Clueless Casserole:

• Add 1 cup second rate search engine to a medium size mixing bowl
• Add 2 cups floundering mobile hardware / software company
• Mix vigorously on high for 10 minutes until you see an indistinguishable lumpy mess
• Half bake the business plan for 1 to 2  hours at 450 degrees until completely inedible 
• Server to clueless customers piping hot to make sure they get burned

This “union” is nothing but two companies with dying aspirations to penetrate a sewn up mobile market. I say why not try to add My Space to this mess and see if they can tackle Facebook while they are at it.

I know this is a useless comment on the IT industry, but humor and tragedy go so well together!

I mean think about it! Microsoft has been struggling to bring online services into a viable revenue stream. To date, Microsoft online services has been a huge money loser in addition to potentially cannibalizing their legacy core offerings. A black eye on “The Cloud”, I hate that overused term, could make businesses back off on outsourcing systems and services. This means Microsoft may see an uptick in traditional software and professional services sales while businesses try to regain confidence in Private Clouds like Amazon EC2. 

What has become a thunderhead for companies like Amazon and recently Sony, may be one of those white fluffy clouds for Microsoft. What do you think?

Installing it on Ubuntu server was a bit of a challenge – mostly because the most recent documentation for Debian/Ubuntu was more than a few years old. The hardest part was getting Ruby on Rails working. However after a bit of messing around, I managed to get the server installed – and I couldn’t be happier with the results. The resulting VM is small and lightweight and syncs up perfectly with Shuffle. The tracks web interface is easy to navigate, and I’ll often leave it up in Firefox throughout the day to make adding new projects and tasks easily.

Tracks has built in user management, and defaults to non-public registration – if you’d like to add additional users, it is necessary to manually create them. Other features include the ability to set dependencies not limited in scope by the current project – say you need to configure a new ESX server prior to setting up a VM for Active Directory. The “setup VM for Active Directory” action can be dependent on the “Configure ESX server” action.  This is extremely helpful for the Tickler view – only actions that are independent of other actions are displayed, offering a sort of “what’s next on the docket” view.

Each action can have numerous tags (useful for searching), a set due date/visible date (hide actions that aren’t due for a while), and note field for specific details for the particular action. To add an additional pop, you can star an action to help distinguish them from the other tasks in the Starred view. There’s a calendar view for seeing what actions are due today, the rest of the week, next week, etc.

The one thing that I can see holding this back from being used in an enterprise environment is that the projects appear to be fenced off to each individual user. If it was possible to assign a project or an action to another Tracks user, this could easily fit into workflows and project planning – imagine setting up dependencies on an action that is assigned to another user.

All in all, I find that Tracks is an excellent personal project management tool. There are a ton of features I haven’t had the chance to cover here, and I’d highly recommend downloading and installing tracks on a VM just to try it out. I’ll look at making my VM of tracks available for download if anyone would prefer a preconfigured VM to going through the build process themselves.

Areas reviewed:

• Capital , operation, and labor costs
• Setup / maintenance ease
• IT skill set needed
• Support Availability
• Features
• Overall impressions

Below is our target list on the docket thus far. If there are specific product or project you would like to suggest we review, please drop us a comment.

The difference between getting and Ipad that uses the Verizon network or the AT&T network really is in two areas.

1. Verizon plan will require you to carry two devices to access the mobile data network (Ipad and the Verizon MiFi)
2. The different data transfer access plans and associated costs.

Assuming you can get past having to carry two devices to be on the Verizon network, the decision is simply to find the data access plan that best fits your personal needs. The table below outline your current choices.

Personally I am not a fan of either choice. I hate the idea of carrying two devices and the AT&T access plans seem a bit lame for the cost. The good news is that the Verizon announcement may get AT&T to consider data access plans that include higher transfer limitations for the $$. Gotta love competition in the marketplace!

What do you think?

After completing much testing, one product surfaced to meet many of our needs.

Veeam Monitor (Version 5.0) server extracts performance data from individual VMware host ESX servers or an entire infrastructure via VMware Vcenter.  Veeam Monitor gives next to real-time views into performance information from the cluster view with the ability to drill down into statistics of specific VM Guest machines. Using this product, our VMware administrators now have the ability to view health statistics as events are happening as well as utilize historical data to analyze trends correlating services provided with performance making scalability decisions very clear. 

Veeam Monitor features include:

• Performance Analysis & Event Correlation
• Storage Monitoring
• Hardware Monitoring
• Alarm Management

Sold in both a free and full version, it is very accessible to businesses of all sizes. Check out their website (www.veeam.com) as they have many award winning solutions for VMware environments.

Looking at the patch it appears that there is an issue with how the 2.6.34 kernel handles the compat_sk_sleep function/variable. The patch chantra provides a solution by changing the affected code enabling the vsock module to compile.

To apply the patch, unzip the tar.gz (I had to rename the file from tar.__0.gz first), and run sudo ./apply_patch. I then launched VMware Workstation and the modules successfully compiled.

Just attended a small business conference recently focused on the future of IT service integrators for the small to medium business. The presentation talked about the spread of server consolidation, real time recovery strategies, and even topics like the “green computing” movement. Quite honestly, nothing that hasn’t been discussed a thousand times over. What was interesting, was the question posed to the speaker concerning services based on “cloud computing” from providers like Amazon. The cloud computing model of hosting services on a public or private cloud is without a doubt being reviewed and cautiously embraced by medium to large size companies looking to offload IT capital, staff, and operational expense. Good strategy, although riddled with business risk concerning security and IP rights. Still a very probable future for modern business. The question that comes to mind for me is this the start of another digital divide? Are the public cloud offerings economically accessible and understood by the small business?

Most small business rely on local network integrators to install and maintain single server installations, desktops, applications, and communications systems. Given this model, it is not in the interest of the network integrator to give up on a low effort reoccurring revenue stream and explain to the small business owner the benefits that come with hosted / cloud based services. This artificially makes the small business world appear unwilling or ready to adopt the cloud services model forcing few providers to customize offerings to this market’s  needs. Based on these observations the only conclusion I can arrive at is that the small business will make slow movement into the cloud one business function at a time. Providers like SalesForce.com will dominate getting the small business sector onboard with the technology trends happening rapidly in the enterprise tier. If I were a network integrator, I would beef up my data center and look for become a “mini cloud” for my existing customers and pull their current infrastructure within. Should be an interesting sector of the market to track over the next few years. Just my 2 cents!