by ezs | Jan 11, 2014 | evilzenscientist, Uncategorized
The never ending saga of running infrastructure has gone full circle. All of my self-hosted blogs and websites have moved from a Hyper-V server in my garage and up to Microsoft Windows Azure.
I spent a decade (2001-2011) self-hosting. Running both email and website on platforms as diverse as NetWare through RedHat, SUSE and finally Windows Server. In early 2011 I decided to get out of the hosting game and move the blogs to GoDaddy and the mail to Exchange Online (then BPOS, now Office 365).
GoDaddy really frustrated me. Poor performance, poor logging, strange “go slows” and unexpected disconnects of SSH. Understandably “I got what I paid for” – but frustrating none the less.
It has taken eighteen months – but slowly the various blogs and websites have been culled and archived, moved back to self-host and now up to Azure.
Windows Azure has really improved over the past two years – I started by evaluating the Platform as a Service capabilities back in November 2011. Functional – but missing some capabilities that I needed to run the photo blogs (all written for the LAMP stack).
More recently as the Infrastructure as a Service capabilities have moved from preview to production I tested this blog running on Azure. Performance and uptime have been great. The blog is running a SLES 11 SP3 platform on Azure – and it’s as functional as running on bare metal or any hypervisor.
I finally took the time to move the family blogs and business website to the platform over the last week or so. The migration of WordPress blogs and Gallery photo sites is pretty simple now.
by ezs | Oct 11, 2013 | evilzenscientist, Uncategorized
Over the course of 5½ years I have had four different and evolving roles – and numerous offices. Today I moved back down to the ground floor of Building 121 on the Redmond campus; my fourth office in this build – and the tenth office overall.
by ezs | Oct 1, 2013 | evilzenscientist, Uncategorized
I recently changed role at Microsoft – and blogging about technology and the application of that technology is going to become a lot easier.
My new position is as the Chief Technology Officer – or Chief Technology Architect – for the World Wide Microsoft Technology Centers.
I will be working with a first class global team of technology architects and leads to really define the portfolio view of the entire conversation and offering in the MTC. The MTC is the pinnacle of the Microsoft technical sales organisation – hosting some incredible customers on a daily basis around the globe.
An incredible asset for Microsoft and our customers – and I am feeling both challenged and excited for the new opportunity.
by ezs | Sep 12, 2013 | evilzenscientist, Uncategorized
I remember a few years ago talking to the marvelous Jeffery Snover about PowerShell – and my mind was blown. The possibilities of scripting, remotability, the modular design – were all magical and innovative.
This week I’ve been updating servers on my Hyper-V infrastructure – most of them are server core – reducing the memory and patch requirements significantly.
Using a PowerShell I’ve been able to upgrade them all to Windows Server 2012 R2 with minimal fuss and effort.
by ezs | Sep 11, 2013 | evilzenscientist, Uncategorized
I took advantage of the enforced, unplanned outage to update SLES 11 from SP2 to SP3.
All good – the only tiny gotcha was running the MySQL upgrade manually at the end.
Otherwise – looks happy so far.
by ezs | Sep 11, 2013 | evilzenscientist, Uncategorized
I got bitten by the udev GUIDs when I did the move/upgrade/move back of my on-prem blog server this morning.
What should have been a simple evacuation of some VMs, upgrade the host to Windows Server 2012 R2, move the old VMs back in place – turned into another episode of handcrafting grub entries and checking that everything mounted back up correctly.
I got bit by this before – and I need to drill into the best practices for using SLES 11/udev in a virtual environment.
by ezs | Aug 6, 2013 | evilzenscientist, Uncategorized
After an initial set of testing in 2011 – I am back testing the Azure IaaS capabilities for the blog.
by ezs | Feb 15, 2013 | Uncategorized
IPfire 2.13 RC1 was released a week or so ago – currently in test – and so far, so good.
by ezs | Jan 1, 2013 | Uncategorized
I found the secret sauce to make the Fall 2012 release of Intune work with Windows 8.
Happy now I can manage the new machines with Intune.
by ezs | Jan 1, 2013 | Uncategorized
Fifteen years ago I would spend six weeks writing the incorrect year on every cheque I wrote.
In 2013 I’ll be lucky to write a cheque during the year.
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