Gorillapond Dot Com

It’s been a while! How have you been? Summer preparations are in full swing in our technology department. We’re getting everything ready for all of the teachers and students to start another year. Here are a few things I have been working on or will be working on before the end of the summer (interesting items in bold):

• Worked on a Windows XP SP3 integrated OS deployment installation
• Refreshed all district-wide application sets
• Built customized OpenOffice.org 2.4 installation package (No registration or Quick Start) for all classrooms
• Recorded Promethean ActivBoard training in HD and will be editing footage for online self-paced courses
• Helpdesk software training and workflow redesign
• Implementing print job accounting at additional locations
• Upgraded MSA1500 firmware to active/active controllers
• Upgraded virtual infrastructure from ESX 3.0 / VC 2.0 to ESX 3.5 / VC 2.5
• Replacing network core equipment, upgrading from Catalyst 4006 to 4 stacked 3750s with 10GbE capability
• Implementing extended proof of concept for VDI clients

If there are any of these topics you’re interested in, let me know in the comments and I’ll do a more complete writeup!

I’ve been learning about the One Laptop Per Child’s XO laptop concepts and playing with the emulated environment. I’m completely impressed and excited. More on that later.

I’m completely excited that I have finally (after waiting 3 weeks) made first contact with someone at OLPC, who forwarded my information to someone who can help me directly. It’s just a baby step, but it’s much better than no contact at all.

We’re looking at getting a few demo units. Beyond that, I’d like to get a set for a whole class, and then the sky is the limit. I am so very excited.

I’ve always claimed to like photography. Right after high school I would carry a point-and-shoot camera with me all the time. It felt a little limiting, but it was small and worked well enough. A few months ago, I purchased a Canon Digital Rebel XT but only used it at family events. It’s a bit too big but the great shots are usually worth it.

I’ve caught up with some old friends recently and it’s revived my interest in photography. I just purchased a cheap 50mm lens, but I haven’t used it much yet.

I recently upgraded to iLife ‘08, which has new web gallery feature in iPhoto if you’re a .Mac subscriber. They also recently bumped the storage to 10GB from 1GB. I love the new gallery, works just like Steve Jobs demoed. This makes for an interesting problem.

I have web hosting through 1and1 for my domain where I have a Gallery installation, it probably has more storage than I will probably use (250-300 GB), and I pay for it anyway to run this domain, website, and email services. The negatives are that the upload utilities are generally bad, and it’s a little unfriendly for people. I also have the .Mac Web Gallery service. It’s 10GB which should be good enough to keep the newest things online, but the best parts are that it looks awesome, it’s super easy to use from my Macbook, and I can upload pictures taken on my iPhone in 2 buttons presses, wirelessly. Lastly, I have a Flickr account. I’ve never used it until recently, but I’ve always been impressed by the community and tagging. The utilities for uploading are pretty easy, and it has passable mobile uploading. If I start to use it more, then I’ll probably have to pay for a third service. Hosting is $10/month and .Mac is $100/year. Flickr is $25/year.

I’m leaning toward using all 3 in some capacity. We’ll see how it goes.

This “too expensive” angle has been played out. I’ve owned Sidekick, Treo, Blackberry and even nice non-smart SonyEricsson phones. They all had their quirks and I always ended up moving to another phone to fill some deficiency or missing feature. My iPhone is much, much better than all of them.

There are a few things you use everyday like maybe your car, mobile phone, computer/notebook, and so on. I am willing to spend more on those things I use everyday if it makes like easier, less complicated, or better in some way. That works for me. However, I don’t spend money on things like cable TV, a DVD library, etc.

It’s also not about showing off or status symbols because I don’t LIKE showing off my stuff, I’m generally too modest for that. I like demoing the technology, not the products themselves.

I really think the iPhone compared to any other phone is similar to the difference between Mac OS X and Windows. The Mac may not be able to do absolutely everything Windows can do, but it does most things in a way that actually makes sense. Sometimes there is a premium to pay for this.

A illustration of the difference: Every phone matches the number of a call to a contact in the address book, and displays the name of the person on the screen. Only the iPhone is smart enough to display “Bob or Betty Newbie” if it happens to match more than one contact. Finally! It gets better, if the last names don’t match it displays “Bob Newbie or Bella Goth.” That Bob Newbie gets around.

I’ve had my iPhone for a few days, and I put together a review of my first impressions. Read more to find out. Read the rest of this entry »

I really think Microsoft has something special with Surface. Read more for a video demo. Read the rest of this entry »

Consider this a notice that the format of the blog will change. I won’t be removing anything, but I will be blogging about more topics. I started the blog as a place to post good information only, and it has served its purpose so far. I really held back posting anything not a HOW-TO or documentation on a specific topic or issue. I thought this gave me an interesting twist on the normal blog site. Most blogs are posts with links to other pages and perhaps some short commentary. If I wanted that, I would just load Slashdot where I can get the comments of more than just one person.

After not having anything to post about because of my blog format, I’m going loosen up a bit more and post on other topics. I’m not sure how far I will go with it, but I’m not going to hold myself back so much anymore.

If you will be at the eTech Ohio Educational Technology Conference next week, come see me. I have 2 sessions: Virtualization Everywhere and Desktop Deployment. Both are on Wednesday afternoon. If you are looking for the notes/slides from these sessions, just click the appropriate heading at the top of the site. You should be able to download the handouts from there.

I hope to post some thoughts on the sessions I visit each day, so look out for those.

Update: I think I will post results and new ideas from the sessions when I get home instead of trying to do it here in the hotel. I also updated all the handouts to the newest version of the slideshow tonight. If you saw the session and have comments, leave a comment on this post!

I had a request to install and configure an instant messaging service for a couple of users who operated out of different buildings. After doing some research, I went with the Jabber/XMPP server called Wildfire. Most of the other servers I looked at seemed to require much more configuration than Wildfire. Wildfire also ran officially on Windows, which is a requirement for our more important services. It was installed and had basic functionally within just a few minutes.

LDAP configuration was easy to initially configure, but took some research to properly setup. I now have an Active Directory group that provides instant messaging access, and I can use other groups to automatically organize users so there is no need to manually manage contact lists. I also have disabled the users ability to add other users to their contact lists to keep user groups isolated.

To test the new service, I used the Spark client inside the Technology Center to see how it would work on a department scale. Everyone seemed to like it, but doubted the overal usefulness of an instant messaging service to a department with close physical proximity.

After seeing the service working well, I switched into deployment mode. I had to make the instant messaging service automatically deploy for users who needed it. The clients must automatically sign on or it doesn’t work. After doing more research, I rolled out the Pandion client to my department officially. I created a custom MSI with preconfigured settings and deployed using group policy.

Pandion includes the unique ability to use integrated Windows authentication. The client loads automatically on logon, and signs on automatically using the credentials of the users domain logon. Wildfire required a 3rd party patch to enable this functionality. Be aware that the patch I linked is only for version 3.0+ of Wildfire.

Soon after rolling out the client to my department, someone saw the client and really liked the idea of instant messaging. So last week I deployed it to another department. I have not received any feedback at this point so I don’t know how well it is going. I will post again once there has been enough time to do a proper review of instant messaging here.

I was excited to see VMware Fusion released last week, since I missed getting into the private beta. It was a fairly large download, about the size as VMware Workstation. After the painless installation process, I copied over some of my template VMDKs for Windows XP and Server 2003 to my MacBook so I could get going as soon as possible. I started up VMware Fusion, nice interface, very clean. Now to get down to business.

I didn’t get very far. To get Fusion working at this point as intended, you must do a CD install. I’ll probably do that at some point, but.. what a bummer.

The “New Virtual Machine” wizard was a bit too friendly for me, and didn’t offer any custom or advanced choice. It felt like the old Virtual PC for PowerPC Macs. No option to connect a template drive to the new virtual machine like I can do in VMware Workstation. Oh well, I thought I would just create a blank drive and edit the virtual machine once it’s created.

Nope, the virtual machine configuration editor is essentially useless. All the options “will be editable in a future release.” No way to attach my template VMDKs. It appears that I could edit the VMX file manually, but that’s a lot of extra work! You also get a warning about debug mode, which was enabled on VMware Server.

I plan to use Fusion in my presentations instead of bringing an extra notebook to connect to the projector, I hope it becomes more functional before mid February!

Update: I took my blank VM, renamed the blank VMDK file and replaced it with my template Windows XP VMDK by renaming the template to the old file name and placing it in the virtual machine’s folder. I booted it up and it worked like a charm.

For the last 2 days we were having network connectivity trouble with our clients. It appears to be an issue with DHCP requests from different VLANS to a virtual machine running a DHCP server. I’m not sure it’s caused by ESX’s virtual networking or ESX’s interaction with our Cisco equipment. I have had this issue with both Windows 2000 Server and Windows Server 2003’s DHCP servers. It would be interesting to know if a Linux server would have the same issue. I have had this issue a few times, once when we first setup our virtual infrastructure and again just this week after I rebooted the DHCP server.

Problem:

Clients that were rebooted were not able to logon properly or surf the internet, they effectively dropped off the network. Clients were receiving IP addresses that were not for their VLAN. For example, clients in the 10.80.8.x/21 subnet were getting 10.80.0.x/21 addresses. These clients were only able to ping the DHCP server.

Solution:

1. Open Virtual Infrastructure Client
2. Find & select virtual machine running DHCP
3. “Edit Settings” on virtual machine
4. Select network adapter used for DHCP
5. Uncheck “Connected”
6. Click “OK”
7. “Edit Settings” on virtual machine again
8. Select network adapter used for DHCP
9. Check “Connected”
10. Click “OK”

Essentially you are resetting the network connection. I don’t know why this works, but I’d like to know!

There’s an old list of how different programming languages let you shoot yourself in the foot. I managed to do something similar on our virtual servers last Wednesday. I just got it fixed Saturday afternoon.

I learned something. Never touch the disks of a virtual machine that has snapshots. “The parent virtual disk has been modified since the child was created.” Fear these words, for you will lose sleep over them. Below is a time line of what got me into the mess and how I got myself out. I tried a few more things, but this is what actually worked.
Read the rest of this entry »

I have been trying to ‘fix’ the issues I had discussed in the original posting with our servers which had undergone a Physical to Virtual migration.

So far I’ve tried two things:

• Disable Symantec Antivirus
• Switch the HAL of the server from ACPI Multiprocessor to ACPI Uniprocessor

I happened across the second option through some google searches. Have a look at the following URLs:

http://kb.vmware.com/KanisaPlatform/Publishing/647/1077_f.SAL_Public.html
http://www.vmware.com/community/thread.jspa?messageID=415307
http://www.vmware.com/community/thread.jspa?threadID=29202

It’s only been 1 day so far, but our wwoods-dc2 server I had talked about before is now humming in the 0-25% CPU utilization range. This seems to be a huge difference from what it was running at previously. Disabling Symantec Antivirus wasn’t noticeable. Read the rest of this entry »

I am putting together a virtualization presentation for IT people in education settings at the moment. I’m going to overview what virtualization is, what options are available (VMware, Microsoft, Xen), and describe the project we executed this summer (What, Why, How). I hope to make it as accessible as possible and get those that might not be exposed to emerging technologies like virtualization, excited about the subject.

I have submitted a request for a session at the eTech Ohio Educational Technology Conference. I hope it gets accepted.

I will be presenting this next week (October 18th, 2006) at SOITA. More information should be available at this page when they update it!

If anyone has materials that may be useful (especially virtualization related clipart), send me an email. Contact information is available using the button above.

I’ve been using Parallels Desktop for OS X (build 1848 and 1884) on my MacBook to put together demos for my Desktop Deployment seminar. I could have used VMware Workstation on my HP Compaq nc6120 like I do on my workstation, but my MacBook is faster and it gave me an excuse to try out Parallels Desktop. The following are the areas I think are important differences from my experience with VMware Workstation: Read the rest of this entry »