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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.

ITIL v3 Managers Bridge

by | Jul 25, 2008 | evilzenscientist, Uncategorized

Big grins this morning. I got an email overnight from Brisbane – the results are in.

I passed the ITIL v3 Managers Bridge – it was an 80% pass score and I got 95%

I’m just waiting for the certificate to arrive in the post – but this means I am an ‘ITIL Expert’

Server retirement

by | Jul 24, 2008 | evilzenscientist, Uncategorized

One of the last things I did before the move was to move some of the retired servers from physical to virtual. The hosts were all SLES 10 – so I did the move to VMware server; the idea being that if I needed anything off the server could find it again.

This week I needed to move one of my previously hosted sites to another host – and I couldn’t find the pesky virtual hard disk. Eventually I found it lurking on a backup server.

Sigh.

Taking the ITIL v3 Managers bridge – some notes

by | Jul 13, 2008 | evilzenscientist, ITIL, Uncategorized

Hopefully these notes will be useful for others; based on my experience of last weeks Bridging course and exam from The Art of Service in Brisbane.

The Curriculum

  • the curriculum is available from APM Group here
  • I didn’t see any surprises in the exam – i.e. everything in the exam was described in the curriculum
  • the focus of the exam is the differences from the ITIL v2 Managers exam.

Differences … but..

  • the bridge does assume that you understand the ITIL v2 space pretty well – i.e. your managers is still fresh!
  • you should read the five ITIL v3 books; there is a lot of contextual information that you really do need to understand.

After four days of cramming in Brisbane I ended up with five annoted ITIL books; five ‘books of notes’; each based on one of the phase books; a book of sample questions and exam-style questions; and finally a book of mind maps from The Art of Service.

For my own learning style the cross-referencing between the ‘bridge notes’ from The Art of Service and back to the books was really useful. It let me refer quickly from a concept – such as Portfolio Management, back to the relevent sections in the books.

Also useful is cross-referencing where the different roles and processes intersect. There is a lot of emphasis on the holistic lifecycle; also on the relationships between phases in the lifecycle. It’s not enough to try and map the v2 linear world onto the v3 map; I found it invaluable working with others to really understand the lifecycle and how it all fits.

Exam is done. Fingers crossed. Results in a week or so.