I’ve been a Blackberry user and BES administrator since 2005 and while there have been a few bumps in the road over the years, nothing has ever been so bad as to question the platform’s integrity as a service for the enterprise. From Sales, to Operations, to IT, these devices offer the access, reliability, and security that our business needs. Our people have become so accustomed to being connected 24/7 that they depend on it. Heavily. With our BES and RoveIT Mobile Admin implementation, I’m able to take care of a lot of issues without being at my desk, in the building, or even in the same state as my employer. The Sales guys are on the road all the time and pretty much live on their Blackberry when they’re not in a hotel where they can use their computer. 
» Read more: Another Blackberry Outage!
Another Blackberry Outage!
December 28th, 2009 by Josh No comments »Websense Remote Filtering – x64, Vista, Windows 7
November 6th, 2009 by Josh 1 comment »We have been a Websense customer for quite a few years now and while the basic functionality of the system has always been acceptable, I’ve always found everything else to be a tedious and slow process with them.
For example, when we first implemented Websense we had a Cisco PIX firewall and integrating Websense with the PIX was a snap. Eventually we replaced the PIX with a Watchguard and had to find a new method of integrating Websense into our network. We had a Cisco router as our LAN gateway, and Websense had an integration for Cisco routers so that seemed like the logical road to go down. After spending over a month working with their support crew without getting the integration to work, one of their techs asked “why don’t you just use it in standalone mode?” Naturally I had assumed that standalone mode would require the Websense server to be physically between the clients and the internet gateway, or to have the clients configured with proxy settings. Neither of which was something that I was willing to do. Turns out, neither is required. Why wasn’t this the first road for tech support to show me? It turned out that standalone mode was SO easy to install and configure, that I still can’t for the life of me understand why they even have integration options. » Read more: Websense Remote Filtering – x64, Vista, Windows 7
Outsourced SMTP – Good or Bad? – PostIni Outage?
October 13th, 2009 by Josh 7 comments »I’ve had some pressure from time to time, to outsource our SMTP gateway function. There are some legitimate reasons for doing this but there are also some fairly serious drawbacks as well. Right now it appears tha PostIni is suffering a significant outage and I can’t email Wal-Mart. Wal-Mart, I said. Just think about how many other enormous companies are being affected by this outage right now!
As I have resisted the pressure to outsource everything from backup storage to SMTP servers, we are not one of those companies stuck in the mud today. This does highlight one of the more serious drawbacks to having your SMTP outsourced. Yes they have redundant servers. Yes they have redundant networks. Yet somehow they are experiencing an outage. » Read more: Outsourced SMTP – Good or Bad? – PostIni Outage?
Disaster Recovery Simulation
October 13th, 2009 by Josh No comments »I’ve had this problem over the years, with managing to execute even a basic DR simulation. Once I bought some huge external drives to test restores from tape. By the time I got around to doing the test, the external drives weren’t big enough to do any but the smallest of our restores. I’ve been fortunate though, and the few real disasters we’ve had were easily recovered from, but I’ve been burned a few times by smaller instances of data loss because of issues that would have been discovered during a DR Simulation. » Read more: Disaster Recovery Simulation
Data Backup – Growing Pains
October 5th, 2009 by Josh 2 comments »When I started at my current employer during the summer of 2000, we had 4 servers, three of which had with thier own 20G DDS4 tape drive managed by independent installations of ArcServe. Combined, we had less than 50G of data being backed up by the daily full backup. The backups were usually flawless and completed in a few hours at most, and sending a monthy set offsite was no big deal and that set typically contained the data set from the last day of the month. I miss those days. » Read more: Data Backup – Growing Pains
OpenDNS is DOWN!!!
October 2nd, 2009 by Josh 8 comments »At 3:15pm EST today I got an email from our BES that it had lost its SRP connection. This happens from time to time and I ignore it as long as it reconnects within a few minutes. Today it did not. A quick test revealed that internet connectivity was alive and well, but that external DNS resolution was not. The OpenDNS servers were unreachable, as was their website. Oh dear.
I switched the forwarders on our internal DNS servers back to our ISP-provided servers and we were back in business, but what does this mean for OpenDNS? I’ve been using them at the corporate level at several of our US sites for over a year with success, but today’s mishap has me wondering if I will continue to do so in the future. I await more information from OpenDNS and hope they have a good explanation as well as a plan to keep this from happening again in the future.
Update: A rather snide comment (below) from David Ulevitch of OpenDNS suggests that this was a Verizon issue rather than an OpenDNS issue. Given the general lack of buzz on the internet, I’m inclined to believe it, but shouldn’t this type of issue warrant some sort of communication to the public? A blog post on the OpenDNS website, or a sticky thread in the forum would go a long way toward getting the word out when problems prevent access to their services, even if said problems are not directly an OpenDNS problem.
Capacity Planning for Virtualization
September 28th, 2009 by Josh No comments »When I began my journey toward virtualization, it was early and there weren’t many good tools for planning performance capacity. Step 1 started with a single host server with local storage, and after a year of running 14 low-resource servers on the one box, I had the leverage to take a big step up to Step 2.
Step 2 included an EqualLogic PS400E iSCSI SAN, and 4 Dell PowerEdge 1950III servers with VMWare ESX Enterprise, with a Virtual Center Server. Our immediate needs/goals for virtualization were modest, with plans only to virtualize file, application, and mail servers and only 15 to 20 physical servers. Our Oracle and SQL servers already had dedicated platforms and until we break into the realm of a ‘real’ SAN like EMC, I didn’t want to deal with the i/o headaches these systems would cause on our virtual platform. » Read more: Capacity Planning for Virtualization
WordPress app for Blackberry
September 10th, 2009 by Josh No comments »I’m sitting in the hospital with my adorable 5-hour-old daughter sleeping in my arms, and I got to thinking that it would be great if there was a Wordpress app for Blackberry. A quick search on Google and hey look at that, a Wordpress app for Blackberry! My battery is running dry so I’ll keep it short, and follow up later when I’ve had a chance to run this app through some more.
QLogic SanSurfer iscli – QLE4062C Advanced Settings
September 9th, 2009 by Josh No comments »Depending on the storage array you’re using with your QLogic HBA, there may be some advanced settings that you should configure. This example is taken from the recommended configuration for using QLE4062C iSCSI HBAs with an EqualLogic SAN. It is assumed that you have already installed SanSurfer iscli.
Recommended Settings:
IP_ARP_Redirect: on
KeepAliveTO: 120
Large_Frames: on » Read more: QLogic SanSurfer iscli – QLE4062C Advanced Settings
QLogic SanSurfer iscli – QLE4062C Update Firmware
September 9th, 2009 by Josh No comments »This process was done on VMWare ESX 4 servers using iscli 1.2.00.21, updating QLE4062C iSCSI HBAs. It is assumed that iscli is not installed, and that your firmware is not downloaded.
Download iscli from http://driverdownloads.qlogic.com. I picked my adapter, and Linux Red Hat, since the SanSurfer iscli download is not available if you pick VMWare as the OS.
» Read more: QLogic SanSurfer iscli – QLE4062C Update Firmware
SpamSentinel, whitelists, and paying attention.
September 7th, 2009 by Josh No comments »Since I’ve begun a trend of posting my bonehead moves on my blog for all to see, I figured I’d share this one as well. I’ve been a Maysoft SpamSentinel customer since 2005 and I’ve always been vocal with my praise when the topic of spam comes up. I especially love the focus on continued improvement. Backscatter? No problem, they just added that functionality to the product. They even snuck in a new feature recently that made a bonehead move on my part less spectacular. Here’s how that went…
Yesterday I noticed that there were zero messages in our B/C quarantines. I immediately sent a screenshot of the dashboard page to Chris Rich (who is so good at support that I’ve often considered referring to him as ‘Yoda’) to see if any recent update might be the cause of this change. He responded quickly, asking if the quarantines were also empty for the days shown by the dashboard page. I confirmed that this was the case and then started back-tracking everything I’d done this week, as I have a tendency to be the cause of many of my issues. » Read more: SpamSentinel, whitelists, and paying attention.
Dell EqualLogic SAN HeadQuarters
September 3rd, 2009 by Josh 6 comments »
I used our EqualLogic iSCSI SAN for well over a year without any effective way to monitor the array’s performance. We have virtualized over 30 servers, including some fairly high-I/O servers like Lotus Domino, and while the virtual platform usually performs very well it was difficult to see what was going on when a slowdown occured. Enter EqualLogic SAN HeadQuarters.
SAN HeadQuarters installs on an application server and logs information received via SNMP from the EqualLogic Group. Firmware 3.3.3 or newer is required to use this software, and 32 and 64 bit versions of Windows XP, Windows Vista, Windows Server 2003, and Windows Server 2008 are supported. For monitoring from your workstation, a client-only installation allows you to view the logged information without accessing the console of the server where you have installed SAN HeadQuarters. » Read more: Dell EqualLogic SAN HeadQuarters
vSphere First Impressions
September 1st, 2009 by Josh No comments »
Chances are if you’re reading this blog, you’re already familiar with virtualization and more specifically, VMWare’s latest offering; vSphere (ESX 4.0). As the nitty gritty details are readily available on the VMWare website, I’ll skip the fluff and give my personal impressions of the features I’ve used so far.
The Upgrade
I started using ESX in 3.0, so this wasn’t my first time movin’ on up to the upper east side, or in this case a newer and better version of VMWare ESX. The upgrade of vCenter server went poorly, having plugin issues and database issues that at the time did not have widely known fixes or workarounds. I don’t care about performance history all that much so I did a full uninstall/reinstall of vCenter, including the database, and all was well. Upgrading the ESX hosts was so easy, I won’t waste much time talking about it. Using upgrade baselines in vCenter I plugged the ESX4 iso in, ran a scan, then individually remediated each of our four hosts in the same manner that I would when installing patches. It was that easy. » Read more: vSphere First Impressions
vSphere Resource Allocation – Using Limits
September 1st, 2009 by Josh No comments »I can think of plenty of scenarios where limits would come in handy, and none of them apply to my implementation (yet) so I’ll spare you my speculative wisdom. I have only one piece of advice regarding this setting, and it’s: DON’T make the mistake of assuming that zero and unlimited mean the same thing, because they don’t.
In summary: zero = the end of the world as you know it, so don’t do it, and especially don’t do it to all of your VMs at once. Trust me on this.
2009: The Year Without Money
January 7th, 2009 by Josh No comments »The economy is in the toilet, and everyone from the gardener to corporate CEOs are feeling it. With that, many businesses are facing reduced IT budgets in 2009, forcing us to come up with new and creative ways to utilize our existing infrastructure. From workforce layoffs to spending cuts, the world of working in IT is changing shape right before our eyes.
I had big plans for 2009, with additional SAN storage, a new backup platform, and a better core switch for our network, all on our list of needs rather than our list of wants. Now I have to address those needs without buying new stuff, which will present new challenges in creativity and patience, I am sure. Although I’m a little disappointed, I welcome the challenge and plan to make the best of it.
