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Top Virtualization Blog Voting For 2014 Now Open

/ seanpmassey

Every year,  Eric Siebert (Twitter: @ericsiebert) of vsphere-land.com runs a poll of the top VMware and virtualization blogs.  The poll to select the top virtualization blogs for 2014 is now open.  You can vote here.

Eric’s poll is a great way to recognize the top bloggers in the field.

This will be the first year that this blog will be participating in the poll.  Unfortunately, there isn’t a category for top end user computing/virtual desktop blog, but if you enjoy what you’ve seen so far, feel free to vote for me in the general category.

First VCAP Exam Scheduled for December 30th

/ seanpmassey

I scheduled my first VMware Certified Advanced Professional Exam for December 30th. I wasn’t planning on taking this until spring, but I ran across a discount voucher that had to be used by the end of the year.

I’ve already started to prepare for this exam. The resources I’m going to be using are:

I will post more about my experiences preparing for the exam and my experience taking it.

Looking for a Better Social Media Client

/ seanpmassey

I’m looking for a better social media client for keeping up on Twitter and Facebook. Since Apple does not allow home screen widgets in iOS, I would like to find an app that allows me to easily keep up with both networks on the go. I’m looking for the following features in a new client:

  • Support for both twitter and Facebook from within a single application
  • Support for the built-in twitter and Facebook accounts
  • Ability to post to either network from within other apps like Safari

 

Newsblur…or How I’ll Survive The Google Reader Apocalypse

/ seanpmassey

In case you haven’t heard, Google announced that they would be ending their Google Reader feed aggregation service on July 1st.  As many other users of the Google Reader service have done by now, I started to look for alternatives to keep track of the 150+ blogs that I follow.

The Reader service is, at least until July 1st, a convenient way to keep track of multiple blogs across multiple devices.  Any replacement for Google Reader would need to be usable on my iPad, my phone, and from a web browser.  A native app or a good mobile website, two things that Google Reader lacked, would be a definite plus.  Google Reader did have a mobile website, but I considered it unusable.  And while there was a nice ecosystem of mobile apps that sprung up around the Google Reader API, none of the ones that I came across were developed by Google. 

One of my other requirements for a replacement is something that I do not have to host myself.  While there options like Tiny Tiny RSS are a valid replacement option, I don’t want to have to host or manage it myself.

A few blogs had some recommendations for possible Google Reader replacements, and the one that stood out was a program called Newsblur.  Newsblur is an online RSS aggregator with a nice web interface and iOS and Android apps.

It is also open source.

After looking at Newsblur, I decided that this was my Google Reader replacement and bought a premium subscription.  A free subscription option does exist, but you are limited to 12 feeds.

Why I like Newsblur

There are a few things that I really like about Newsblur.  I like that it has several styles for consuming blog content.  If you prefer a “river of news” style, that is an option.  If you prefer to select and read each post individually, you can select each post.  There is also an option to bring in the full text of a blog post on those that only provide a snippet similar to the readability app on the iPad.

One of the other things that I really like about Newsblur is the iPad app.  The iPad app’s interface is very similar to the web interface with one nice feature added in -the ability to quickly move between articles and having them marked as read by swiping to the left or right.  This is nice when dealing with some blogs like Ezra Klein’s Wonkblog or Hack-a-Day that post extremely frequently.

What I don’t like

One of the major drawbacks of Newsblur right now is performance.  This has improved significantly has they have been adding capacity to handle the flocks of people leaving Google Reader, but there are still periods where the mobile app loads slowly or throws up time-out errors.  I expect that these will be resolved soon.

I’ve also had some issues with sharing an article directly to Facebook from the iPad.  In order to work around this, I have to open the blog post in Safari and then share it from there.  This might be an issue with the Facebook app and not with River of News.

Happy New Year

/ seanpmassey

Happy New Year!

I’m not one for resolutions, so i won’t be writing a post on what I resolve to do this year. But I have some exciting stuff that I’m working on for 2013 such as:

  • An article on how I automated user account creation using PowerShell.
  • Some original science fiction that I’ve been kicking around in my head.
  • Some book and/or application reviews
  • No politics. My Facebook friends might appreciate this.

Now to start the year off right, here is this amazing bit of astrophotography courtesy of Phil Plait at the Bad Astronomy blog at Slate.

 

Windows Server 8–Installation and First Impressions

/ seanpmassey / 1 Comment

The long awaited (at least by this IT guy) public beta for Microsoft’s next generation server operating system, Windows Server “8” was released on Leap Day.  A previous development release was available to MSDN subscribers in September 2011, but this will be the first opportunity for a lot of IT professionals to jump in and take a look.

Downloading

The Windows Server “8” beta can be downloaded from Microsoft’s TechNet site in ISO and VHD format.  A Live ID is required to access the beta downloads.  Like Windows Server 2008 R2, it only comes in a 64-bit edition, so you will need access to 64-bit hardware to try it out.

Installing

Windows Server “8,” like the Windows 8 consumer preview, will run on VMware’s ESXi.  However, before you can install it in ESXi 5, you will need to install patch ESXi500-201112001 from the VMware patch repository.  (You can install the patch by following these directions.)
Once you have the patch installed, you will need to choose either a Windows 7 or a Server 2008 R2 as the operating system type when setting up the VM in ESXi.
If you’ve installed Windows Server or Windows 7 before, you won’t see any major changes or surprises in this installation program.  The same basic graphical installer is used from previous versions of Windows.

User InterfacE

The first thing you’ll notice about Windows Server 8 is that the Server Manager from previous versions of Windows Server has evolved and replaced the old Server Manager console with a new Server Manager dashboard.  This new interface can act as a single pane of glass for managing the local server as well as any remote servers (although older versions of Windows will need to install the Management WTR tool in order to be managed).

The Server Manager Dashboard in Windows Server 8. (Click to enlarge)
The Start Menu on Windows Server 8 uses the Metro Interface that is found on consumer Windows 8 operating system.  While this is a significant change, I find it to be an improvement.  I like it because it allows access to all of the tools for applications on the server without having to dig through various menus to find them.

The Metro-style Start Menu in Windows Server 8.  (Click to Enlarge)
The color scheme on the UI looks to be a pleasant light-blue color.

New Features

According to Microsoft, there are hundreds of new features in Windows Server 8.  Some of these features are listed on the Windows Server 8 Technet page.  A brief summary of some of the more popular features that are found on the Technet page or in the technology press are:

  • Built-in NIC Teaming:  No need to use 3rd-party tools to team network cards.
  • Significant Improvements to Hyper-V:  Storage VMotion Live Migration, multiple migrations at one, using SMB shares for VM storage, and the ability to do live migrations without having to setup a failover cluster.
  • PowerShell 3.0 and PowerShell Intellisense
  • Virtualization-Safe Domain Controllers:  When on supported hypervisors, Domain Controllers will be able to better detect and heal USN Rollback as well as supporting Domain Controller cloning.
  • File Storage Deduplication
  • IP Address Management:  IPAM is now a feature that one can install on Windows Server.
  • AD Recycle Bin GUI:  There is now a graphical interface for the AD Recycle Bin, which makes recovering accidentally deleted objects easier.
  • Server Core GUI:  Server Core is now the default install mode for Windows Server, and it includes an optional GUI that can be toggled off and on as needed.

Conclusion

A few years ago, Server 2008 was a huge (and arguably disruptive) change for Windows Administrators.  Server 8 looks to be a continuation and refinement of those changes while adding several new features to the Windows Server arsenal.

On Why the Wisconsin Union Busting Bill is Not A Law…Yet…

/ seanpmassey

I didn’t intend to use my blog to comment on a political situation.  While I don’t mind discussing politics, I prefer to talk about politics without everybody being able to see my posts (for those of you who are reading this after seeing it on my Facebook feed and going “what the hell,” my Facebook privacy settings are set up so that everything I post is restricted to a sub-section of my friends list).

One further note to any readers – I am not a lawyer, and I don’t play one on TV.  Everything expressed below is an opinion and has no actual legal bearing.  It is based on my reading of the relevant documents which I attempt to link to.

There has been a lot of discussion over the past month and a half about Scott Walker’s “budget repair bill.”  I won’t editorialize on the content of that bill here, nor will I give a full history of the bill except where necessary as most of those events are well known.
This particular part of the story starts on March 11th.  After finding a way around the quorum issue in the State Senate and getting the bill passed, Governor Scott Walker signed the “Budget Repair Bill” into law.  This, however, did not cause the Act to go into effect.  Wisconsin has a public notice clause in it’s Constitution that specifies that a law cannot go into effect until it is “published.”  Secretary of State Doug La Follette stated that he would wait until March 25th to publish the law in order to allow legal challenges to be presented in court.
Shortly after that, the District Attorney of Dane County filed suit alleging that Wisconsin’s Open Meetings Laws were violated in the process of this bill becoming law.  Wisconsin has a statute that allows the District Attorney of the County where the violation occurred to file suit, and if successful, the actions taken during that meeting would be voided.  On March 18th, Judge Sumi of Dane County issued a temporary restraining order baring Secretary of State Doug La Follette from publishing the law and baring further action in implementing the law until the case can be heard.  Text of the decision can be read here.
On March 25th, Senate Majority Leader Scott Fitzgerald (R-Juneau) asked the Legislative Reference Bureau (LRB), a non-partisan agency that serves the Wisconsin Legislature, to publish the law in accordance with Statute 35.095(3)a which requires the LRB to publish Acts within 10 days.  After the LRB had published the law, Senator Fitzgerald issued a statement that it was now officially a law, and other Republican lawmakers including the Governor and Attorney General also issued statements to that effect.
But is it?  The answer, based on my reading of Wisconsin statutes and other relevant legal documents, is no.
There appears to be two statutes that govern how an Act of the Legislature goes into effect after it is signed into law by the Governor and are the most applicable in this case.  Those statutes are:
Statute 35.095(3)A and B read as follows:

(3) PUBLICATION.
(a)  The legislative reference bureau shall publish every act and every portion of an act which is enacted by the legislature over the governor’s partial veto within 10 working days after its date of enactment.
(b)  The secretary of state shall designate a date of publication for each act and every portion of an act which is enacted by the legislature over the governor’s partial veto.  The date of publication may not be more than 10 working days after the date of enactment.

Statute 991.11 reads as follows:

991.11 Effective date of acts.
Every act and every portion of an act enacted by the legislature over the governor’s partial veto which does not expressly prescribe the time when it takes effect shall take effect on the day after its date of publication as designated under s. 35.095 (3) (b). 

So while the LRB has published the law in accordance with 35.095(3)(a), it hasn’t actually taken effect.  Judge Sumi’s restraining order prevents the Secretary of State from setting a publication date in 35.095(3)(b). Since the act does not include a date that it takes effect, Statute 991.11 applies and the act is officially in limbo.
The act did have a date of publication at one point, the Secretary of State’s office has rescinded it in compliance with Judge Sumi’s order.  The official text of the act does have a date of publication of March 25, 2011 in accordance with 35.095(3)(b), but the footnotes also note that this is not the official date as the Secretary of State’s office is barred from officially publishing the Act and that the LRB’s publication was performed under 35.095(3)(a).
In plain English, that means that while the LRB published a copy of the Act, it hasn’t taken effect as law because the Secretary of State is barred from officially assigning it a publication date, and the LRB doesn’t have the legal authority to publish it into law.
There are two other statutes that direct how the LRB and the Secretary of State’s office as to coordinate in preparing, publishing, and providing public notice of the Act or fill in other details of the process, but aren’t directly relevant to the issue.
Finally, to make matters more confusing, Article IV, Section 17, Subsection 2 of the Wisconsin Constitution states:

“No law shall be enacted except by bill.  No law shall be in force until published.”

The Constitution doesn’t define what “publication” entails.  However the annotations in the document point to Milwaukee Journal Sentinel v. Department of Administration (2009) that does discuss the publication requirement, and all of the statutes listed above cover this in some fashion as well with 14.38(10)C being the most direct application of publishing an Act of the Legislature.  I won’t touch on that further here as the publicity surrounding the this law has, in effect, generated sufficient notice nor is it relevant to the issue of whether this Act is in effect.

Interesting Exchange 2010 SP1 Install Error

/ seanpmassey

Over the weekend, I decided to upgrade my Exchange 2007 environment to Exchange 2010.  The upgrade itself went smoothly, but I ran across an error when when trying to install Service Pack 1 and Update Rollup 2.

After you extract the Service Pack 1 files to your hard drive, there is an updates folder that allows you to add in Microsoft Installer patches, and the update rollup comes as an MSP file.  So I placed the update rollup into the updates folder so it would be installed with the Service Pack.  That led to an error where Setup exited with an error halfway through.

The error from the error log file was:
[02/05/2011 22:47:12.0567] [1] Installing MSI package ‘C:\Users\admin\Desktop\SP1\exchangeserver.msi’.
[02/05/2011 22:47:12.0583] [1] Patch file ‘C:\Users\admin\Desktop\SP1\Updates\Exchange2010-KB2425179-x64-en.msp’ was found in the patch directory.
[02/05/2011 22:47:12.0724] [1] Found a valid order for the available patches.
[02/05/2011 22:47:12.0724] [1] Patch ‘C:\Users\admin\Desktop\SP1\Updates\Exchange2010-KB2425179-x64-en.msp’ has order ‘0’. The status code returned was ‘0’.
[02/05/2011 22:47:12.0724] [1] Patch ‘C:\Users\admin\Desktop\SP1\Updates\Exchange2010-KB2425179-x64-en.msp’ is valid for the current .msi package. The patch order is ‘0’.
[02/05/2011 22:47:12.0724] [1] The patch attribute will be set to ‘C:\Users\admin\Desktop\SP1\Updates\Exchange2010-KB2425179-x64-en.msp;’ for the .msi package.
[02/05/2011 22:47:12.0740] [1] Installing a new product. Package: C:\Users\admin\Desktop\SP1\exchangeserver.msi. Property values: PATCH=”C:\Users\admin\Desktop\SP1\Updates\Exchange2010-KB2425179-x64-en.msp;” DISABLEERRORREPORTING=1 PRODUCTLANGUAGELCID=1033 DEFAULTLANGUAGENAME=ENU DEFAULTLANGUAGELCID=1033 INSTALLCOMMENT=”Installed language for this product: English (United States)” REBOOT=ReallySuppress TARGETDIR=”C:\Program Files\Microsoft\Exchange Server\V14″ ADDLOCAL=Bridgehead,ClientAccess,Mailbox,AdminTools,AdminToolsNonGateway
[02/05/2011 22:48:34.0354] [1] [ERROR] Unexpected Error
[02/05/2011 22:48:34.0354] [1] [ERROR] Installing product C:\Users\admin\Desktop\SP1\exchangeserver.msi failed. Fatal error during installation. Error code is 1603.
[02/05/2011 22:48:34.0354] [1] [ERROR] Fatal error during installation
[02/05/2011 22:48:34.0479] [1] Ending processing install-msipackage
[02/05/2011 22:49:45.0389] [0] End of Setup
This left my Exchange setup in an unusable state.  Not only were all the Exchange services disabled, but this error occurred after the Service Pack 1 installer removed all the Exchange 2010 binaries from my system.
Rebooting the server and trying to reinstall Service Pack 1 forced me to try out the RecoverServer command option that is included with the Exchange 2010 installer (it works very well).  Googling for the error turns up a Microsoft Support KB that applies to cases where the Powershell Execution policy is set via Group Policy.  That didn’t apply to my system as I don’t use Group Policy for that.
I placed my Powershell Execution Policy settings into bypass and tried again, with the same results.  Unlike my previous attempt, though, I didn’t reboot my server.  At this point, I decided that I really didn’t need Update Rollup 2.  I just wanted to install it to be at the latest patch level, so I removed it from the updates folder and reran the Service Pack 1 installer.
I thought the installer would fail, and I would have to do a Server Recovery again.  But it didn’t, and the Service Pack installed successfully, even though it had previously removed all my Exchange binary files.
Interesting things learned:
1.  Do Not Try to Slipstream Update Rollups Into A Service Pack Install
2.  Exchange 2010 Service Pack installers do not have a rollback feature that will return the server to a state it was in before installation
3.  If the Service Pack install fails after it removes the Exchange binaries, do not reboot your system.  Correct the error that is causing the installer to error out and restart the installation.  It will start over from the beginning and complete the install.

First Impressions of the HTC Desire on Cellcom

/ seanpmassey

I picked up my first Android phone on Saturday when Cellcom, a regional carrier in Northeast Wisconsin, launched the HTC Desire.  The Desire replaces my Blackberry Curve 8330.

It’s hard to give a fair comparison between a two year old Blackberry and a modern Android device, so I will try to avoid making direct comparisons. Even making a hardware comparison wouldn’t be fair as the Curve only has 96 MB of memory and a 312 MHz processor to the Desire’s 384 MB of RAM and 1 GHz processor.  As you can see, the chips that go into phones have come a long way.

The first thing you’ll notice about the Desire is how small it is.  HTC managed to put a lot of horsepower into a device that is less than a half-inch thick.  The form factor and thickness remind me a lot of the iPod Touch and the iPhone.  On measurements alone, it is just a few hundredths of an inch bigger than the iPhone 4.

Despite being a small phone, it feels like it was built very sturdy.

The Screen

The Desire has a 3.7 inch SLCD touchscreen running at 480×800.  The screen is crystal clear and displays colors well, and I have no problems reading text on the screen.

Positives after four days of use:
1.  This is the best mobile web browsing device I have ever used.  I can load the non-mobile versions of a website with this phone.
2.  The on-screen keyboard is delightful to use in landscape mode.  Portrait mode is awkward with my big hands, but almost every app supports changing it’s screen orientation when rotating the phone.  
3.  The Desire uses the HTC Sense interface.  This interface is very easy to customize by adding apps, widgets and shortcuts on the 7 home screens.  Moving between the screens takes a flick of a finger, so your Facebook, Twitter, and weather are easily accessed from the main screen.
4.  Exchange ActiveSync Support.  The one drawback of having a Blackberry is that I could not set it to sync with my home server without installing a program on my server and having a BES data plan.  The Desire, like all Android devices, supports Over-the-Air syncing with Microsoft Exchange servers natively.
5.  Compared to the slow and buggy Blackberry App World, the Android Marketplace is fast and very easy to use.

Negatives:
1.  Battery life doesn’t seem to be that great for moderate use.  I can drain the battery with marginal use in an 8 hour work day.  This may be my fault as I wasn’t able to fully charge the device the day I bought it.
2. I can only rotate the phone one direction to put it into landscape mode.  This can be a problem for me as I am left handed, and my pinkie finger ends up hitting the volume button when I’m typing.  Being able to rotate the phone the opposite direction would solve this issue by putting the volume button on top of the phone.
3.  The Desire lacks Blackberry-like sound profiles.  I do not have a central location where I can change my phone to different sound settings based on time-of-day or other factors such as being in a meeting.  There are, however, applications that try to correct this.

Despite the few shortcomings that I have found, this is a very enjoyable phone to use.  I would recommend it to any Cellcom customers looking for a smartphone.

It’s About Time – Blog Roundup…

/ seanpmassey

Blackberry Releases Desktop 6 Software

Blackberry has finally released a new version of their Blackberry Desktop Software.  This program is used for syncing the Blackberry device with your PC or Laptop.  It’s about time they got around to this as the previous version of Blackberry Desktop didn’t work with Office 2010.

Dell 21in MultiTouch Monitor

Dell has announced a 21.5 inch multi-touch HD monitor for $319 on dell.com.  I would love to have one of these in my future home office.  I wonder how touch would change the Real-Time-Strategy game experience.