Two things in technology that make me crazy!

February 13th, 2010

Howdy,

While doing my daily dosage of browsing tech sites i stumbled up on a article about Who is developing KVM.
As always, when reading the comments, one of the first comment said something like this: The article does not mention VirtualBox! This is biased towards Red Hat!.

WHY PEOPLE!?!?!? WHY SHOULD A ARTICLE ON KVM MENTION VIRTUALBOX!!!!! :)
VirtualBox is a desktop virtualization technology. It will probably never be a technology that one would run on a production server! With technologies like Xen, KVM and VMWare around, no one with some brains is going to use VirtualBox as a server virtualization technology! However VirtualBox is a excellent product for using for your basic virtualization on your workstation as a replacement for example, VMWare Workstation.

Another thing in technology that just makes me go wah wah…..Articles mentioning FCoE (or Data Center Ethernet) as being the savior of networking, and the easiest technology ever to connect your servers to storage! You can now fire your storage administrators because now you have unified fabric for storage, networking and probably more in your new fancy “Data Center Ethernet”!

No people….You will not start firing your fancy storage administrators….I would rather bet on that you are going to be hiring a new administrator, or at least spend a fortune on training. And not one of your storage/network persons are going anywhere :)

This is one of the hypes that your sales rep from any IT related company is going to be telling you any day now. FCoE/Data Center Ethernet brings us bunch of new problems that we have to deal with…and trust me, we’re looking at some new technology here! :)

Well, For now!

Bgrds,
Finnzi

Virtualization on Linux!

February 6th, 2010

Howdy,

A very neat link on Linux/VirtIO: here

Bgrds,
Finnzi

Changes?

January 26th, 2010

Howdy all,

So far the first weeks of 2010 have been the busiest ever for me in a long time. The good thing is that all those hours spent went into some very cool stuff :)

And 2010 is bringing major changes….where the hell was I when that meeting went down with the changes!

Skyggnir (My employer) is moving to another building in downtown 105 Reykjavik. Downside is that we don’t really have enough parking spaces there!:)

Due to some personal stuff going on with my self I am rethinking my future. Early in 2009 I had a clear vision where I wanted to be in ten years, now I don’t. However I guess change isn’t all that bad, changes can lead to great things!

More on those changes later.

We were trying out RHEV at work today, it rocks! At least our initial testing has proven OK, but we’ll do some more extensive testing later this week. Hopefully we’ll see some deployments shortly.

Well, it’s late! :)

Bgrds,
Finnzi

Work’n’stuff :)

January 6th, 2010

Howdy all,

Was doing assembly of two EMC Clariion CX4 arrays at work today for a customer. I must say the hardware seems to be high quality. The only thing that bothers me (the product is not any worse, it just bothers me to see this on a piece of storage hardware:) was the Windows license stickers on the controller shelf. The controllers run a Windows kernel. However EMC is no newcomer to the game and I am pretty darn sure that those boxes are going to be more stable then some other storage I have had to work with for the last ~6 years or so:)….

Also doing some data migration with the IBM San Volume Controller today, although not in any connection with the EMC boxes i spoke of earlier. Planning to do some firmware upgrades on a array shortly.

Just felt like yelling out my love for the SVC!

Bgrds,
Finnzi

Ohhh i loooove open source!

January 3rd, 2010

Howdy!

I’ve been using TVersity to view my DVD divx/xvid encoded backups on my Xbox 360. However this means that i have a Windows PC around. Don’t get me wrong, i have a Windows Vista partition on my home workstation, however i like to spend most of my time running Fedora since i don’t even have a VPN client installed on the Windows install.

Then i found uShare. This package is in the RPMForge repository which i have already configured on my home fileserver. This program will run on your Linux/*NIX install and share your media folders.

I was getting afraid that i had to find a Windows machine to have idling around just to share my media :)

Well, off for the day.

Bgrds,
Finnzi

Remote support for multiple operating systems!

January 2nd, 2010

Howdy,

Found this while browsing: http://www.bomgar.com/

Those guys offer the same thing as Citrix’s GoTo Assist but they offer you a appliance which you can install in your own network. It seems to support pretty much every version of Windows, MacOS X and few Linux distributions. This could probably save you a buck or two if you are buying GoTo Assist licenses ;)

Just wanted to post this before i loose the link:)

Bgrds,
Finnzi

Happy new year!

January 1st, 2010

Howdy all,

Happy new year all, hopefully this is going to be a better year then 2009 was to our lovely world! :)

I’ve already migrated my email from Dreamhost to GMail, something i didn’t ever think i would do. So far so good, hopefully i will never Google my own name and find my mail in the search results :)
The web interface is awesome, searching email is blazing fast, and the spam filter is probably one of the best I have ever tried.

This really is the future for many companies. There is really no need to host your own Exchange/Domino server anymore unless you have some crazy 7-year no-delete policy (for example, financial companies). This is much more effective, has proper Blackberry/Active Sync support and costs 50$ a year per user with a 20GB mailbox.

Well….I’m off to read up on few things.
Laters,
Finnzi

Merry Christmas everyone!

December 25th, 2009

Hi all,

Well…It’s Christmas time again. This year has gone by like a bloody rocket.

It didn’t really start out as a good year, the Icelandic government has had it’s share of problems due to the recession. However things didn’t really turn out as bad as we thought except for the price of alcohol and tobacco has skyrocketed.

Hopefully the next year will be a better year thought for everyone as the world’s economy tries to recover :) .

Well, just wanted to wish everybody a merry Christmas!

Bgrds,
Finnzi

FreeMind – Open source mind mapping app!

November 15th, 2009

Howdy all,

Was searching for a multi-platform mind mapping application and found FreeMind. Check it out, it’s free, multiplatform and quite easy to use :)

A friend pointed out it is a Java application, and everybody who knows me know how much i looove Java! However running it on my Macbook is pretty darn smooth and this app has everything i really need from a mind mapping application.

I’ll try to map some of my projects this week and see if it helps me out, i have already mapped some projects in the past but most of that was just from brainstorming about a specific project, not to create a work schedule out of it.

Well, off to do something!
Bgrds,
Finnzi

F12, Firefox 3.6…..the open source community is rocking!

November 14th, 2009

Howdy all,

I upgraded my home workstation from Fedora 11 to Rawhide last week, and with the updates this morning i got the F12 release package. The release rocks! KVM is awesome! Had to do some testing with Windows servers and loaded up two on the F12 box and they seem to run pretty fast. Everything has been stable so far, and it looks awesome :) .

Also i have installed the Firefox 3.6 betas on my work laptop and my Macbook at home. It runs pretty fast, has some cool theme options (for those who like that) and Windows 7 integration features along with the option of installing addons without restarting the browser! See the full feature list here.

Red Hat has released it’s new virtualization platform, RHEV, and I’ve asked them for a evaluation version since it has all the features i expect from a hypervisor, and it costs half of what VMWare vSphere costs. Hopefully our evaluation goes as planned.

Well, I’m off to drink more coffee and work on a small project.
Laters!
Finnzi