Select Page

Amazon S3, Azure, Live Grid and the cloud

by | Oct 30, 2008 | evilzenscientist, Uncategorized

Now Amazon have opened a European S3/EC2 datacenter in Dublin I am experimenting with video hosting on Amazon S3 and having data in Europe.

Several reasons:

  • there is a big fat pipe out of that datacenter into most European markets; most of the family watching our videos are in Europe. It’s a lot of hops closer (lower latency, better experience) and it’s a whole lot faster (not slurping out of my server rack at 1 Mb/s at best)
  • I don’t have to worry about the storage of the data. It’s just there.

 

I’m looking at moving other data into the cloud too; waiting to see what Microsoft offer up in terms of Azure and other offerings. Live Grid is consumer grade right now – but looks like a good start.

Adobe AIR and updating twhirl

by | Oct 14, 2008 | evilzenscientist, Uncategorized

Problems updating twhirl – it kept reporting an ‘Adobe AIR error 0’.

The problem was that the installer did not have permissions under Vista to install into c:program files.

The solution – run the Adobe AIR installer as Admin – c:Program FilesCommon FilesAdobe AIRVersions1.0Adobe Air Application Installer.exe – then select the .air file and install.

Snapfish firefox plugin

by | Sep 5, 2008 | evilzenscientist, Uncategorized

What a pain. Lots of photo printing sites use the Snapfish uploader – the only problem is there seem to be multiple versions out there – and they don’t co-exist at all.

Here’s an example – the UK Truprint site clashes with the legacy Costco printing – so Rachael had problems uploading.

Patching, updates and change control

by | Aug 13, 2008 | evilzenscientist, Uncategorized

Another regular round of patching this week.

My Active Directory DC and primary Kerberos box needed updating from Windows 2003 SP1 to Windows 2003 SP2.

The update had been on the list for a while, but because of the importance of it for authentication for all workstations and PAM/Kerberos on the Linux systems it never found a window.

I started the work while at home taking calls today – and for some reason SP2 just didn’t want to install. Multiple errors complaining about INF file validity and internal errors.

In the end I had to remove SP1 and install SP2 onto the rolled back server. I’m going to be testing everything this evening to make sure nothing drastic changed.

What was planned to be a 30 minute outage with a rollback of ‘uninstall the SP2’ turned into a more complex change. Uninstall SP1; rollback to re-install SP1. Install SP2. Rollback to uninstall SP2. Final recovery – restore from backup.

The moral – even with good change control the unexpected happens.

Ximian – five years ago

by | Aug 5, 2008 | evilzenscientist, Uncategorized

It was five years ago this week that Novell acquired Ximian.

http://www.novell.com/news/press/archive/2003/08/pr03051.html

I clearly remember heading to the Ximian offices at the back of Fenway Park in Boston a few weeks after the acquisition; my task was to meet with the Red Carpet Enterprise team and work on integration plans with ZENworks.

I arrived at the offices at around 8.30am – and waited until around 9.15 before someone turned up. The RCE team started heading in at around lunch time. I quickly learned that they worked like me 🙂 Work late, up late.

So started one of the most rewarding and exciting times of my time at Novell. The Red Carpet Enterprise team were an incredible team – I don’t think any of us are left at Novell.

RCE evolved into ZENworks Linux Management and then became the underpinning technology for ZENworks Configuration Management.