by ezs | Oct 17, 2005 | evilzenscientist, patching, Uncategorized
I seem to have won the task of writing a short paper on ‘how to update and patch Novell systems in the enterprise’.
I’m working on this in conjunction with my ZENworks 7 Linux Management white paper – which is still being written. (Sorry it’s late – I’m on the road again!)
My summary so far is:
NetWare – use ZENworks Server Management. Deploy CPKs of the Consolidated Support Pack
SLES 8 – use ZENworks Linux Management. Mirror content from a YaST Online Update mirror.
SLES 9 – use ZENworks Linux Management. Mirror content from update.novell.com. Note: Make sure you have migrated your SUSE portal account!
NLD 9 – as SLES 9
RHEL – use ZENworks Linux Management. I know it’s not a Novell product – but mirror content from Red Hat Network using your RHN credentials.
There are probably some other platforms I need to add here – small biz server and some applications spring to mind – but I’ll be working off this list.
Comments welcome.
by ezs | Oct 11, 2005 | evilzenscientist, patching, Uncategorized
A busy one:
Microsoft Patch Disclosure – October 2005
Nine Microsoft patches: three Critical, four Important, and two Moderate.
Internet Explorer is the target of another Critical update. All nine of these updates are available via ZENworks Patch Management today.
by ezs | Oct 10, 2005 | evilzenscientist, Uncategorized
I posted a few months ago about how Sudoku had hit the UK – the wave has now reached the US.
United have a set of puzzles in their in-flight magazine; I see them in newspapers; they have been on CNN – everywhere.
Bored on a flight I tried them – and they are certainly interesting. The harder puzzles really appeal to my sense of problem solving and pattern matching.
So – somewhat addicted – I purchased some cool software – Soduko from SadMan Software.
Great – I’ve now got an endless supply of really hard problems – along with built in tutorial advice. It’s interesting – since reading up on some of the pattern matching concepts I’ve halved my time to complete some of the harder problems.
by ezs | Oct 10, 2005 | evilzenscientist, Uncategorized
Novell is an identity company. We present our vision and solutions to customers, potential customers, partners, integrators, press and analysts all the time.
I’ve never seen an identity presentation made like this before. Here’s the original blog post.
by ezs | Oct 8, 2005 | evilzenscientist, Linux, Uncategorized, ZENworks
Did you know you can use the imaging in ZLM7 to image Linux and Windows?
Nice solution for a standalone imaging solution if you just want a nearly-smart(*) imaging story. It’s fast, furious and does what I need.
(*) for true smartness use ZENworks 7 with the full policy enablement of imaging.
by ezs | Oct 7, 2005 | evilzenscientist, Uncategorized
What a great post. I recommend you read this one.
O’Reilly also have notes.
Less as a competitive advantage: My 10 minutes at Web 2.0
I was invited to present a 10 minute “High Order Bit” at the Web 2.0 Conference. I decided to talk about the concept of less as a competitive advantage. Here’s the rough text (from memory) of my presentation.
Less.
I want to talk about the concept of less. And more specifically the idea of using less as a competitive advantage.
Conventional wisdom says to beat your competitors you need to one-up them. If they have 4 features, you need 5. Or 15. Or 25. If they’re spending X, you need to spend XX. If they have 20, you need 30.
While this strategy may still work for some, it’s expensive, resource intensive, difficult, defensive, and not very satisfying. And I don’t think it’s good for customers either. It’s a very Cold War mentality — always trying to one-up. When everyone tries to one-up, we all end up with too much. There’s already too much “more” — what we need are simple solutions to simple, common problems, not huger solutions to huger problems.
What I’d like to suggest is a different approach. Instead of one-upping, try one-downing. Instead of outdoing, try underdoing. Do less than your competitors to beat them.
by ezs | Oct 3, 2005 | evilzenscientist, travel, Uncategorized
Every time I travel to Cambridge I have cell phone problems. Five bars of signal; can’t get through.
Tonight was no exception. Full signal, dial, wait, nothing. Dead air. Dial again, nothing. Again, “You could not be connected”. Again, and again.
Turned out that each time Granias phone was ringing, showing my number and the line was dead. Go figure.
Even Mayor Menino thinks it sucks.
by ezs | Oct 2, 2005 | 'Web 2.0', evilzenscientist, Uncategorized
I was talking to a friend in Barcelona about application development (note – I’m not a hacker; “I don’t write code” TM).
He mentioned that Ruby on Rails was getting a few people inside Novell excited.
Since then I’ve stumbled across literally dozens of brand new, hot, useful web apps that are based on Ruby on Rails. All stemming from a few core projects from 37Signals.
by ezs | Oct 2, 2005 | blogging, evilzenscientist, Uncategorized
I blogged a few days ago about Backpack – and I’ve now been using it for about a week.
I’m still pretty impressed by the look, feel and general behaviour of the application; Backpack really reminds me of Lotus Organiser from about ten years ago. Except it’s extensible, in the web, always available and sharable.
One new feature that’s had some attention in the blogosphere (Scoble et al) is the Writeboards. Think of it as an always on Word or Powerpoint document that’s many-to-one sharable. And Editable. With track changes and edits.
This is a way cool feature.
I’m still looking at the security of all this. I implicitly (foolishly?) trust people like Google for my mail; I also accept that my corporate data is backed up somewhere and belongs to my employer. It’s just a little larger leap of faith for me to trust a new player in this space. What will they do with my data? Should I ever store anything more confidential than a to-do list online?
by ezs | Oct 2, 2005 | evilzenscientist, fun stuff, Uncategorized
Dilbert today was spot on:
Haha – anyone called Ted reading this 🙂
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