by ezs | Nov 8, 2007 | Uncategorized, ZENworks
Novell has a fantastic demo suite known as Utopia – listen to this Novell Open Audio Podcast for details.
One issue that was reported by the field was that running Windows 2003 server on VMware workstation with ZENworks Configuration Management would sometimes cause the ZENworks services not to start.
I’ve never really seen this issue; I saw one VM that was broken – but only saw that everything was slow.
For the sales kickoff I built a set of VMs and was testing them. Moving from ESX to VMware Workstation on SLED running on a Thinkpad T42p laptop I saw the issue.
In short the workstation service was being slow to start; the server was stressed – and the service timed out. The dominos started to fall; Net Logon failed etc etc etc.
My fix is simple. Make the workstation service dependant on something that is relatively benign but that will start with some reliability. I chose the DNS service (it’s a single server) – because that ultimately provides the DDNS underpinning to Active Directory and other services.
Here’s how:
sc config lanmanworkstation depend= dns
That simple. Reboot and you should now have a working ZCM Utopia demo.
For the internal Novell people – did this fix your problem?
by ezs | Nov 8, 2007 | fun stuff, Uncategorized
I blogged last year on ZENworks project code names.
We recently almost announced a project codenamed “Brown Trout”.
Innocent sounding to the US reader; I’ll let the rest of the English speaking world share what the context is.
Hint: It’s brown, streamlined and lives in water. But it’s not a fish.
by ezs | Nov 7, 2007 | Technology, Uncategorized, wordpress
Just a quick note; WordPress 2.3.1 adds support for WLW Keywords.
Some nomenclature changes – tags to keywords; but it works just great.
Here are the Keywords in WLW:
… and the corresponding tags in WordPress:
by ezs | Nov 7, 2007 | evilzenscientist, Uncategorized
ZENworks imaging can use the Preboot eXecution Environment – PXE – to start it’s imaging engine.
When the imaging server components (TFTP server, Imaging engine, Proxy DHCP) are running on the same server as the DHCP server there are certain configuration changes that need to be made.
Read the ZCM10 documentation for more.
Three steps to happiness – I’ll document this for Windows; SLES is broadly similar.
– set the Proxy DHCP to run correctly
– set Proxy DHCP to start automatically
– add DHCP option tag 60 to the DHCP scope
(more…)
by ezs | Nov 7, 2007 | evilzenscientist, Uncategorized
I’m building demos and lab machines for the Sales Kick off in Orlando next week.
I had a load of laptops that needed cleaning up before reinstallation. I even had a disk from my old production laptop that still had PGP whole disk encryption bootguard on it.
Trinity Rescue Disk helped out again. Delete the partitions; re-write the master boot record. Invaluable.
by ezs | Nov 5, 2007 | evilzenscientist, Uncategorized
I hate it when Fedex leave my parcel at the sorting depot for a day; just to meet and not beat the 2 business day delivery.
The parcel //could// have been delivered today – 5th November – but that would be next business day.
As a customer I’d be //really// happy if I got things early.
by ezs | Nov 2, 2007 | evilzenscientist, Uncategorized
I’ve been using Hugin for a few years now – following a recommendation from Nat.
The best things about Hugin:
- Hugin does a stunning job of stitching and blending pictures
- Hugin is Open Source – so it’s free
- Hugin is cross platform
So here’s my 5 minute how-to:
Get Hugin – download from http://hugin.sourceforge.net/download/
Install it.
Get autopano-sift to do the point management from http://user.cs.tu-berlin.de/~nowozin/autopano-sift/
Install it.
Get enblend to do the excellent blending of photos once they are stitched together from http://sourceforge.net/projects/enblend
Install it.
You now need to tell Hugin to use autopano-sift and enblend.
File –> Preferences –> Autopano
Specify the location of Autopano-sift
File –> Preferences –> Enblend
Specify the location of enblend
That’s it.
Add your pictures; do the magic – and you have some great panoramic pictures.
I’ve found that experimenting is key; you can get great results with some patience.
There’s also a manual for Hugin here http://sourceforge.net/forum/forum.php?forum_id=707719
by ezs | Nov 2, 2007 | evilzenscientist, Uncategorized
I’ve been looking for a good quality, upscaling, multi-region DVD player for ages.
Alan tipped me off about Oppo – and I’ve just bought a DV981HD player.
Should be here Monday.
Apparently it’s $1000 worth of player for $225. Alan swears by his.
by ezs | Nov 1, 2007 | evilzenscientist, Uncategorized
Novell has let go a lot of colleagues and good friends in the last month.
ZENworks Engineering and QA lost a lot of good people; their roles are being filled in Bangalore, India.
Also several UK friends were let go this week; and also people across the US.
by ezs | Oct 30, 2007 | evilzenscientist, Uncategorized
Woo. Off to sunny Orlando in a few weeks for the annual sales conference. I missed last year; I was on paternity leave.
I’m running three days of ‘Endpoint management training’ for the global pre-sales and technical teams.
I’m juggling the agenda right now – should include:
– Advanced ZCM scenarios; scale, deployment, labs etc
– ZENworks Endpoint Security Management
– ZENworks Patch Management Services update
– Vista deployment and migration lab
– roundtable, roadmap, updates etc
Recent Comments