The Grumpy IT Admin

Star Wars: Jedi Fallen Order - a review by an over 50s gamer

2020-12-28T01:15:00.009+00:00

Some Context

I like video games, unfortunately I started way back when on Spectrums, and now my faculties are not what the once were, not that I was ever a gaming Ninja.

Now mostly I play games on easy or story mode because I cannot be arsed to try that hard, I want to be entertained, I want to enjoy a game as a game, I don’t want real life where I die after one shot, I get that 24/7 at work and with the wife. I hate online gaming as everyone else is 99% better than me. Oh and I hate Boss battles, they are the most boring moments in a game, if there was an option to bypass them I would, they add nothing to the story just serve to annoy and frustrate.

I bought the game in sale on Epic (£22), with their added £10 discount voucher for £12, Steam had it for £54 at the time. Pick your battles and whatever works for you, but never pay full price (£42 is 4 decent and 6 good bottles of wine)

The meaty bit

Spoiler alert: this review will mention some aspects of events in game, it should not affect your immersion too much but may reveal some stuff you may not want to know.

Caveat: I played the game on Story mode. Any other mode may be way more difficult and include additional enemies that complicate things more than my limited skillset can deal with.

So, is it a good game for those that like a story? Yes and no. It has good story but…. there are some developers involved that are Ninja gamers and do not understand what gamers of a certain age or indeed those less digitally dextrous and mentally capable than them actually want from story mode, there is a reason it is called story mode, but that has escaped them. Not an unusaul state of play though.

The story adds something to the Jedi world and is probably the best Jedi game since Jedi Academy and Jedi Outcast. There said it… But it has its foibles.

This is console port, and they did not expend a lot of effort on it. It works and most of the wrinkles have been removed, I did not encounter any major bugs on the first 90% of the game, however when you go into the menu and go to the controls to change a few things and the only option is a controller and not keyboard and mouse (though these work fine) you do wonder what the dev were smoking. Still, it is a minor thing and they do flag up you should use a controller. But as someone who is over 55, I have never really got to grips with a controller and all my gaming has always been with a keyboard and mouse. Brain says no.

Most of the mechanics work fine, but it feels a little aimless at first in that you can go to a world that offers little till you acquire more force powers, it is almost like the devs got stuck in an argument between themselve whether they were doing an open world or a path lead game experience and ended up offering choices you cannot complete without enhancement.

Game Tip: Only go back to a world if the story demands it or if you have all your force powers and whilst there only do the bear minimum to progress the storey on first visit or you will only get annoyed. Though that maybe just me.

Combat for the most part is relatively straight forward, LMB attack and RMB block, but there are many more force related attacks and other stuff you can get through acquiring skill points that are key combos that are beyond my skillset. One to aim for a try and master is the light sabre throw (Block plus F) and as this is a useful range attack. Other than that, just focus on anything that gives you more force power and health or recovers those quicker. If you are better than me at these things fill your boots.

Boss battles

These are not too onerous in story mode, there a couple that are troublesome and may take a couple of goes to get past, but I can live with that.

Then there is the one.

It's near the end, THE boss battle where the devs went all out to annoy their customers, it is exceedingly difficult and involves a lot of blocking and random shit that will just annoy the hell out of you. I was prepared to not finish the game rather than try and beat it at the 100th attempt.I am not alone alone and doing a web search will reveal it is troublesome, ok it is really badly designed by the devs or really well designed by them to annoy you and make you feel inadequate.

Hit this person 99 times but they will not play by the same rules so if you block a combo they will continue it, if they block your combo you will die. Asuming you know how to do all those combos......and then there is this other thing that gets involved....

Basically, it just symbolises everything that is the contrived about the boss battle in games and why I hate them so much and that devs fail to understand what story mode means.

They just suck the enjoyment out of the game, particularly when you have an opponent that plays to different rules than you, has loads of extra abilities and is way better that you.

I will own up to downloading a cheat app (https://www.wemod.com/download?title_id=36630) to give me infinite life so I could get past this boss as games should not make you angry, they should be entertainment, especially when you select story mode.

What are the consequences of this? I seem to have hit a bug where I am in a turbo lift and keep falling through the floor as it ascends. I had to do a game repair in Origin to fix the bug.

To sum up

It is a good game, it has couple of weakness that could have been fixed with a better overall vision of how the game should have played out and some better understanding of what people who select different game modes require from a game, but that is generally statement about game developers. They people who are deep into the game, but fail to realise that there is a market out there of people in their 50 and 60s that have been gaming all their life but need a gentler experience and also have fat wallets with spare cash that can fill their coffers. Don't insult, annoy or frustrate them but offer them a story and enjoyment, after all gaming is part of the enterainment industry not the BDSM one, for the most part.

Windows Phone to iPhone - a painful transition

2018-03-29T23:52:00.002+01:00

Windows Phone died a death due to a whole heap of incompetence from Microsoft.

My phone was an old Nokia 925, about 4 1/2 years old and bought and paid by my company. There were always low requirements for company phones, if it rung and you answered it, all was good.
Then Hangouts reared its head (Google want to destroy MS, so WP support) but third-party support gave a stay of execution.
The final nail was a requirement for out of hours support software that had no app for Windows Phone. I had to be “downgraded” to an iPhone 6s (yes, it is a low spec 2 version old iPhone, better hardware than my 925 but not really up there as a current version, how my company loves their staff, buy expensive crap rather than cheap crap).

Stuff that just worked on my old phone, now needs 'me' to be re-engineered to work the Apple way.

This is only slightly less bad than the Google eat all your life and sell it back to you way, but it is like stepping back in to the 1990s Microsoft way (we are Apple and nothing else exists so get with the program) rather than the battered Microsoft 2010, be friendly and slightly meek way, which is why they probably lost the mobile phone OS war.
So, what has been the difficulties?
Where's the back button?
I just want to copy music from my (many) PC to my phone. You'll need iTunes for that sir, sell your soul please.
I want a dark background and white text as I find it easier on the eye. We promised that in in iOS 9 but just go and buy some new eyeballs because black on white is all you’re going to get until iOS 23.
I just want an app that will play music and not try and sell me loads of other stuff and subscriptions, streaming stuff and...... You luddite get with the program, we own your wallet.
When I tick the box that says update all my apps automatically, can you update all my apps automatically without me going in to the App store and clicking on “update all my apps”?
Why does Safari have a back button at the bottom of screen (you have to scroll up to see it, just in case someone upstairs notices a minion has done something sensible) when every other app has to put it at the top of the screen out of reach of one's thumb? One only needs one button to do everything and when we find that person we will string them up on the battlements of our ivory tower that your soul paid for.
It has been a struggle this last six month.
IOS is not as friendly or slick as Windows Phone, but then Betamax was better than VHS and these things count for little when content is king.
Apple (and Google) executed well, MS failed miserably to get with the cadence of OS release and missed the boat and plunged in to the harbour like a love-sick teenager trying to stop his sweet heart leaving on the ferry two days previous.
It saddens me that tech companies never seem to learn from history. Grow big, fat and lax and before you know it, you will become that niche player who sold all his assets and have nothing to offer, like IBM and numerous other companies who failed to keep up and have only there IP to offer the world.
At every turn I find Apple getting in the way of me doing stuff, this is far from the Steve Jobs “it just works” mentality and more how can we get more money and data out of our customers by making sure options are just an illusion as Apple is the only true way.
Did I mention there is no back button?

Trying to update a Lenovo Yoga Tablet

2017-10-21T21:43:00.001+01:00

Android, oh my god really?

I tried, really, I tried very hard, but a combination of Android craziness and Lenovo ineptitude just made it so hard I couldn’t be bothered. In fact, the combination of the two made Microsoft look positively stunning in their slickness of updating and a paragon of patching.

In the windows world Microsoft delivers updates to all manner of hardware mixes without a pause for breath. You may not want them, but you get them anyway and since Windows 10 you get OS updates on the fly for free as long as your chipsets are supported, but it is quite a long term support, 7 or 8 years at the shortest, normal 10 or more. With Android, you are lucky if you get 2 years for OS updates if you are lucky and security patches, I really don’t as I have yet to work out how to find out.

So what produced this anti-android rant? Trying to update my Wife’s Yoga Tablet (less than 1 year old) from 5.1 to 6. Yes, I know the latest Android version is 8.0 but due to the unique way Android manages update (ie they abdicate all responsibility to the people who are only interested in selling you new kit that has old versions on it, then it may have to be validated by a fourth party as well) the latest supported version is 6.

So, on Windows I would download the update and run it. Simples. Might break something probably won’t, but it’s there, available and seemless(ish).

On a Lenovo Tablet (your experience may vary depending on type of device, manufacture and supplier/carrier), first you need to go to the Lenovo web site, don’t bother doing this on the device you want to update (I know, a kind of crazy assumption) but on a Windows computer (Mac OS may work don’t have one) find the web page for the device you want to update, don’t bother with the scan my device option (not available on the same web page when viewed from your Android device) just get you reading glasses out and try and find the product number on the device, stick it in the search box and cross your fingers.

Eventually your work out there is a download available, so you download it. Unfortunately, it is just a Tar file or compressed data file. Yeah, no idea what you do with it either. Then you notice there is an application, so download and install that on your PC.

Run it, plug you tablet in to USB when prompted and whoa something worked!

Tablet and some details turn up on screen, now you need to disable all the security on your tablet, set it to developer mode and enable installing from anywhere. Ok found all the bits, done and done.

Now you can install the Firmware update, already downloaded that, oh that was 146GB, it says there is a 1GB download, oh well click on that. Do some web surfing while it does its stuff. Great downloaded, now I can hit the update button. “Backup your device as this process will wipe everything”. Really, oh that so 1990s. Ok, how do I do that, is there a backup button here somewhere, white text on a white background? No? Ok back to web site, here you go, back up a Yoga tab, do this and do that…er that is not my OS, is that the one I am trying to update to? That option isn’t there. Oh, what the hell lets just go for it.

Click the update button, Yeah, a progress bar, off it goes and then a button that says finish, click and, er.. nothing, it says update now. Tablet hasn’t rebooted. Should I just do a manual reboot? What the hell go for it. Ok we are still on 5.1.

So what have we learnt today?

When it come to updating Android is about as rubbish as Windows 3.1. It may be a combination of lack of interest by Lenovo but ultimately it is down to Google abdicating responsibility to third parties to manage the updating process. Alphabet is the richest company on the planet and spends a considerable amount of time dissing Microsoft about patching fails in its OS and yet the experience of patching Googles OS is about as good as it was in the 1990s (Windows 95 was marginally simpler if not wholly effective).

I would love to see a break down of Android versions on active devices out there, and just see how many have the latest security patches for things like the latest WPA2 bugs if there has even been any for the version like my wife’s Yoga Tab, which you can still buy from Lenovo with Android 5.1. Imagine what people would say if Dell sold PCs with Windows Vista installed?

Oh, and that first download? Still no idea what to do with it.

How long do you keep your backups

2017-10-01T23:55:00.001+01:00

Backup retention periods seem to be driven by urban myths and how systems worked in the 1970s. Not wholly surprising since most back up software still seems to be stuck in that period and most sales pitches are urban myths.

So how long do you keep backups for (this is the easy starter question) 10 years, 7 years or even forever? Do you keep you daily backups for that long or only your monthly or yearly ones?

Why (don’t you just hate it when someone says why) have you chosen that time period? Was it because someone in the business said there was a law that said they had to keep some data for that time?

What happens to stuff that was created and then deleted between your backups tapes?

Have they ever shown you the law that states that?

My first question is where is the data kept?

Most HR/finance/legal systems likely to have a data retention requirement store data in a database these days and the data covers the last seven years or whatever is the legal requirement or for whatever period the department wants to keep it. So, if you restore the database from last night’s backup there would be seven years of data yes? So why do you have seven years of backups? If you restored the database from 7 years ago it would contain data that was 7-14 years old, is that any use to anyone? Is it even legal to keep data about someone for that long? (GDPR brings with it the right to be forgotten).

Back in the day when most databases were flat file types or even just spreadsheets and documents and storage cost a lot, the only other copy of the data was on the backup tape and it all made sense. However, most modern systems retain the required data in the system for the required period of time, it is probably one of the reasons that system was bought in the first place.

You may have some file shares that have data covered by some vague 7-year rule (Health and Safety springs to mind) but if there is a legal requirement there should be a system to manage it and it should also manage versioning of documents, logging changes and by whom, a file share may not be up to the job, legally.

The question now is, how long should you keep backups and why should you keep them at all?

Stuff gets deleted, for sure, and there is always that threat of encryption malware so you need to be able restore it and you need copies somewhere else. That is the case for backups made, now how long to keep them and what frequency do you take them?

We keep daily backups for 3 months and that is it, as for frequency it depends on the system and server function, where’s the data, how often does it change and what is your ability to re do and missing data? A web front server has nothing of interest on it so a weekly backup will suffice for most, a database server may need TL backups every 15 minutes and a file server daily, but using inbuilt systems to give better protection such as VSS, not a backup strategy but a basic versioning system, SharePoint and other systems can do this better if needed.

The business took its sweet time to get it’s head around it like many things when you challenge an historic convention based on myths and outdated technology, but we are getting there. Cost for tapes and offsite storage where waved under noses to stimulate the thought processes. We still have some file stores that need some longer retention, but it is a very small amount of data it is not a real issue and should eventually be moved to a proper system. For email (always a sticky problem) we now have a cloud based journaling system in place, all email will always available which is better than we had before from periodic backups, we have failover email servers and backups for speedy system recovery not for email recovery (what was your email running on 10 years ago, could you recover an Exchange 2000 system to get that email back even if you could lay your hands on the Backup exec software and Windows 2000 install CD to go on an old server that can take the only functioning SDLT/LTO 2/AIT tape drive left).

Backups need to be brought in to the here and now and be designed to useful and manageable with today’s systems and quantity of data, not still trying to support system design from the 70s. Virtualization is a game changer for backups and you need to move away from one size fits all to one that looks at the data and protects accordingly.

Data, what is it, where is it, how often does it change and how would you regenerate it at the application level? These are the questions to ask, expect some blank stares in response.

Windows 10 Fall Creators Edition Annoyance

2017-09-30T00:49:00.001+01:00

What is annoying me right now is not an admin thing except in the loosest sense.

I have been on the Windows 10 fast ring forever and have had a few issues but nothing major over the years, but as we rush headlong in to the Fall Creators update one aspect has really annoyed me.

My PC is used by myself and my wife, her mostly in the mornings and daytime, me in the evening. After we have finished the PC gets shut down, yes, its weird behaviour in this modern always connected world but it’s what we do.

Sometime before build 16273 a rather annoying configuration seems to have been imposed.

When you boot a PC the last logged on user is signed in as a disconnected user. Why? It may make login (sorry sign in) quicker but in reality, if I have just started the PC I am waiting to log in and with SSDs it makes no difference at all.

Why worry you may ask? For me it affects two things. First, and most visibly, when I shut down the computer an annoying message pops up and tells someone else is still logged on and the computer and waits until I click OK before shutting down. Don’t know about you but shut down means shutdown to me and I just get up and walk away only to find the computer still waiting for me to click OK the next morning.

The other is that my work VPN connection won’t allow a connection if more than one user is logged in, so I have go in to task manager and kill my wife’s rogue session.

It’s not major stuff but it is unnecessary and unwanted and the sort thing that really pisses people off and provides no real benefit to anyone.

I have yet to find any of this behaviour mentioned in any documentation, I have logged feedback for every build since I first saw it (about 7 or so) but there is never anything about it in the known bugs so I can only assume it is an intended feature.

So how much are Macs these days?

Addendum
Ok here's the thing, everytime I logged in wsappx.exe went bonkers using 20-30% CPU, this seems to be a store related thinging but was also really irritating. I manged to disable the service (AppXSvc - AppX Deployment service) which required a registry change and reboot as the option to do it from the GUI was greyed out (regedit and find the AppXSVC key under HKLM\System\CurrentControlSet\Services\AppXSvc and change the value of Start to 4) and hey presto the log on last user nonsense has gone away, oh joy of joys. So at least I now know what cause the issue it that bloody store.

Windows 10 Phone/Mobile thingy

2016-02-07T01:32:00.002+00:00

I know a lot of people dont think Windows 10 phone is worth a punt because it doesn't have enough apps or err........ is there any other reason other than it isn't IOS?

How many apps do you actually use?

If we ignore all the apps that do the same thing how many would each platform actually have?

Anyway I use a windows phone because it is relative simple at doing stuff and it generally works for me.

I still haven't worked out how to remove all the Tesco apps that came pre-installed on my wife's Hudl tablet, Android just doesn't seem to work in any kind of logical way for me, I am sure if I spent some time (a year or so) with just Android I may grow to ......... work with it. As for Apple, I am really not keen on their closed shop Apple only business mentality.

I am currently running 10586.71 on my trusty Nokia 925.

Having gone through all the fast ring builds i have to say it is mostly very stable and slick. There are a few minor issues. Outlooks has improved immensely with the way it handles multiple email accounts, there are still inconsistencies in things like spell check, where you sometimes seem to get OS spellcheck and sometimes Outlook spell check that really should have been sorted many versions ago. It is still a struggle to find stuff and the search in the settings menu still can’t find things like brightness which is annoying.

The one really annoying thing they introduced early on was that the back button no longer shuts down an app, just suspended it, same as all the other platforms, so you then have to go in and shut them all down at some point.

The big thing for me with Windows Phone is the future prospect of ditching my laptop and just having a dockable phone that runs Continuum.

For business it really is a big thing, no heavy bag to carry around between offices, just roll up and park your arse and your phone and you are good to go.

Currently I sit in the knowledge worker realm so need to be able to access a number of GUIs and windows based apps, so there are two ways this needs to go for me, the first has already happened, RDP sessions are now available on Continuum so I remote all the servers I like or even attach to a VDI environment with a persistent desktop. The second option is a full fat Intel phone running a x64 version of Windows with Continuum so I can have all those GUIs installed directly on my phone, which is managed by SCCM.

The 950 and XL phones are quite good but not quite enough for me to change my 925 yet. I am sure that MS are testing Intel Atom based phones, but if they can truly bring something really new to the party they can make big inroads in the corporate space simple on the basis of saving the cost of a business laptop for a number of users. Some simple maths, at around £1k/$1400 per user for a laptop and docking station, scale that up to say 1000 users with a 4-year replacement cycle and you are looking at saving £250K/$350k a year on hardware if you issue a phone and laptop to each user. I am sure there people out there that could massage the TCO to be even more favourable.

Gaming made easy (for developers)

2015-04-26T00:04:00.001+01:00

Hi all you gaming developers out there.
I like gaming (on my PC) I don't do consoles because my wife watches Eastenders (for you US folks that is a British soap) and we only have one TV in the house, I now it is sad but that is how the other 99% of the world live.
I imagine gaming development is a high pressure job these days with the humungous film like budgets and all that you have to deal with, but there seems to be a be a disconnect between you and us.

I accept you develop for consoles and then transfer to PC, if we are lucky, because apparently we in the PC zone like to pirate your games, well here's some news for you, everyone I know who owns a console has chipped it and there is a hard disk going round with 100's of games on so don't delude yourselves that there isn't as much pirating going on on consoles as there is on PCs.

From a gameplay perspective, you need to focus on the end user. Yes, they come in many varieties and you need to cater for all of them.
Some like the dark art of a sneak, some like a story, some like a gungho shooting fest.
But what kills a game more than anything, is you not avoiding what they don't like. Because they all have common dislikes which will kill your game.

What are those?
Replaying the same bit of of game/cut scene, over and over again because you don't allow them to save a game when they want to, or you have an auto save the saves games before the cut scene rather than after it. Why did you do that? Do you hate the people that buy your game and pay your wages?
Going back to 30 minutes ago after being killed because you implemented some lame in game save mechanism rather than a quick save or even ESC and save game because it was too hard to do.
The space bar makes me jump, what do you mean I can't jump? Everyone in the universe can jump over that railing/car/box/rock, why can't I jump?
Ports from consoles where you really don't understand what it is like to use a keyboard and mouse to interact with a game which leads to some massive inconsistent choices for UIs.
Endless advertising at the start of a game, all those better with Nvidia or Havoc stuff that I have to sit through every time I start a game, yawn go and make a cup of tea. I just want to play the game, make it start, and make it quick. If you must, let me hit ESC or any key a skip through it all till I get to bit with the menu. Oh and why is there a screen that says hit any key to continue? What possible purpose did that serve? Really please tell me because it makes absolutely no sense to me, it is just another reason not to like your game.

Windows Phone 10....

2015-04-25T23:56:00.003+01:00

I have been using Windows 10 on my Nokia 925 for two weeks now and for the most part there is a a lot to be thankful for. It is a development of the Windows 8.1 Phone, especially the not widely released one that spookily turns up on your phone just before Windows 10 if you decide to go down the Windows Insider path, I would like to spend a bit more time with that one.

However, as with Windows 10 on the PC there are signs that Microsoft are struggling to to hit that one OS rules them all goal that they started with Windows 8.

It is all beta still but as we are expecting an Autumn (fall) release, you would expect them to have nailed the basic design of the OS and supporting in house apps and just be fixing GUI and interface issues and any bugs. Unfortunately there are still, in my opinion some major issues with some functionality which I would have expected only from an immature company not one that built it’s empire around how the user interacted with its software and could make it work for them.

Problem one is that the App that you use to report bugs to Microsoft crashes. This really is a bad day at the office.

Problem two is that the email client they have moved to is unusable for me. When reading or trying to type an email the text is so small I need to put reading glasses on to see even vague words, there is no way to make this bigger and it does not respond to any common gestures to make it bigger.

They have decided to put all email in one place and one tile on the home screen. There is no live tile yet, so I won’t judge that, but when you go in to the App the default is to go to the last account you looked at. There is no overview that shows you unread emails or anything useful, you are left to wander around to see if you have anything, multiple clicks and it is not the most responsive. Yes there is the notification center but to be honest it requires too much work to be useful, it would better to turn it off, if I could work out how.

With the small text I can’t read, the reduced usability and the fact that the app doesn’t even link to any choices I have made on themes such as dark background or text size preferences, the Outlook app is a major backward step is usability and productivity for me.

Under Settings > Phone apparently you should see your number, it isn’t there yet (well not on my phone) but to be honest how hard should it be to find out what your phone number is? Yes I should remember it but for some reason mobile phone numbers just don’t work for me. At least ther is hope.

Cut, Copy and paste should work everywhere, but it doesn’t, for example there are two apps that won’t update in the store, I can get an error code up but I can’t just say “Cortana go and find a fix for that error”, or cut and paste the code in to Spartan or do anything, I have to remember the code and search myself.

Old school hit the back button and it would close the app, now everything stays open, so if you go in to settings and set up your phone, press and hold back button there will be around 10 to 20 apps/windows open. That is a massive retrograde step, windows 8 did something similar were Metro apps wouldn’t shut down, Windows 8.1 solved it, windows 10 brings it back.

Searching is the worst experience ever. If you type something in to the address bar in IE or Spartan it will basically start Cortana and eventually bring back some random stuff from Bing, after you have waited about 3 minutes, I have started going to Google and doing searches from there.

I like Windows Phone 8.1, it is a simple and easy way to do the smart phone thing, yes it isn't perfect but it is better than the alternatives for me. From trying to use Android on tablets and the like it feels too messy and unintuitive, iPhone is not a path I want to go down due to price, their closed environment and compatibility issues I have seen.

Right now it is my opinion that if Microsoft release Windows 10 on phones as it is, it will kill them in the phone market completely, it is like watching Blackberry all over again.

Ask yourself, what do you want from a mobile phone OS?

For me it is simplicity to do the task I want to do.

Easy UI customizations to deal with my physical imperfections (memory and eyesight), simple ways to access key information like upcoming meetings, phone numbers, documents etc, make me look good simple to take photographs and easy integration to the cloud for offline storage.

Windows 10 does not do it this and is worse that Windows 8.1.

Unless MS pull the proverbial rabbit from the hat I will be looking at Samsung’s in house OS and Firefox OS because the future Windows Phone is looking like something that just does not work for me.

Windows 8 and the mouse wheel

2014-06-08T17:26:00.000+01:00

Why oh why to MS shoot themselves in the foot?
I am sure there is a practical reason for doing but for me it is unfathomable. Microsoft has seen fit to reverse the way the mouse wheel works in Modern UI apps.
I never really noticed this odd behaviour as I the only Modern app I use is solitair. But I have been using the VMware Horizon app lately and couldn't work out why scrolling with the mouse wheel was backwards to what you get on the desktop.
I then noticed that it was backwards in other apps I tried.
this makes using the Horizon App awkward to use so I have had to revert to using the desktop client rather than the App, not a big thing but really Microsoft why did you make that decision?

EMC, OMG why did we?

2014-04-26T12:09:00.001+01:00

My company recently merged with another company, doubling the size and doubling the IT requirement. This has meant that our existing VMware platform with iSCSI EqualLogic was not really up to the task as it was beginning to creak anyway and doubling it to support more than 500-750 servers was unlikely to expand.

Time to look at some grown up storage again. Usual suspects, EMC, NetApp, Dell and HP.

Key features required were expandability, replication, off host backups at remote site. There were a number of other minor things like making copies of live SQL databases between live and dev systems and storage tiering.

Dell Compellant, HP EVA/3Par, EMC VNX, NetApp were all in the frame.

Hardware wise all came in around the same prices, software wise it was different story for the replication and backup piece, the dell offering went off down the NetBackup route which is stupidly expensive and cost more than the hardware so that was first to go. HP went before we started as dealing with HP is difficult as they tend to turn up mob handed and most of the people aren’t even sure why they are there it gets very messy and disjointed. EMC offered VNX, a Data Domain and the ability to use our existing Backup Exec licencing, and Netapp offered Netapp and Backup exec.

After lots of meetings we ended up in the EMC camp. After some more shenanigans we found out VNX2 was imminent which EMC forgot to mention so we had to wait for that. Up to now we were dealing direct with EMC so needed to engage with a reseller which EMC provided.

This was all to be connected over FCoE at the primary site and iSCSI at the remote site due to costs.

This is where it all started going a bit wrong, after every visit we found out more and more limitation of the EMC solution, first replication is not as slick or as simple as the EqualLogic, the interface is at best clunky and slow, Unisphere is a bit of a misnomer, there is link to Replication but to do anything you have to launch a separate web app, Unisphere only supports storage nothing else and to be honest if you want to do anything it easier to do it from the command line, I create all the scripts in Excel using the concatenate function. There are a number of rules about how you present storage to servers that seem to be artificial, you create a storage group, you can then add servers and volumes in to that group so they can all talk to each other, whilst you put a volume in multiple Storage Groups, each server can only go in one group, this means that if you want to present a volume to only one server such as log drive, the each server needs to have its own storage group and all the shared volumes need to be in all the volumes which can be messy and more difficult to manage than it needs to be. Simply allowing a server to be in more than one storage group would make things hugely easier to manage and I can see no reason for the restriction. VNX seems to be designed for old school physical servers and their disks, preferable UNIX boxes with a few sops to the modern VMware world.

SQL replication is complicated and imposes some major restrictions on how and where you place the server on the storage to get the application consistent replicas, so much so we are looking a a seperate product to mange all our SQL servers. All replication is crash consistent.

Backup Exec does not play well with EMC. There is no real integration with anything and scripting all the mounting of volumes and servers at the remote site is not a simple thing to do.

The iSCSI implementation is verging on bonkers, you have to put each port on each controller in a separate subnet, I kid you not, this means that each server that has two nics can only talk to two ports on each controller, I can see no reason for this, the EqualLogics has no issues with all the ports being on the same subnet, maybe something to do with multipathing but why do they make things more complicated than they need to be, the Data Domain does not need this, it also makes it more difficult to use the any kind of storage tiering with other vendors’ products.

However, it is so much quicker than the EqualLogics with much less latency. At least one good thing then.

All in all, EMC is a hardware company that writes basic software to manage their kit. The VNX is still really just a Clariion in new clothes and their software is at best poor, I look at what I can do on the EqualLogic with fond memories despite the many woes and general slowness of the platform, sometimes manageability is king.

Netapp sells itself as a software company that does storage and to be honest there has been many moments when I wished we had gone down that route instead, if only our account manager hadn’t been such a Muppet. However I am sure that we would have several problems with them as well and EMC is where we are at and the next two months will be spent trying to get the replication, DR and backup pieces working consistently and simply in a usable and manageable way.

Thunderbolt what's the point?

2014-04-26T11:18:00.001+01:00

It's quick it can allow you to have one cable to your monitor, it's quick and err that's about it.
What's not good is that you can't get it on anything other than a Mac without paying out a good deal of money, even the cables are around c£30 (c$45), a recently acquired Drobo storage unit came with a TB and USB 3 ports but only a USB cable, surely this tells you something? There is no such thing as a TB expansion card that you put in to a computer.

Intel seems to have missed the point. Proprietary standards always fail unless they offer something you can't get somewhere else and become ubiquitous before any competing standard can get a foot in, HDMI managed this trick but is slowly being replaced by Display Port, which is an open standard and has no licencing fees associated with it. USB took off simple because it was on every computer before it was even supported by the OS, every update has been backward compatible.

Anyone in retail will tell that if you own the shelf you will get the sales, if you stuck around the back or in a quiet corner you need to be a lot cheaper or offer something no one else is offering. Thunder bolt does not do either.

For Thunderbolt to take off Intel needs swallow the cost and supply free chipsets to all the motherboard manufactures and the likes of Dell, Lenovo, HP to get it in to all the business PCs, allow free licenses to all peripheral manufactures, then with all the connectivity out there it may have a chance to get some traction. Without reaching any kind of critical mass of installations it will die a death, like Firewire did.

It saddens me that companies never seem to learn that it is not just good enough to have the best technology, usability, cost and availability are the keys to success as JVC knew well when the destroyed Sony Betamax. Sony remembered this with Blu-ray and put it in the PlayStation 3 despite the cost as it got the players in to homes. Intel needs to give it away for free or little cost or it will not happen.

EqualLogic and Exchange 2010

2013-04-12T23:23:00.001+01:00

We have had some problems with our EqualLogics (no surprise there) doing the most simple of thing, emailing through our exchange 2010 relay.

2003 worked fine, however 2010 seems to cause a number of problems. Small notification emails are fine, however, when it comes to the diagnostics emails with their vast 2-5MB attachments something chokes and we get a time out error at the EqualLogics end, something like
'diag' or 'update' was unable to send output using e-mail. SMTP returned the following error: TimeOut]

Some Googling suggests that it is either the Tarpitting Microsoft have stuck in that creates a 5 second delay to proceedings for security, or something a bit more deeper in the SMTP protocol on the receive connector on the CAS\Hub server, namely chunking and binary mime settings and it is all related to BDAT.
By default the Tarpitting is set to 5 seconds, some folks have found that setting this to 0 or turning it off works for them, it didn't for me, neither did setting the Inactive Time out or the Time Out values to 15 and 20 minutes.
So this leaves the other bits. I have tried to understand all the words and stuff around this but it is all techno babble. However, setting the BinaryMimeEnabled and ChunkingEnabled did fix the problem for me. However, I now have to understand what these settings are for and what is the effect on other systems using this connector if I disable them.

To disable you need to run some stuff from the Exchange command shell.
First to see what's what run

Get-ReceiveConnector

If you have a big environment or just lots of connectors like us that probably went bonkers and off the screen, so to narrow it down you need to find your connector with a shortened list

Get-ReceiveConnector | Select name

Should do the trick.

Once you have your connector you need to run the following

Set-ReceiveConnector -identity "connector name" -BinaryMimeEnabled $false -ChunkingEnabled $false

This should prevent any sending server from using the BDAT verb against Exchange and should cause them to default to the DATA command instead.

No change is without consequences and straying from default settings normally ends in grief, so you may wish to limit your changes to a separate connector, as we have, for EqualLogics and other systems that don't want to behave in a normal way, such as all those finely hand crafted SMTP servers that developers have created which may not take kindly to these new fangled methodologies. Got to love those developers that need to reinvent the wheel rather than using something easy that is built in to Windows like an SMTP server.

Installing VMware Virtual Centre 5.1 with that stupid SSO

2013-02-24T19:17:00.002+00:00

VMware used to be very good at releasing stable mature and sensible upgrades, though of late that seems to have gone a bit wonky. The latest vSphere release 5/1 is a bit of a headache to install due to the inclusion of RSAs SSO module. RSA is another part of EMC, the ultimate owner of VMware.
Now the cynical may see this as a way of getting RSA product in to companies. if it is the case then it will back fire spectacularly as RSA products have generally been a bit clunky, unintuitive to use and difficult/pernickety to install and configure. I remember needing to the time on our RSA server to not use Daylight Saving Time as the RSA product couldn't cope with it.
Unfortunately the SSO module in the current 5.1 install of Virtual Centre seems to have its own problems. Despite its best efforts it fails miserably to find AD, it suggest that maybe AD is not installed, running or some other problem with the environment, clearly indicating the short fall in performance is nothing to do with its own inadequacies. It does say you can fix this at the end of the install when everything is up and running but doesn't at any stage tell you how.

So here is how to do it.

First there are three ways to set up SSO, a single instance (Basic), High availability cluster which is a cluster, and multisite mode which has no fail over and appears to be the same as basic mode but on different sites that don’t seem to connect together so not sure why there is a different install option.
You only appear to need one SSO per physical site so you should be able to get your VCs talking to it though I haven't got this far yet. If you lose the SSO I believe that you will not be able to login to the VC but I may be wrong so one SSO per VC may be preferable. The SSO can be installed on separate server if required, though whether you choose to put the DB on a separate SQL server may be a step too far for some though regular backups of the DB are advisable even if using the SQL express option.
There's not much help as to which you should choose or the consequences of choosing one over the other, or whether the High Availability option is a must.
To be honest the easiest way is just go for Basic for each site, I can't actually see and difference between Multisite and Basic anyway and if you are in to High Availability you will probably know more than me or have access to someone who understands all this nonsense (for a small fee).

Officially these are the descriptions
Basic
Basic mode installs a standalone version of vCenter Single Sign-On. Multiple vCenter Server and Inventory Service instances can point to it. If the Single Sign-On server or the virtual machine hosting the server fails, administrators cannot access vCenter Server, but ESXi hosts continue to function normally.
Multiple Active Directory and OpenLDAP instances can be added as identity sources.
High Availability Cluster
Cluster mode installs two or more vCenter Single Sign-On instances in high availability mode. All instances use the same database and point to the same identity sources. Single Sign-On administrator users, when connected to vCenter Server through the vSphere Web Client, will see the primary Single Sign-On instance.
Multisite
Multisite mode is designed for deployments with multiple physical locations. Installing a Single Sign-On instance at each site allows fast access to local authentication-related services. Each Single Sign-On instance is connected to the local instances of the AD (LDAP) servers and has its own database with local users and groups. In each datacentre, you can install Single Sign-On in standalone or clustered mode, pointing to the identity sources in that location.

Big question is can you get the benefits of Multisite (whatever they are) if you choose High Availability? As you can see this is all as clear as mud with little help coming from VMware.

Finish the install of all the VC components including the Web Client because you will need it.

Then do the following
1.    Log in to vSphere web client as admin (admin@System-Domain, this is the default admin added during install of SSO and the one with the excessively complicated password), you can log in as the local server Administrator user but you don't get the option to configure SSO.
2.    Go to Administration -> SSO Users and Groups
3.    Go to Groups tab and click on __Administrators__
4.    Click on the little man icon to Add Principals
5.    Select the local vCenter server as the identity source and search for the local Administrators group
6.    Then add that user and click OK.
7.    Log in as the local user.
8.    You should see the vCenter listed after you log in.

To add an LDAP source do the following

Go to the vSphere Web Client -> Administration -> Sign-On and Discovery -> Configuration + Add Identity Source

Fill in the pop up screen (more info)
Name : Name of the connector, anything you like
Primary Server URL :this should be in the format ldap://Servername.Domain_name
Base DN For Users : this should be in the format OU=OU_name,DC=domain,DC=com
Base DN For Groups : this should be in the format OU=OU_name,DC=domain,DC=com
Domain name : Domain_name.comUsername : a user account that can make ldap connections to AD

You can then add domain groups and users in to the permissions by selecting the connection you named above in the Add principals dialog and then selecting the required users or groups. You should be able to log in to the Web client by ticking the user authentication box on the initial screen and when using the normal desktop client.
Once the LDAP connection is set up you can then add permissions in the normal way in the desktop client by right clicking and adding permission and then selecting the LDAP connection by name.

There is a suggestion that the DB doesn't get created properly and you should do it in advance but I have yet to see this, way to go VMware, great implementation of a feature that adds little but causes more wasted time and effort than anything you have ever done.

Would I buy an RSA product? Not a chance.

When I get around to doing an upgrade from 4.1 I shall write up my experiences as I am sure they will be eventful, if I can work out whether to use the existing SSO or do a separate install per VC, assuming I can work out how to do that of course.

What's wrong with Windows 8?

2013-01-27T14:31:00.000+00:00

There has been plenty written about Windows 8 and the changes Microsoft have made to the interface and the Metro/Modern UI. Yes it is damn irritating, but Stardock comes to the rescue for a mere $5. Microsoft should have offered this as a freebie on the Desktop OS, it is a small thing, users would then get used to the tile thing and Modern apps at their own pace and not have it imposed upon them, it would not have been a difficult thing to set up, as Stardock have proved, they could even have offered the UI as an overlay in the same way they did with Media Centre to allow people to come to terms with it or use it by default if they so choose to or it worked with their device.

However the UI is not the only place where Microsoft seem to have shot themselves in the foot.

Removal of start up options (F8, Safe mode, LKG etc) can only be accessed after OS is running.
Burning stuff to DVDs seems more difficult than before
No support for DVD videos

All the old games have gone (replaced by freebie downloads but not there by default)
Skydrive every where and it is rubbish
No Media Centre
Costly extras that used to be included (Pro Pack)
Left to right scrolling instead of up and down
No button options to close Apps
No search facility in the Windows Store you have to go to search then select the store
Microsoft modern UI games that crash, freeze or are not responsive to mouse clicks
Modern UI apps that are all full screen only
Remembering last logged on user and automatically logging on as them if they don't have a password set, faster boots but takes longer to log on which is self defeating
Two lock screens, the system one you can not customise and is that awful cartoon Seattle
Log Off is now called Sign Ou
Flat, two colour interface

It all boils down to many things that had been refined over the years are suddenly either more difficult to do or find, require more mouse clicks to do or have just been pulled and/or need to be paid for now.

What this amounts to is number of little niggles that leaves a sour taste in the mouth, grumbling users and feeling that it is a work in progress rather than the finished article.

Computers and particularly the software that runs on them is there to make life easier and more efficient, if it stops doing that for any reason then its value is lessened and it becomes less desirable.

Windows 8 is usable, it has many good bits under the hood but is marred by some sloppy finishing and a dictatorial attitude to the UI that does Microsoft no favours given the threats to their dominance from all directions.

Were Microsoft right to move to a common kernel for all devices? Probably. Were they right to impose the same UI across all platforms, no. Were they right to dumb down to lowest spec hardware, no.

Windows won because it was flexible, tolerant and allowed users to do it their way, Microsoft seemed to learn that with Windows 7 and then promptly forgot it again with Windows 8.

For some reason every other OS release is just an extended beta and is finished in the following release 95/98, 2000/XP and Vista/7 so I look forward to Windows 9 I just hope we don't have to wait 3 years for it.

Enterprise Vault - Failed Exchange Task

2013-01-02T19:00:00.000+00:00

Here's another weird one.
Enterprise Vault, we use this for e-mail archiving. It does a reasonable job. Probably no better or worse than any similar product.

A couple of days ago I noticed that there was warning that it hadn't archived anything from one of our mailbox servers for a couple of days, not big issue as there is just a couple mailboxes on there as it used for testing at the moment. I had a look at the associated task and it was stopped. Started it and it failed. Error in the event log looked something like below

The Task 'Exchange Mailbox Archiving Task for EXCH' failed to log on to Exchange server 'EXCH' using mailbox 'SMTP:EnterpriseVault@symantec.local'. Please ensure the mailbox has not been hidden, that the server is running and that the Vault account has sufficient permissions on the server.

I went through every conceivable setting in AD, EV and Exchange trying to work out what had happened and why it wasn't working on this one server but was fine on the other 3.
After much head scratching I resorted to our support company and the guy there tracked it down to a problem with EV talking to a GC. Whilst it was working on all the other servers on this one it wasn't but what you need to do is add a registry entry to tell Outlook (on the EV server) to talk to the nearest GC,

MS have a technote here on this but the skinny is as follows

If you are running a version of Exchange Server that is earlier than Exchange Server 2010, use the following steps to force Outlook to identify and use the closest global catalog server yourself.

Click Start, and then click Run.
In the Open box, type regedit.exe, and then click OK.
Locate and then click the following key in the registry:
HKEY_CURRENT_USER\Software\Microsoft\Exchange\Exchange Provider
Note You may have to create the registry path.
On the Edit menu, click Add Value, and then add the following registry value:
Value name: Closest GC
Data type: REG_DWORD
Radix: Hexadecimal
Value data: 0x00000001
Quit Registry Editor.

Exchange Cluster IP address goes walkabout

2013-01-02T18:56:00.000+00:00

A power outage at the weekend caused unscheduled shutdowns on our servers. All came back OK and were working fine. However our backup of the Exchange 2010 server failed as Backup Exec could not connect to the Database.
We have a DAG set up to a DR site, we failover manually if required and for when we need to do maintenance, it all works rather well. DAGs have an IP address assigned to them which is actually related to the Windows Cluster service, which if the servers are in different subnets have be different depending on which server is active.
I believe this is controlled by the Cluster service, Exchange then updated DNS to point to the new server when you move to a different active server. Unfortunately despite not having auto failover the cluster service moved the IP address, Exchange, however, did not update DNS as the active DB had not moved. Bringing the server back up didn't change anything.
So we now had the cluster IP address in the DR site and the DB on the production site, clients could still connect to DB ok but BE was looking at the cluster IP address in DNS and not able to connect to the DB to back it up as the IP address is not bound to a NIC like a normal IP address though you can see it if you do an ipconfig/all on the active server, it shouldn't be on the passive server.
After rebooting servers and moving the active DB to the DR site and back there was no change in the cluster IP address.

There was also some of these errors in the event log

Log Name:      System
Source:        Microsoft-Windows-FailoverClustering
Date:          6/18/2010 2:02:41 PM
Event ID:      1069
Task Category: Resource Control Manager
Level:         Error
Keywords:
User:          SYSTEM
Computer:      node1.company.com
Description: Cluster resource ‘IPv4 DHCP Address 1 (Cluster Group)’ in clustered service or application ‘Cluster Group’ failed.

After much Googling, head scratching and and deciphering Powershell commands we decided to set the DAG to only use the Production site IP address then add the DR site address back in using the following Powershell commands.

Set-DatabaseAvailabilityGroup Database_name –DatabaseAvailabilityGroupIpAddresses “Prod_IP_Address”

Get-DatabaseAvailabilityGroup -identity "Database_name" | fl *ip*

DatabaseAvailabilityGroupIpv4Addresses : {Prod_IP_Address}

DatabaseAvailabilityGroupIpAddresses : {Prod_IP_Address}

Set-DatabaseAvailabilityGroup Database_name –DatabaseAvailabilityGroupIpAddresses “Prod_IP_Address, DR_IP_Address”

Get-DatabaseAvailabilityGroup -identity "Database_name" | fl *ip*

DatabaseAvailabilityGroupIpv4Addresses : {Prod_IP_Address, DR_IP_Address}

DatabaseAvailabilityGroupIpAddresses : {Prod_IP_Address, DR_IP_Address}

This worked as hoped for and BE can do it's stuff once more.

If you have ever wondered what to do with MS OneNote I use it store every script I ever use for future reference, one tab at the top for each subject and one page for each script, it is very handy.

What I hate about Computer Games (Developers)

2012-12-26T23:58:00.001+00:00

There are a number of real annoyances about computer games for me.
I am not a spotty teen cyber punk but more of an occasional middle aged gamer, what I want from my games is entrainment, a good story line, nothing too difficult or involving multiple key combinations or wave after wave of bad guys or a big baddie that requires 2 million hits to kill off at the end of each level. Boss fights are boring at best and mostly an irritating interruption to the narrative, if you must have them then offer an option to jump them or make them easy on the easy mode, preferable think of something different.

If developers are going to offer an easy mode then make it easy, if you have some combat system make it simple and easy to use. If hand to hand combat is a minor part of the game don’t make a big thing of it or require huge combos to achieve a kill.
I am a PC gamer not a console gamer and it still amazes me when a developer ports a game from a console to a PC and does stupid things like using odd keys to do things like jump or crouch, surely by now these things should be set in stone, space bar to jump, C to crouch it's not rocket science.

Why are developers so lazy that when they port it over they don't beef up the save options?
I should be able to save when I like and the game should do autosaves as it goes along. Why are the autosaves always 20 steps before a tricky section rather than just before it?
One of the worst games I have tried to play is Dead Space. This had three major failings, first if you are going to do a game in the third person don't set it in a space station where the character blocks half the screen, then don't make it so you can only save by going up to a control panel on the wall and interacting with it, just make it autosave as you walk past, if you are going to get your characters to interact with an object make it fairly easy to do not some kind of precise threading a needle kind of thing.

Another game that is annoying me at the moment is Mirror's Edge. This is potentially a great game but is let down by a combat engine that is so dire and difficult to use it makes the whole game very frustrating especially when you have sequences where you need to fight an opponent to progress.
Developers need to use people who are not hard core gamers to test games, some of us just want a distraction form our mundane lives not a challenge to our ultimate gaming skill. We can always crank it on the second or third play through.

Games are supposed to be fun and mildly challenging not frustrating, annoying or beyond the limited capabilities of normal people, by al means turn up teh heat for those that like to shoot people 50 times to kill them but allow the plebs of this world the option to just shoot them once.

Multiplayer online games are pointless for those of us that are just occasional gamers, every time I see a studio bigging up the multiplayer version of a new game it just means that they are spending less time on the storyline of the single player version and it will be shortened and probably buggy and rubbish.
Why should I spend any time online playing a game where I die within 5 seconds of starting? I know I am inept and pathetic, but I play games to pretend I am hero not to be remind me that in reality I am just a poor imitation of plebeian canon fodder for the joy of others to humiliate.

Games I didn't finish
Dead Space (Everything)
The Witcher (Combat, save games)
LA Noir (Boredom, controls, endless driving)
Star Wars KOTOR (Combat)
Hydrophobia (Boss level was pointless, lost interest)
Far Cry 2 (Back and forth and back and forth, tedious)
Just Cause 2 (Just petered out in to same old, same old ...zzzzzz)
Stalker (too much walking, got bored)
Dragon Age 2 (Controls, how many menus do I have to go through to get you guys to follow me and attack everything that moves?)
Prince Of Persia; Sands of time (Boss level too frustrating just got fed up and and played something else)

Games I finished but didn't enjoy as much as I could have
Mirrors Edge (Too pernickety, too much dexterity)
Tomb Raider AOD (Controls, Boss levels)

Games I have enjoyed
Oblivion
Skyrim
Fallout (all)
Halflife (1, 2 and episodes 1 & 2)
Far Cry
Deus Ex
Deus Ex: HR
Lego Starwars, Indy, Batman, LOTR
Dishonoured
Borderlands 1 & 2
Metro 2033
Crysis 1 and Warhead
Portal 1 & 2 (never laughed so much as on CO OP on 2)
QUBE
Mass Effect 1 & 2 (2 was seriously flawed and buggy, didn't bother with 3)
Fear 1
Amnesia
Limbo
Bioshock 1 & 2
Homeworld
Tomb Raider (early ones only)
Star Wars: Jedi Academy
Star Wars: Outcast

What's wrong with IT training?

2012-12-16T13:21:00.000+00:00

Well for me just about everything.

Over the years I have been on courses by Microsoft, Cisco, Altiris, VMware and Palo Alto and they all pretty much follow the same formula.
The instructor has a PowerPoint presentation or 3 which are printed out and given to you as a manual, the instructor reads from this, repeating what is written and then depending on how good they are adds in some real world stuff and bits to assist you learn, at the end of a module there is some practical work for you to do that is often a step by step guide on how to to do something.

So what is wrong with all this?

Well lets flip this to a different topic of learning. Swimming. If you wanted to teach someone to swim would you sit them in at the poolside, show them some photos of someone swimming with a brief explanation of what they were doing? Then put them on a plank in the water so they didn't sink and let them read a bunch of words on how to move their arms like the person in the picture?
For me this would have a low success rate and yet this is they way we learn about complex IT environments.

First off I would ditch the PowerPoint (I have yet to see anyone right click a PPS file and go show rather than double click and then find the run show button, quite amazing for IT geeks really) and the printed manualls, replacing it with a glossary and terms of reference, admin manuals (as poor as they often are) and other useful documentation such as scripts for common tasks (I keep all mine in a OneNote) all on USB stick.
The learning would be in the form of practical demonstrations by the instructor where they would explain what they are doing as they went along and any interesting bits as they cropped up leading you through the features of the part under discussion and where to find them, admittedly some flow diagrams may help here but these would be one off slides. The students would then run through a lab that covered the same topic but detail configurations.

The benefit of this approach is that you have a work flows and visual representation of layout in context up on screen that can be then replicated to reinforce learning, the instructors would be working harder but would be more engaged than they are sometimes when just regurgitating a script for the 100th time and lessons would be more interactive for the students, I find it difficult to stay awake at times as my brain is not engaged by PowerPoint presentations. It does rely on good instructors who have a good working knowledge of the subject but that is no bad thing.

With courses costing 2-2500GBP for a 5 day course plus accommodation and all the other bits it is not to my mind value for money when you get a course like the ones currently touted by the big vendors.

These vendor designed courses need a rethink, they're poor, often the documentation and the course is out of sync with the most recent versions of the software available, the documentation can contain factually incorrect material due to poor proof reading, additional material is not readily to hand, students often struggle, they don't engage and overall they don't work as well as they should.

EqualLogics Latency Update

2012-11-04T23:24:00.001+00:00

After spending some time wading through a lot of stats and figures and checking the configuration on all the switches we have partly resolved the problem at our most badly affected site.
This always seemed to have extra issues as the problems seemed sporadic and didn't follow the same pattern we saw at other sites.
We traced to the problem to two ports that were connected in to the second newer EqualLogic unit. These were showing a number of errors on the switch end. Shutting down these two ports stopped all the latency emails we were getting and now we are just getting the normal pattern were a number of servers all email about latency at the same time rather than random emails from different servers.

I have yet to visit the site and ascertain whether it is a problem with the switch, controller or the patch lead.
But it just goes to show that if you start at one end and work your way through the path, make sure every setting is what it should be and above all never assume anything, something will turn up.
I would recommend reading up on any configuration guides for iSCSI and specifically EqualLogics and any switches that you use, we found one particular good one related to Cisco 3750 switches from Dell that listed all the settings you need to configure a switch correctly, QOS was something we had not previously configured.

For a 3750 the following should work

1. Clear the current configuration.

switch>enable

switch#write erase

switch#reload

2. Set up the out-of-band management interface.

switch>enable

switch#config

switch(config)#int fastethernet 0

switch(config-if)#ip address 192.168.x.y 255.255.255.0

switch(config-if)#no shut

switch(config-if)#exit

switch(config)#ip default-gateway 192.168.x.y

3. Set up the ports.

switch(config)#int range gig 1/0/1-48, gig 2/0/1-48

switch(config-if-range)#flowcontrol receive on

switch(config-if-range)#spanning-tree portfast

switch(config-if-range)#no storm-control unicast level

switch(config-if-range)#no shut

switch(config-if-range)#exit

switch(config)#system mtu jumbo 9198

4. Configure QOS and optimize buffers for EQL iSCSI use.

switch(config)#mls qos queue-set output 1 buffers 4 88 4 4

switch(config)#mls qos queue-set output 1 threshold 1 100 100 100 400

switch(config)#mls qos queue-set output 1 threshold 2 3200 100 10 3200

switch(config)#mls qos queue-set output 1 threshold 3 100 100 100 400

switch(config)#mls qos queue-set output 1 threshold 4 100 100 100 400

5. Configure telnet access.

switch(config)#enable password 0 yourpassword

switch(config)#line vty 0

switch(config-line)#password 0 yourpassword

switch(config-line)#exit

switch(config)#exit

6. Save the configuration and activate it.

switch#copy run start

switch#reload

If you have stacked switches the MTU is set on the stack not each switch.

We are still struggling with the 11 second period when the EqualLogic stops processing iSCSI traffic which Dell don't seem that interested in doing anything about or even acknowledging. It definitely seems to be something to do with the controllers, but at least one part is now working a lot better.

VMware VCentre protect

2012-10-10T10:40:00.000+01:00

Those of us who have to manage patching have a massive problem. There are many vulnerabilities are in applications and plug-ins which aren't covered by any kind of automated process to apply, yes some do come with updating tools but require admin rights to apply patches and you have no visibility or control over what gets applied and when.
This is where products like VMware's VCenter protect come in. They allow you patch many different products, both freeware a paid for apps.
Great you may think, well yes in principle but ultimately a product like this needs to major or a three things

Usability
Reporting
Applying patches

Unfortunately VVP fails on two of these, not just a little fail in my book but miss by a mile.

Yes it does apply patches, as best as I can tell, the fails are down to useability and reporting of information.

First fail is that there is no remote console, you can only run it on the server you installed it on. Bad.

You start by creating management groups for your computers, then add computers to these groups b various methods, AD groups, browses lists or from a vCentre. This is good, unfortunately once you have added them they don't actually appear anywhere, you can see the groups but the computers are not in there until you scan them, so you scan the group and the computers go in. Well no they don't if they are not switched on. the scan will tell you if it can't talk to a computer but you won't see it in the Machine view, new computers will not be visible until you scan them, adding them to AD is not enough. This is a major fail in my book, every other console either imports stuff in a dynamic way not a static list.
Agent less scanning should only be done out of hours as it kills the server and uses huge band width, I would certainly not do it across routed subnets.
The Agent configuration is poor and inflexible.
Creating scedules is ok but you can't change them afterwards

The console is awkward and odd to use. Updating of information is manual F5 process.

The whole product looks like a after hours project that went mainstream with out anyone actually finishing it off or doing some usability testing.
It is a Windows only product which in this day and age of Apple supremacy and BYOD is unforgivable.

Unfortunately the other products I have seen aren't a great deal better, Symantec uses their all in one SIM console which I loathe. It is overly complicated like most Symantec software these days and not nice to use.

Sophos seems to be taking it's first steps in to the world of patching which may be a better prospect if you buy in to their AV as well.

EqualLogics strikes back - twice

2012-09-11T12:17:00.000+01:00

We have had an ongoing issue with our EqualLogics systems where they have a massive disk latency problem. We have narrowed this down to 11 second periods where there is no network activity on the controllers. We have passed all the information to Dell but are still without a fix.

This problem has been with us from the start across all the firmware revisions. The most affected system is the system that receives the most replication traffic, had has the fewest live servers on it.

The only thing we have got back so far is that there is something going on with replication even though the periods we are seeing this are not confined to when replication is happening.

Dell obviously want us to upgrade to the latest firmware but this is not a good idea at the moment as a replication bug has been found that appears to throttle replication to around 25MB/s which is not desirable. Dell are not acknowledging this but our suppliers are definitely seeing it and have advised us to not update to the latest firmware until they can work out what revision caused the issue.

Will post if more information is forth coming.

Norton Ghost 15 is dire

2012-09-01T16:39:00.001+01:00

I have been imaging hard drives over the network as part of my working life for more years than I care to remember, this has involved mostly using Altiris' RDeploy tools but also occasionally Ghost and Disk copy and some Paragon tools. Things can wrong if you don't pay attention, I remmber once dropping a DOS image on to our Exchange Mailbox server rather than taking an image of it for DR testing, oh how we laughed, fortunately it was just teh system drive so was quite easy to fix.

However after a recent purchase of some Samsung SSDs I had occasion to investigate am recent copy of Ghost 15. Oh dear what were they thinking, or perhaps they weren't.

Symantec seem to be making one mistake after the other of late, every major release of software seems to be changed beyond all recognition and useabilty, Altiris 7/7.1, Backup Exec 2012 and now Ghost.

Disk imaging should be simple, put a bootable CD/USB drive in, boot to it say copy this disk to this disk and job done. That is how you used to do it in the older version, Not anymore.

I scanned the application for the word Clone or disk copy and it was no where to be found, lots of mentions of backing up partitions and SRPs creating restore points and such like but no simple cloning. A quick trip to the Symantec website (never a joyful experience) and the forums has a few lost souls in the same boot and a number of not very clear or helpful answers as to how one should go about this simple task.

So there you have it, Symantec have once again tried to make a product more usable and stuffed up completly and made it unusable instead.

Oh and by the way don't use the product that come in the box as it doesn't work you will need at least SP1 apparently, another trait of recent Symantec software, they get it rushed out the door to hit a deadline but it doesn't actually work or basic features are missing until they release an update, Altiris 7 had no Network booting (PXE) support so you couldn't do imaging over the network, that came in 7.1, just about. We are looking to stop using Altiris at work now and stump up the cash to move to Landesk because Altiris 7 is so difficult to use, it has always been flaky (6.9 SP5 has WOL issues across subnets, every update broke the remote control and needed a hot fix) but at least it was relatively simple to use.

It's about time heads at the top of Symantec rolled because something is seriously broken on their product development side whether it is the people or the way the do things it is simple appalling and needs to be fixed soon or they will suffer.

How to install Exchange Management tools silently

2012-08-29T11:44:00.001+01:00

As we support 1500 users we don't manually install anything on PCs. it is all done remotely using, at the moment, Altiris Deployment console (not the nasty web based 7.1 but the rather more pleasent 6.9 with win32 console). We use simple command line stuff to run installers in quiet mode such as MSIs with a /qn or setups with recoreded ini answer files.
Every now and again we come across an installer that either doesn't support silent install or tries to do something stupid at the end like display a read me file, complete Muppetry!
However we often come across stuff that requires prerequistes installed like Exchange 2010 Management tools.
This needs a bunch of Windows features set up in advance, but guess what? The installer knows this but doesn't install them for you and Microsoft doesn't tell you what they are in any documentation or how you should go about installing them, though it does say if you run Setup /r:MT it will install silently, don't believe it, it is all lies.

So what are the prerequisites and how do you script the install?

You need
IIS 6 Management Console
IIS Metabase and IIS 6 configuration compatibilty
Microsoft .NET Framework 3.5.1

You install them as follows
dism /online /enable-feature /featurename:IIS-WebServerRole
dism /online /enable-feature /featurename:IIS-WebServerManagementTools
dism /online /enable-feature /featurename:IIS-IIS6ManagementCompatibility
dism /online /enable-feature /featurename:IIS-Metabase
dism /online /enable-feature /featurename:IIS-LegacySnapIn

That last one is the IIS 6 Manangement console which is very confusing.

As some of these components need to be enabled before others the order above is important.

You probably have .NET installed already but if you haven't then try
dism /online /enable-feature /featurename:NetFx3

Once installed don't forget to patch your Exchange Tools up to the same level as your servers or your tools may not talk properly to your Exchange environment or you will get errors or failed commands.

I have found that Altiris works better on Windows 7 if you run all jobs under the system account rather than as a named user, this does mean you wil have to free up your permissions on any install shares, other desktop management systems may have other ideas.

DISM is the Deployment Image Servicing Management tool and can be used to add all sorts of stuff to Windows (/Online) or indeed any Windows Image (WIM, /Image) file, I use it to udate our Wim files we use for deployment with new drivers, but that will be covered in another blog.

More Exchange stuff

2012-08-12T01:48:00.002+01:00

Here's some more weirdness related to Exchange.
Basically we saw a lot of slowness, not all the time and not on all sites. This slowness would manifest itself in response times from the CAS/HUB server that sit behind a loadbalancer which comes from Kemp.
The CAS/HUB servers use the loadbalancer as the default gateway, now for all our traffic this worked extremely well, the only issue we got was this slow down. Even connecting to the server via RDP would be very slow and unresponsive, the cure was to vMotion the loadbalancer. More of a workaround than a fix but it helped.

After much troubleshooting and packet sniffing and a conversation with Kemp it was ascertained that if we change the NIC type from a VMXNET3 to a E1000 all our problems would disappear.

Surprisingly this actually worked.

Now the CAS/HUB servers are much more responsive and don't fall in to an apathetic well of despair.

Would I build an Exchange system that was fronted by a loadbalaner again? Probably not, most of our problems have ended up back at them, simple DNS round robin would have worked so much better.

More Exchange 2010 Weirdness

2012-07-13T23:30:00.001+01:00

Didn't think I would have to revisit this one so soon.
Our Exchange servers were patched up to date with Windows patches and lo and behold all hell breaks loose.

Nothing major just users can't connet to their mailboxes from Outlook, again. OWA is fine, it's just Outlook shows as off line, except for users in cached mode, or users that tried 20 times to connect... or that user sitting over there.

Moved some affected users to cached mode and all was well again for them, not me though, tried cached and non cached and no joy, tried and new profile and got straight in, back to old profile and no joy, was it the PC updates that went out last night?

Well affected users were on a different patching schedule to me so probably not.
It must be the patches applied to the Exchange server, we had this last time they were patched with Roll-up 3.

So we dropped the one of the CAS servers out of the (load balanced) cluster and rebooted it, dragged it back in and then did teh same with the other one and all was well again.

All very weird and nonsensical. Moral of the story is always reboot Exchange 2010 servers twice after applying any kind of patches.

And be ready to reboot again the following morning.