by ezs | Mar 10, 2006 | blogging, evilzenscientist, Novell, Uncategorized
Novell Cool Blogs finally went live and public this week – we’ve now got half a dozen regular posters – and seemingly hundreds of readers.
The next challenge is keeping up the quality and quantity of posts; we also plan to add other Novell people to the blogosphere – and finally got out and tell the world about the site!
One challenge we have is making the blog ‘less corporate’ – but still remaining a trusted and valuable source of information.
Written at: Birmingham, England
by ezs | Mar 10, 2006 | Uncategorized, ZENworks
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I spent the morning with a large, strategic Novell customer who asked a seemingly simple question:
“Can you give us a quick overview of ZENworks for Servers – we have it as part of our MLA and are wondering what to do with it”
A good question isn’t it?
Well – we talked for over an hour about three of the main roles that ZENworks 7 Server Management can play in an enterprise environment. I’ll cover these in a series of posts in the next week.
To start I’ll describe a common administrative headache – updating NetWare.
Written at: Edinburgh, Scotland
Patching and Update for NetWare
Sounds simple eh? But think about what really happens when you have to patch a NetWare server.
Most customers today (the ones that are not using ZENworks) download the Support Pack from Novell, unpack it, test it and then manually copy the Support Pack to servers (lots of XCOPY, batch files and crossed fingers here).
Next notify users that service will be interrupted (even if it is 3am in the morning).
Then it’s RCONSOLE to your server, unload NLMs, start the installation process, reboot and fingers crossed you have a good experience.
That takes time. It’s also not efficient and for everyone concerned about consistency, reliability and uptime this method doesn’t stand up.
Sound familiar? Are you the administrator stuck in the office at the weekend working into the small hours to patch servers?
The answer is to use ZENworks Server Management.
Novell are providing more and more patches and updates for NetWare in the ZENworks CPK format – examples include NetWare support packs, updates for the NetWare Java Virtual Machine, eDirectory – and – the newest addition – ZENworks Support Packs.
My colleague Martin Irwin has also worked to produce a migration from NetWare 6 to Open Enterprise Server using this technology!
Testimony from customers like yourselves really shows the value of this. I have worked with customers who have used ZENworks Server Management to automate NetWare and ZENworks Support Pack installation. They have taken the time needed to deploy from ‘weeks’ to ‘days’ – with a corresponding saving in time and effort.
Let me know your experiences with ZENworks Server Management – there’s a lot more information to share. Next time I will write about how Tiered Electronic Distribution can make the desktop administrators life easy.
Written at: Edinburgh, Scotland
by ezs | Mar 10, 2006 | blogging, evilzenscientist, patching, Uncategorized
Just updated – and things seem stable enough.
WordPress 2.0.2 fixes a security issue – details of the update here.
by ezs | Mar 9, 2006 | evilzenscientist, Uncategorized
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A great question from a friend in Norway:
# Roger Foss Says:
March 9th, 2006 at 12:57 pm
Please clarify something:
Blogs have traditionally been a little edgy; a place where employees deviate a little from the corporate line.
These cool blogs sound very corporate and official, though. They contrast to the blogs of, say, Miguel and Nat, where you barely see a Novell logo.
So if they are official blogs, how are they different from the newsletters, mailing lists and news groups that already exist?
Its a fair question, no? So we know what to expect.
I think the answer is that we’re just getting going. Most of the bloggers here are new to blogging – and in many cases are being somewhat conservative to see how ‘the powers that be’ react.
There are naturally differences between this Cool Blogs site and the personal blogs of Nat and Miguel (and others..)
We are trying to keep the focus on Novell technology, with blogs written by Novell technologists. We want to be edgy, sometimes irreverent, never irrelevant, occasionally funny and I hope soon a trusted source of information on the inner Novell.
Does this help answer your question? What else would readers like to see here?
Written at: Edinburgh, Scotland
by ezs | Mar 9, 2006 | Novell Open Audio, Uncategorized, ZENworks
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I recorded a series of podcasts for Novell Open Audio – the first part of this is now live!
This time round I give some background on ZENworks 7 Linux Management. Still to come – Asset Management, Patching and BrainShare 2006.
Enjoy!
Written at: Edinburgh, Scotland
by ezs | Mar 9, 2006 | evilzenscientist, fun stuff, Technology, Uncategorized
There has been a lot of hype in the last week or so about the Origami device – or Ultra Mobile PC (UMPC)
Intel have a way cool video here – this looks like a technology teaser more than anything.
Details are starting to trickle out of CeBIT in Hanover – as well as on MSDN Channel 9.
From what I can see and read:
– this is clearly a first generation product.
– three hours battery life. Urg. My Thinkpad gets double that! My iPod Nano gets over 14 hours!
– the form factor leaked on the web earlier this month looks cool; the products shown so far look less cool.
– 1GHz Intel x86, 512 MB RAM, Wireless, Windows XP Tablet Edition.. that’s just enough to run an RDP client and iTunes 😉
Clearly there is a cool factor here; the challenge will be in running to second edition – I’d certainly look at needing more battery life.
As Scoble said:
It’s not an iPod killer.
It’s not a portable Xbox.
It’s not an OQO killer.
It’s not a PSP killer.
Update: it’s not a Nokia N90 killer either (thanks to Marc Canter for asking about that).
Update 2: it’s not a Treo 700w killer either (thanks to Dave for pointing that out).
Update 3: hey, PalmAddicts, it’s not a Palm killer either. 🙂
So, what is Origami?
The UPMC doesn’t look like any of these; the closest I can describe right now is a ‘home laptop replacement’.
Written at: Edinburgh, Scotland
by ezs | Mar 8, 2006 | Uncategorized, ZENworks
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I am Edinburgh for a few days visiting some of our global ZENworks customers.
One thing that I love about visiting customers is seeing how Novell technology is being used. Every customer deployment opens my eyes to the seemingly endless imagination of technical architects and administrators like yourselves. Every large customer deployment is somewhat unique – whether for ZENworks, Novell Identity Manager or any of our technologies.
The other part that makes customer visits so vital, is getting a first hand account of new trends and activities within IT organisations. It is direct interaction like this that helps Product Managers collect requirements for better, innovative products.
I’ll report back on what I find in the next couple of days.
Written at: Edinburgh, Scotland
by ezs | Mar 7, 2006 | evilzenscientist, Uncategorized
I’m off to Scotland for a few days – customer visits and strategy and roadmap presentations.
I’ll be in Edinburgh at the end of this week – hopefully I’ll get some time to see more than airports, plans and offices!
by ezs | Mar 7, 2006 | 'Web 2.0', evilzenscientist, Uncategorized
Wow. A great post from Ray Ozzie – Microsoft CTO.
See the demo here – then think what this could mean.
Ray describes how applications evolved from DOS through to early Windows to today; and how ‘Clipboard’ functionality was key. The next natural extension is to the web – and newer web based applications.
by ezs | Mar 7, 2006 | blogging, evilzenscientist, Uncategorized
I had a comment:
urm how do I add your blog to my firefox 1.5.1 live feeds.
I’m just too used to seeing the rss button in the address bar.
If I click on the rss 2.0 link I get the error about the xlm not having any style info associated with it.
Thanks
Marcus
I added the icon on the Firefox address bar. This was pretty simple to add.
For those interested – the following needs to be added to
<link rel="alternate" type="application/rss+xml"
title="Evil ZEN Scientist feed" href="/index.php/feed">
I made modifications to index.php within my theme under WordPress.
[I also ran into a WordPress 2.0.1 bug]
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