Ad Nauseam - ramblings of a technologist

the swag is in the mail

Last month at TechEd, we gave away a bunch of Edge t-shirts, and let people know that if they missed out on one, they could still drop a postcard in the mail and we'd follow up and send one out.  Surprisingly enough, postcards did start trickling in, from remote places like Norway and W Conshohocken PA.  One card even included a tasty crab dip recipe - how thoughtful!

I spent this morning stuffing t-shirts in to envelopes, and also took the opportunity to clear out some of the stuff that's taking up space in my office and squeezed in what else I could into the envelopes.

Enjoy the swag guys, and thanks for visiting Edge!

TechEd Rocked

I'm back from TechEd, and was greeted today by the first "Postcard to the Edge" request, all the way from Missouri.  We have a smallish stash of shirts that we held back to send out, but if we have a huge number of requests, they'll have to wait  until we place an order for more shirts next month.

I took a few pics at the event that I'd like to share:

I took this one myself, at one of several parties we attended during the week. Turned out pretty good, eh?  That Edge crew is a good looking bunch.  I think David's pulled off Blue Steel pretty well here.

Listen, I know that most IT folks aren't highly concerned with fashion, but socks with sandals is never ok.  Black socks with shorts is also not ok.  The two combined?  Fashion Fail!

This is what appears to be Florida Gator pajama bottoms coupled with a button down shirt.  Seriously.

Cross Platform What?

We just got out of the Opening keynote at MMS, where Bob Muglia and friends showed some industry changing stuff: 

Cross Platform Extensions for Operations Manager, and Virtual Machine Manager 2008.  In the demo, they showed an application running on Windows, Linux, and Solaris, with apps running on Apache and IIS, and databases in Oracle, SQL Server, and MySQL.  All of the components were managed natively by Operations Manager.  One single console managing all those platforms, showing status, reports, and automatically resolving issues.  Really cool stuff.  We also announced that we're going Open Source with the packages.  Yeah, us.  Microsoft.

Not content to stop there, in the Virtual Machine Manager demo, they showed how the new VMM console allows you to manage Virtual Server, Hyper-V, and VMWare environments.  Anything you can do in the VMWare management console, you can do from VMM, including live migration, plus it utilizes the VMM advisor to help you decide where to move your VMs, and the new PRO tips can even dynamically provision, deploy and move vm's in your environment for you.  Awesome!

We have some coverage of these announcements up on Edge, and there's more to come.  Here are some links to get you started:

Larry Orecklin is a GM in System Center.  He gives a brief "view from the top" of these announcements.  If you're short on time, watch this video.

Robert Reynolds is the director of Product Planning for System Center.  His video is a little longer, and goes into a little more detail about the standards we're adopting and some of the scenarios these new products enable.  His video is a little longer, and you can watch it here.

Barry Shilmover is the cross platform guy in the Operations Manager team.  If you want to see cross platform extensions in action, watch this video where Barry takes us through the same demo that was done on stage at MMS.  It's all real - no smoke and mirrors here.  I saw the racks of equipment myself. (actually, if you saw this video, you've seen the racks too - we just weren't allowed to tell you what they were before today).

If text is more your thing, you can read the official press release here.

MMS Rocks!

8 Things Meme

Sometimes, I don't think the Internet is even trying anymore.  Philip tagged me with a new blogging meme.  A really creative one.  It basically goes like this:

• list 8 things about your self.

that's it.

Clearly, all the good ideas on the Internet have been used up.

Not one to be a spoilsport though, I'll play along...

the complete Meme Rules:

• Each player starts with eight random facts/habits about themselves.
• People who are tagged need to write a post on their own blog (about their eight things) and post these rules.
• At the end of your blog, you need to choose eight people to get tagged and list their names.
• Don’t forget to leave them a comment telling them they’re tagged, and to read your blog.

My 8 things:

1. In the late 90's, I was a silver medalist in the Utah Tae Kwon Do championship.  The gold medalist went on to open his own school.
2. I have driven a motorcycle once, for about 100 feet, before wedging it into a cow feeding trough.
3. I try and choose parking spaces next to expensive cars, because I think those drivers will be less likely to ding my doors.
4. my first car was a $400 1973 VW Beetle.  In the winter, I had to scrape ice off the inside windshield while driving to school.
5. in 11 years at Microsoft, I've had at over 10 different offices, 12 different managers, and 3 job roles.
6. I'm addicted to "one day, one deal" type websites, like www.woot.com.  I've spent over $3000 on things like "100 nightlights for $10"
7. with just 10 more country visits, I'll have achieved my goal of filling all the stamp pages in my passport before it expires in 2010.
8. 5 years ago, I celebrated Easter on the back of a camel watching the sunrise over Uluru.

lessee, I'll tag Joey, David, Wendy, Steve, Giovanni, Jason, Daniel, and Jon.

it is entirely unlikely that I will get around to commenting on people who I tagged,  hopefully they'll find this trackback.

nuts and bolts of OS development

I'm watching the interview that David did with Iain McDonald, it's pretty good!  Iain's been in Redmond for a while now, but he's managed to maintain his Aussie sensibilities and down-to-earth personality.  I love his description of how product names happen - a bunch of guys go down to the bar and work it out over drinks.

I think Iain is also the first Edge interviewee to drop the f-bomb in an interview.  I wonder if we can get in trouble for that.

Potpourri

I occasionally come across things that I think "wow, I need to blog that," but I generally forget about them, or decide that they don't really warrant a post all on their own.  Rather than just cast them aside, I'll start occasionally rounding them up in posts like this one...

--

Neil came in to my office again with a camera, and this time we talked about how to set up a failover cluster.  I've written up a cookbook that takes you through building the environment that I used to record the screencasts on WDS, iSCSI and failover clustering of hyper-v.  It's not super deep or overly technical, just the basic steps to get the pieces configured.  Let me know if it's something you'd like to take a look at.

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I had lunch last week with Martijn, who happened to be in town meeting with some other teams.  We talked a lot about the cross section of people who blur the line between IT Pros and Developers.  Now that we're giving PowerShell to IT Pros, they start looking more like Developers, and there are plenty of Developers that get pushed in to IT Pro roles as well.  Martijn has some good insights in to those people and I really appreciated meeting with him.  Thanks Daniel, for putting us in touch.

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I wasn't planning on attending Mix this year, but I might try and arrange a trip just to see Steve Wiebe reclaim his record.  I'm pulling for Steve to win this one, even though I have a Billy Mitchell autographed bottle of Rickey's Hot Sauce:

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I made a trip to the doctor's office a couple weeks ago to get something for a nagging chest cold I was dealing with.  I know there's a running joke about old magazines in doctor's waiting rooms, but this one must take the cake:  a 1987 issue of National Geographic:

It contained a fascinating article about this new technology called MRI.  I wonder if it will take off.

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my interview with Bob Muglia, bigwig

In December I interviewed Bob Muglia for Technet Edge.  You can see it here.

I've met a few Vice Presidents and CxO's in my time at Microsoft.  A few intimidated the hell out of me.  A couple were pretty down to earth.  None so much as Bob though.  I've been a fly on the wall of a couple of his staff meetings, and have been consistently impressed with his ability to uncover the real state of the business and do so in a gracious and respectful manner.  You know what else impressed me?  When I emailed him asking if he'd be willing to do an interview, he replied personally, just a few hours later, with "I'm glad to do this!"

It really was clear when I met with Bob that he has a real passion for our products.  He really does install all of this stuff on his own, and I've heard the feedback he gives product teams when he sees things we should do better.  When you look at the evolution of our server products over the years he's been in this role, you can see how that passion is paying off.

I have a request for you:  At some point you've been using a Microsoft product, and asked yourself "what were they thinking when they made this?"  If you'll let me know what product you were using, and what made you want to ask that question, I'll grab my Edge camera and do my best to find an answer for you.

0 to WDS in 6 minutes

I usually manage to stay behind the camera on TechNet Edge, but Neil showed up in my office the other day with a camera, and wouldn't leave until I showed him how to set up and configure Windows Deployment Services (WDS) on Server 2008.  You can see the results here.

I did leave out one minor configuration step that happens automatically when you first configure WDS - if your WDS server is also your DHCP server it needs to be configured to not listen on the DHCP port, and add a DHCP setting that redirects the boot requests to a different port.  The WDS console will do this for you automatically when you first start it up.  If DHCP runs on a different machine, you just need to add the Scope Option 060 value PXClient.

locked and loaded

It took a year and a half to do it, but Neil's IT Pro Evangelist team is up to full headcount, now that Joey is on the team.  Please head over and welcome him!
Small world observation:  during his interview, Joey and I realized that we worked at the same company and played hoops together some 15 years ago and 1000 miles away.  When we were talking last week, I found out that he used to be the DJ at the dance club I frequented in high school.

Smorgasborg

It seems like most of my blogging is happening over at Edge these days, but I've seen a few links recently that I really thought i should share.

First, a couple of items for the Green Computing evangelist in me:

The Electronic Product Environmental Assessment Tool allows you to see how various vendors are integrating green computing principles into the manufacturing and operations of their equipment.  I'm pleased to see that my current laptop and monitor both received Silver ratings, and when I'm due to refresh this equipment, these assessments will be included in my decision.  If you're not already considering the environmental impact of your computer purchases, this is a great place to start.

Voltaic Systems has released a computer bag with a solar panel capable of charging a laptop.  I've seen

some of their backpacks with smaller panels that will recharge an .mp3 player or a phone, but this is the first time they've offered something with this much capability.  The $600 bullet is a little hard to swallow, but the idea of being able to use my laptop for a few hours a day without ever plugging in to the wall is pretty cool.  Dear Voltaic:  if you send me one of these to evaluate, I will shamelessly sell out and give it a raving review.  I will give it regular visibility in TechNet Edge videos, and frequently remind people that my laptop bag is superior to theirs.

In other news, I remember when Server 2003 was hip and cool and on top of his game.  Today, he's old and busted.  He has a blog, check it out.

I got served

I installed Home Server this weekend.  It was cool. 
At the risk of damaging my geek cred, I'll admit that I haven't had a dedicated server running at home for over 7 years now.  I ran one once upon a time to act as a router for my home network to the internet, and so I could share a printer.  It got replaced by various specialized devices that did the same tasks.  I would occasionally enable ftp or web services on one of the home machines and  when I had specific requirements, but for the most part, I didn't miss having a server at home.  It always seemed a little wasteful to dedicate hardware and keep it on all the time to support occasional usage.

I've casually followed the development of Windows Home Server for early on, but always felt that, while interesting, I wasn't sure it held much value for me.  I really got to see it in action during the keynote at IT Forum.  It was the remote access stuff that got me interested, as well as the automatic backups.  I decided to give it a look. 

I wanted to build my server with as much existing hardware around the house as I could.  Home Server has pretty modest hardware requirements, so I was pretty sure I had stuff in the garage that would fit the bill.  I try to be energy conscious, so I was still concerned about leaving a machine on all the time, so I wanted something that would be quiet and stingy with its power consumption.  I dug through some boxes in the garage and found this guy:

It's a 1GHz proc motherboard, with vga/tv-out/audio/nic/etc. all on board.  I bought it a few years ago to build a DVR with.  At the time, I went cheap with the tv capture card I bought, it didn't support PAL signals (I was living in PAL-land at the time) and the little 1gig processor wasn't quite speedy enough to do quality encoding.  I wedged it in to one of these, and it got limited use as a DVD player in our bedroom, but it never got unpacked when we moved back to the US, except to occasionally scavenge components off of.   I really liked the idea of using this MB, because it's got only one little fan on the cpu (I have a passive heat sync for it somewhere, but couldn't find it during my excavations this weekend).  I don't know how much power it draws, but the power brick I have it connected to is a 60w adapter, so I know it's not more than that.  That makes me feel better about my power consumption than if I hooked it up to a standard 400w PC power supply. I cannibalized a 512MB DIMM and DVD drive from another recently retired machine and I was nearly set.

An inventory of the unused hard drives around the house turned up nothing bigger than 80gb, and while I had a couple of those, I knew it wouldn't be enough to even hold backups of the home machines, so I ended up making one purchase, a 750gb drive at Frys.  I really should have picked up a couple of them, but one should be enough for now, and Home Server does some clever volume extension stuff that makes it easy to add more storage later. 

Installation was pretty painless - Home Server uses Small Business Server 2003 at its core.  Once install completed, it had an impressive 27 updates available at Microsoft Update - just standard post SP1 patches for Windows Server 2003.  It comes with a separate install CD to run on client machines, so after I ran that on a couple of the home machines, I unplugged the monitor, keyboard, and mouse from the home server and moved it to a shelf under one of the desks where the routers and things are.  It's not in a case, just a tidy stack of DVD, hard drive, and motherboard.  Eventually I'll move it to a shoebox or some other elegant yet ecologically conscious container. 

I was a little disappointed to find that there's no x64 client for Home Server, which means half of the machines at home can't participate in the backups and other benefits of home server.  It appears that one is on the way, hopefully soon.  Configuring remote access wasn't simple -my home network is a little complex - the server sits behind a double NAT, which means that the auto-configuration for remote access failed.  I eventually was able to find out what needs to be configured for remote access - it's just port forwarding for ports 80, 443, and 4125, but it took me half an hour of forum trawling before I finally found them.  It's very clever to have auto configuring of routers available, but it should have been easier to find the manual config instructions (in fairness, right on the router config page, there's a link to the help file that tells you what you need to forward.  I don't know why it wasn't obvious to me immediately).  Backups schedule automatically to run between midnight and 6:00am, but I keep all the machines off at night, so I need to change that to lunch or dinner time.

Overall, I'm pleased with the ease of setup and config.  I guess I'm the perfect target demographic for a product like this - multiple machines at home, but no desire to put a full server/domain infrastructure in place.  Easy automatic backups and remote access to the network. 

two thumbs up.

Woah! Edge t-shirts at IT Forum!

Neil and I just handed out ~300 t-shirts to IT Forum attendees.  I hope I have a small stack left in the Exhibition Hall, but I think they're all pretty much gone.

The real hot commodity now is Edge laptop stickers.  I have a real small pile of those - if you're at IT Forum and want one, come and find me!

word is out

Well, the cat is pretty much out of the bag now on Edge.  I'm really looking forward to this new way of meeting and networking and connecting with IT Pros around the world.

I'm starting this week in Barcelona.  If you happen to be here and are attending TechEd IT Forum, I have a small daily supply of Edge t-shirts I'll be carrying around and giving out.  You can find me in the Chalk Talk sessions on NAP and MSIT on Tuesday and Friday, the lunchtime theatre on Wednesday, and often hanging around the NAP booth at Ask The Experts at other times.  Find me, ask me, and if I haven't given away my daily allotment already, I'll have a t-shirt for you!

let the speculation begin

http://edge.technet.com/

Neil got a sticker, but I got the t-shirt

looks like Neil's got one of those laptop stickers I mentioned the other day.

don't tell him, but I managed to score the t-shirt:

sorry, it's a cell-phone pic, so the color and resolution isn't very good.

What I'd like to show you (but they'd kill me), is the other side of the t-shirt...