by ezs | Mar 18, 2006 | evilzenscientist, Uncategorized
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This is the first of a series of posts describing the inner workings of Novell Cool Blogs. Over the coming month I will bring in others from Novell’s web and IS&T teams to describe some more of the process.
Written at: Salt Lake City, UT while preparing for BrainShare 2006.
Let’s begin by describing how Cool Blogs is put together.
Cool Blogs has two main sites – one is internal, available only within Novell, the other is public facing.
The internal system is the staging and development blog. This is where new members of the Cool Blogs community can get familiar with the system; it’s also part of the release and change management regime for updating the site. Any updates to the blogging software, the underlying OS and application or even to the look, feel and behaviour of the site are tested internally first.
[It’s probably worth noting that this is a highly recommended best practice; everyone reading this should be going through some form of change control for any updates. I’ll not ask for a show of hands – it may shame a few of you!]
The external facing blog is available to you – our readers and community. This is where all of the live content is created and posted – and where we integrate a lot of Novells security and traffic management technologies.
The staging and production environments are designed to closely mirror each other; each blog consists of a pair of servers – both running SUSE Linux Enterprise Server 9 – one for the blog software, one for the database.
After a long search we eventually selected WordPress as the main infrastructure for Cool Blogs. There was no real political decision here – after a lot of testing we found that WordPress met our requirements in terms of platform support, features, extensibility, security – and it happens to be licensed under the GPL.
So CoolBlogs is running on top of WordPress – which consumes PHP, Apache and MySQL as the database. We added another layer of security and lockdown to these servers by deploying Novell AppArmor with some pretty restrictive profiles.
The public facing CoolBlogs service sits in Novells web hosting datacenter and is protected and accelerated by Novell iChain and multiple firewall and intrusion detection services.
The server hardware is good – dual processor, plenty of RAM, fast 1GB interconnects. My goal is to get traffic to these servers to make them work!
One of the most important parts of Cool Blogs was getting the look and feel just right – so it integrates with the wider novell.com theme. This was created and tested by the Novell Web team – and I think it looks pretty seamless.
So that’s the overview – WordPress on SLES 9, secured by AppArmor. I’m very happy so far with the solution. In my next post I will describe how we plan to link the Novell Cool Solutions Wiki with this Cool Blogs site to maximise the value of the information shared here.
I am interested to know your experiences – and what else you want to know!
Written at: Salt Lake City, UT while preparing for BrainShare 2006.
by ezs | Mar 18, 2006 | evilzenscientist, Novell, Novell BrainShare, Uncategorized
I’m now in downtown Salt Lake City for the week of BrainShare. It’s raining – but the BrainShare banners are everywhere, attendees are starting to arrive, hotels are full (or even overbooked!) and already there is a definate buzz building.
I’ve been down to the Technology Lab already; dropped off my demo servers for the keynotes; checked everything looks ok.
Tonight is a catchup with the team; tomorrow is an all day analyst event. I’m off to the spa 🙂
by ezs | Mar 17, 2006 | evilzenscientist, Uncategorized
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According to Shel Israel – Product Managers are one of the best sets of bloggers.
I like this sentiment – I also agree!
Product managers and other people who are passionate and knowledgeable about the details of a product are often better.
A product manager … is mostly loyal to his or her product and accountable to customers. The product manager is often tied to happy customers.
Product managers also speak in a language closer to everyday people.
Read the full post here. I’ll happily use this as a fire underneath the engineering and support Cool Bloggers!
Written at: Provo, UT while preparing BrainShare Keynotes
by ezs | Mar 16, 2006 | blogging, Evangelism, evilzenscientist, Uncategorized
According to Shel Israel – Product Managers are one of the best sets of bloggers. I like this sentiment – I also agree!
Product managers and other people who are passionate and knowledgeable about the details of a product are often better.
A product manager … is mostly loyal to his or her product and accountable to customers. The product manager is often tied to happy customers.
Product managers also speak in a language closer to everyday people.
Read the full post here.
by ezs | Mar 16, 2006 | Uncategorized, ZENworks
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I wrote last week about ZENworks Server Management in the real world.
In that post I described how a deployment of ZENworks can deliver some rapid benefits – namely patching and updates for NetWare and its associated services.
Next I want to cover the second major benefit of ZENworks Server Management – Tiered Electronic Distribution. Using TED will save you time, money – and shoe leather!
Written at: Salt Lake City, UT
Tiered Electronic Distribution has been part of ZENworks since ZENworks for Servers was first released; it allows ‘content’ to be moved across your infrastructure (WAN and LAN) efficiently, between servers and sites, supporting multiple platforms.
The ‘content’ can be of multiple types – I quickly covered NetWare updates, but any type of file content can be moved using TED. We have customers moving all imaginable data using this technology.
One of the most cool uses of TED is integration with ZENworks Desktop Management – moving desktop applications from a development/test/staging area – to production – and then out across a campus, departmental or branch infrastructure.
We have many customers using this type of infrastructure today – and seeing huge benefits.
How do you know this will work in your environment – just ask a few simple questions:
- am I manually (or semi-manually) moving ZENworks applications across my network?
- are my administrators creating and re-creating application objects for each site and department?
- does a change to a global application require days, weeks or months of rollout; touching each site and server?
If these questions trigger uncomfortable answers then maybe you should look at using Tiered Electronic Distribution in conjunction with your NAL applications.
Typically once the ZENworks Server Management infrastructure is deployed you will see payback in weeks; some customers have paid for their deployment projects with their first deployment.
I’ll leave this post for now – I will point people to Erin Quill’s session at BrainShare. TUT 350 covers using ZENworks in this manner – as well as other high availability ideas. There is also an Advanced Technical Training Session at BrainShare – ATT 345 – as well as a Technical Tutorial – TUT 347 – covering advanced application management.
Written at: Salt Lake City, UT
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