Tao of Schoony

Memories... In the days before smart phones.

Wed, 28 Mar 2012 17:48:00 GMT

Fry's image server is apparently down... Haven't seen this in about 13 years, since I was an Internet bagillionaire, but it used to happen frequently in the early days of the Web.

Memories...

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Google's trail of evil continues

Fri, 27 May 2011 16:09:00 GMT

I gain no pleasure in seeing this happen (http://www.pcmag.com/article2/0,2817,2386033,00.asp), but it appears as though the Google reign of evil is continuing to grow (http://nicholasschoonover.com/Home/tabid/39/EntryId/13/Google-has-become-evil.aspx). Google apparently hired a key guy from PayPal... NOTHING wrong with that and it's a really small valley. While we (tech vendors) compete with each other in the market place, we're always looking for the next great job/business opportunity, that's simply ingrained in our culture.

However, the PayPal suit says that he swiped code prior to leaving. Long-story short. They had to sue, because otherwise their shareholders would be suing them for violating their fiduciary duty to protect the shareholder's investment in eBay (owns PayPal). The real questions on my mind is, why is Google hiring someone to develop an electronic wallet? I can't believe that there's any real intellectual property to steal. There might be a few frivolous patents that can slip by patent office clerks, I mean seriously Amazon got 1-Click Purchasing past them, but Google prides itself on having lots of really smart people on staff. They couldn't do it without hiring this guy from PayPal? This I gotta see the final product to believe it, because it's going to cost a lot more than the sum of the team's salaries and other costs now that the lawyers are involved.

Nicholas

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Google has become evil

Mon, 16 May 2011 22:18:00 GMT

So, as I so painfully found out today. Google decided to change their market place refund policy from 24 hours to 15 minutes. Ya, 15 minutes and no that wasn't an exageration (http://market.android.com/support/bin/answer.py?answer=134336). I bought an app today and downloaded, grabbed a cup of coffe, hit the restroom, returned and started the app. Then it had me send an email to the author to request an activation key (WTF?), I waited, waited a little more, then received the email and input the code. The app refused to work. I give it a couple more tries to no avail, just a blank screen. No worries right? WRONG! The time from purchase till then was longer than 15 minutes so Google Market refused to refund my money!

Now I have to call Visa to stop payment and start arguing with Google to get it back, but this could all have been alleviated without their ludicrous 15-minute return policy. I refuse to do business with anyone that has such ridiculous policies, because that is proof positive that they don't want to do business, they just want their cut of the purchase price and don't care if the goods actually work for you. Could you imagine if the rest of the world operated under such terrible terms?

"This pizza is cold..." "Tough, you own it now."

I've been told that Apple iTunes has always had a policy of all sales final, but guess why I've never purchased an Apple product since they killed the IIGS? Because Apple has a long history of obscenely screwing their customers. That was never the case with Google, they were always the guys that had the words "Do no Evil" written into their DNA if not their corporate charter (I never actually checked). Google are the people. Period. Or so I wanted to think, but they have grander intentions of doing evil and blatantly so. I'll be sporting a new T-Shirt that says "Google is Evil", until they change this policy, beg forgiveness publicly on video, refund every penny pilferred by their fascist market place. Note: I left out demanding an offer of 100% refund of all Android apps and devices to any customer that asks. Wow, what a painful blow to their otherwise great reputation.

Buh bye, Google Market. Douglas says that he's been using Amazon Market lately so I'll check it out. I may be ditching the rest of Google's properties as soon as I can find decent alternatives. I've dumped Apple and Microsoft in the past, why not Google?

Nicholas

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Skype Extension for Chrome Disables OWA Send

Fri, 29 Apr 2011 17:02:00 GMT

So, it appears that my mysterious inability to send email from my desktop computer using OWA via Chrome was solved by disabling the Skype extension. Magically OWA send works instantly. I also tried turning off my only other extension, Google Voice, but that wasn't the culprit. Anyway, hope this helps someone else as it was a monster pain for me to have to use Internet Exploder just for OWA as it's such a monstrously bloated piece of code. Thus why I don't have lots of extensions. ;-)

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I’ve got your Server Migration right here!!!

Sat, 06 Feb 2010 19:18:16 GMT

Quite literally! At least I will on February 23rd for all attendees of my San Francisco seminar! That’s right, Double-Take Software has graciously volunteered free copies of our Double-Take Move migration product. That should be really appealing to anyone planning on performing a server migration in the near future. Prepare to get your weekend back. Here are the quick value points of Double-Take migration solutions.

Migrate Data, Apps and Operating System, right down to the SID. ‘nuf said!
Completely Server and Storage Independent. The only X2X Migration solution in the industry! Migrate P2P from an old HP server to new Dell, P2V, V2P (Yup!), V2V (VMWare to Hyper-V, etc.), old EMC SAN to new Dell EquaLogic.
Eliminates production down-time. That’s right, no kicking users or quiesce needed.
Real-Time. No lengthy periodic “refreshes”, it’s real-time. Plus it’s continuous after the initial sync, so you actually migrate when it makes sense and not when you’re forced to by other tools.
Byte-level Transaction Awareness. Write a transaction, replicate the entire logical transaction, not just parts like other solutions. Change a byte, replicate a byte, not a block or a SAN page. Be thinking TCO and this matters really fast when you’re migrating over WAN.
Did I mention Total Cost of Ownership?

Seriously, it always comes down to cost, regardless of economy. If it’s not cost effective then why would you even consider a technology. When it’s all said and done, make the right choice and take the right solution for the job. That’s why so many people choose to pay for Double-Take migration solutions because they pay for themselves, while the other alternatives end up costing much more over time.

Hope to see you at the Seminar! You can sign-up here.

Nicholas

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Disk Management Extend Fails “The parameter is incorrect.”

Sat, 19 Dec 2009 23:05:23 GMT

I have a couple of cluster nodes that I failed to size the C: drive adequately and began to run out of disk space. No problem! They’re all virtual machines, so I just need to expand the disks and away I go! Well, I’ve run into this situation several times since my lab has a lot of machines that I’ve upgraded over the years and while 15 - 25 GB volumes were fine prior to Windows 2008, it just doesn’t get it now and I like to use 40 GB volumes. That said, I’ve seen several cases where the virtual disks grow correctly and show up in the OS correctly, but when you try and use the Windows 2008 disk extend feature then you get this error from Logical Disk Manager, “The parameter is incorrect.”

What’s worse is that the Logical Disk Manager sees the volume as 40 GB, while the file system still only recognizes it as the original size. See the diagram below where I’ve laid a Windows Explorer view of the C: file system over the (supposed) 40 GB volume after extending the volume. Weird huh? What’s worse is that reboots don’t correct the issue. LDM is firm in it’s belief that this volume is now 40 GB and the File System doesn’t seem to care.

Here’s the work around that I’ve found to correct this situation. Go back into Logical Disk Manager (Disk Management in Server Manager) and Shrink the offending volume by 1 MB. After a minute or so, this will revert the volume back to it’s original size.

Now you can choose to extend it again and all will be right with the world. Notice in the screen shot below that both the volume and the file system now agree on the correct sizing.

Hope this helps!

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Migration and the meaning of Christmas

Thu, 17 Dec 2009 18:04:53 GMT

Tim Green at DTM Systems (tim.green@dtm.ca) in Vancouver, BC sent this to me today and I had to share. Tim is a great engineer that I’ve know for years and he does a job bridging business requirements to technical implementation. I have a lot of respect for his abilities and as you’ll read shortly, we have a shared sense of humor.

I’ve also been working with a large company on a HUGE migration project and I’m sure that they would second the motion to use server and storage migration solutions from Double-Take Software as well. So, without further ado…

Twas the night before Monday and all through the room
Geeks bent over keyboards as the deadline did loom.
Tables were strewn with pizza half-eaten
Pop cans and coffee cups and egos now beaten.
The clock was ticking slowly as still they all sat
While visions of sleep flew past just like that.

Alas the migration had run long once again
And the CIO as always had ordered his men:
“You’ll stay here all night ’til the problem you mend
Or when the users come in, they won’t be your friend.”
So the IT staff was pulling yet another all-nighter
And this one now promised to be a nail-biter.

Old servers were being retired from service that day
Replaced with faster ones, but in the old fashioned way.
They were moving terabytes from a old tired SAN
When they found some data not quite in the plan:
Enormous in size and quite critical to all
The data? Very big. Time ’til morning? Very small.

A fix to this problem was very hard to conceive
And everyone on staff was past ready to leave.
Things should have been done in a very different way:
Data can be migrated during a normal business day.
With the data ’a copying while the server still live
Techs can go home from the office well before five.

Move your data and servers whenever you choose
No more costly downtime; no more sanity to lose.
Migrations much easier, no overtime for geeks
Projects that took months will now only take weeks
So don’t be stuck in a mess such as this
Use Double-Take Move, and your life will be bliss.

Merry Christmas all!

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Networking 101

Wed, 18 Nov 2009 00:34:55 GMT

I think that I may have to smash my head into a steel door the next time someone tries to argue network performance with me. I have had this conversation WAY too often for 15 years and can’t take it anymore. I have to blog about it in the hopes of performing some enlightenment. There are way too many people that try arguing that their ping latency is next to nothing, and they usually debate that their WAN is perfectly stable. Trust me, you’re wrong, wrong, wrong. Please allow me to explain why.

PING MEANS CONNECTIVITY – I am SO tired of people telling that they have great WAN connectivity between their sites with excellent ping times. Ping s a very poor indicator of data transfer latency because it runs as an ICMP protocol on IP, and has high priority. Getting a ping response from another machine means that it’s on the network, nothing more can be reliably discerned. One of these days I’ll write a little utility that uses TCP and UDP to send user definable data payloads to another machine and measure that latency.

“OUR WAN NEVER GOES DOWN” – What you don’t know WILL hurt you and you won’t even know it. WAN’s are constantly dropping connection between sites. You just never really notice it because the vast majority of data transmission is bursty, so the loss of one packet means that you might get a red ‘X’ where a graphic should be. Hit refresh and you’re on your way again. Just you try doing that with database replication or off-site copy and you’ll cry your eyes out when you lose your production machine and find out that the replica database is suspect and won’t come on line because of the corruption. Woops… That’s specifically why Double-Take Software patented their data integrity algorithms back in the mid-90’s, to guarantee data integrity with transactional awareness. We have customers with latencies measure in tens of minutes and even months (think about that one for a while).

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What's the problem with System Migration?

Tue, 17 Nov 2009 19:58:30 GMT

System migration is a difficult and time consuming process, only your boss’s boss thinks otherwise. They never spent all those weekends freezing in the data center wasting countless hours doing migrations, waiting for backups and restores to complete, reconfiguring system settings, testing, tweaking, promising the family that you’ll be home soon. This is migration and anyone that says otherwise, hasn’t really worked in IT. In-fact, that should be my next litmus test for an interviewee. “So, how long did your last migration take?” An immediate shrug and drooping of eyes will indicate an affirmative of real world experience and not another paper certified semi-professional. If the candidate immediately throws their coffee into the wall, then they’ll get an offer immediately. Do not pass Go; please go directly to HR and begin doing your new hire paper work.

I guess that it’s hard for most non-IT people to understand the pain and suffering that comes with migrations because they probably have misconceptions like:

Can’t you just copy the files? – Yes, absolutely, all 5,934,182 and 2,000,000,000,000 Bytes of them. That’s 2 Terabytes by the way, a lot scarier when you see all the zeros huh? Oh, and we’ll have to kick all of the users off of the system because although we have a Gigabit network, we’ll only have access to about half of that realistically, so at best that “copy” will take no less than 4.4 hours. Except that the system bus and disks probably can’t even come close to that sustained rate of throughput, so they’ll be the big bottleneck. If we get disk performance of around 75 Megabytes per second then that’s going to take 7.4 hours, or what many refer to as “a work day”.

We’ll also have to kick all of the users off of the system while we do this “copy” because we don’t want them to make changes to files that we’ve already copied to the new system or those changes won’t make it across. Most of the users and management won’t mind much since they’ll probably be barbecuing with their family on a Saturday. Now, let’s kick off the users, start the copy process and watch to make sure that no errors occur. If an error does occur, then we’ll have to start the copy from the beginning again because we won’t know where it stopped when it crashed. No problem, except that it probably won’t fail in the first 30 minutes, it’ll fail at around the 5 hour mark for some vaguely decipherable reason like a process lock or something. Better use backup and restore software to have a higher probability of success since they’re more resilient than a straight copy.

Once we do finally complete the data migration then we’ll have to recreate all of the shares and, uh oh, we did remember to recreate any local user accounts, but they’re not showing up because security was copied by SID. Ack! “What time is it?” Got to fix all of those permission issues now and audit the file system to make sure that you caught them all. An hour later… Think we found them all, and the shares are working, now for the user updates and some more testing. Finally, we’ve fixed any remaining issues with a total time of around a day and a half if most things went well, and that was migration of our File Server. Can’t wait for the business critical application servers, especially that machine which no one quite knows how it’s configured or stays running.

So, hopefully you’ve gained a little more insight into the trials and tribulations of system migration. If only there were a set of tools to allow users to stay connected while the entire system is migrated regardless of hardware vendor…

Get ready for some serious relief for your migration woes from Double-Take Software, check out some of the details in my post to our group blog too.

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AD DCPromo "A delegation for this DNS server cannot be created"...

Sun, 15 Nov 2009 20:42:15 GMT

I ran into this issue today when finally rebuilding my lab DC01.Contoso.com and using DCPromo. This warning pops up and since I had crippling DNS issues in the past (Thanks again Mike D!), I got really nervous.

Solution: It seems that this message can be safely ignored in my case because according to the article that I finally dug up (http://social.technet.microsoft.com/Forums/en/winserverDS/thread/38ccac86-375c-4402-9bfc-660ce5c0a606), I only have a single domain in my lab environment. I also confirmed DNS health with the “dcdiag /test:DNS” command. All’s well.

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