My thoughts on life, the universe and beer

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Howdy,

Long time no blog.

For the last months a lot has happened. We’re going through some kind of a recession. The economy here in Iceland has crashed. But we are all still alive . Rumors have been going around that we do not even go to work anymore …..

That is just not true. Live goes on. People have been loosing jobs, but we’re going to get through this. We’ve done so in the past, just not in the same scale.

The company i work for, Skyggnir (TM Software Infrastructure Management) has been merged with the service part of Nyherji. Now i work in a department called Kerfisveita Skyggnis…it translates to something like Skyggnir ASP hosting.

I even got a new job title, Systems consultant. Yet my job role is pretty much the same.

The people in the department that came from Nyherji are all pretty cool and all around i think this new department is going to work out just fine.

Now Skyggnir is the largest ICT company here in Iceland by far, it was the largest before the merge i think but now there is no doubt ….

With christmas coming up my workqueue slows down a bit but it seems that with the merger there is going to be a lot of projects starting in January that will end up there, hopefully i will just have enough to do!

Well, just wanted to let all of you know that i am not dead …yet

If i will not see you until after christmas i just wish you a merry christmas and a happy new year!

Bgrds,
Finnzi

Howdy,

Just upgraded to the new 2.7 release of wordpress. I got to say this release rocks!

The new interface is very clean and i just looooove how those guys always seem to make upgrading the easiest thing in the world

Greetings to the WordPress.org team, you guys rock!

Bgrds,
Finnzi

Howdy,

Been wondering about Operations vs Consulting in IT for the last weeks.

The company i work for is being merged with another service company. The managers are creating new departments and moving people around. My new department is called something like “ASP Operations”. We will run all the centrally managed systems, our machine rooms etc.

I’ve always looked at IT as IT….not operations vs consulting etc. My job has always been very much a mix of those two since i work in a team of 3 admins that do work on SAN & Linux environments.

After thinking a bit i decided that i like operations a bit better then consulting for me. I like to create my environments, be they SAN, Linux or whatever. I like to build them, run them and finally replace them.

All hail the System Administrators of the world!

Well….
Bgrds,

Finnzi