layer 4 switch; here are the Middle Tier Best Practices.

There have also been several BrainShare sessions on Windows only management. I’ll try and find the links to presentations.