They sell a selection of iPhone and iPad accessories and mounts, all made by hand in the USA from US sourced parts. So if you’re looking for something to hold your iPhone and want to support products made here in the states, stop by and check out there site.

At this point it I realized it was not coming from our mailhost. I quick bit of googling and I found that this was being blocked at the firewall level. It appears that Sonicwall firewalls when they have enabled the Gateway AV security service will block VBA macros as an option. It is a configuration option to enable or disable.

The first image is from Feb 6, 2010 where Elkridge, MD got 38″ of snow. We measured 31.5″ before our measuring stick got lost in the snow. If you click on the image it will take to a panorama where you can view our neighborhood.

This image is from Feb 11, 2010 after the second blizzard to hit us. Click on the picture to see a larger image.

One of the strengths of OSSV is its simplicity, but that is also it’s weakness. The reporting and monitoring capabilities of OSSV can be cumbersome. You can get a lot of status information from the filer itself via the snapvault status command. However, the one thing that you can’t tell from filer is how far along the process is. That information is only available when the snapvault status -l command is run on the primary system (your Windows/UNIX/VMWare server). With windows that means that you either need to get either console access (via. Remote Desktop, VNC, etc.) or command line access with something like PsExec.

We’ve been running this way for almost two years, but I finally got tired of all of the typing. So I developed a web based reporting tool that gathers all of information and presents it in a nice graphical clickable interface.

The front screen of this php web application displays the status of all currently configured snapvault relationships. It does this by executing the snapvault status via an encrypted ssh key-based session to the filer. The resulting output is shown below.

For each specific qtree you can click to get the detail about that status of that relationship just as if you had run the snapvault status -l command on the primary server. Thereby showing you how many files have been transferred, how far along you are on the current file and what errors have been encountered. All this is accomplished via winexe linux command. Winexe remotely executes commands on WindowsNT/2000/XP/2003 systems from GNU/Linux just like PsExec does from windows.

If anyone is interested in using this, I can supply you with my really ugly code. Finally a big shout out the phpSysInfo project from where I borrowed the CSS styling.

Update: I’ve finally put the code online for anyone to access.  You can download the original code from my box.net account. Get the ossvreport.zip file.

Update 2: Box.net is no longer allowing easy public access so I’ve put it up on dropbox.com and you should be able to get the ossvreport.zip file from there now.

We’ve successfully virtualized many of these servers (they are great candidates because they are so often extremely under utilized when on physical boxes). The ones with hardware dongles pose some problems (I’ll save that for another post). Then along comes a product from ETAP. They will let you virtualize their application (which is extremely resource intensive), but they prohibit (i.e. software won’t run) you from virtualizing their license manager. This is completely insane! Their silly little license manager use very little memory, and almost zero CPU cycles. In our case it may handle one or two requests for a license a day (if that), and I have to install it on a physical box. What a PIA. 

In a plea to all software developers, “you have nothing to fear from allowing your software to be virtualized.” We are not trying to steal your software, we’re just trying to maximize our investment. Let alone allow us to be better prepared for disaster recovery. In fact, by making it difficult/impossible to virtualize is going to cost you money in the long run as I will strongly denounce your product and actively push our company (and others I deal with) to avoid your products and find alternatives that support virutalization.

The question was how to move forward without spending tons of money (and avoiding all of the politics involved in deploying a solution). The solution arose through the timing on our computer leases. We lease the majority of our computer equipment for three years. It just so happened that as I was looking to move forward, one of our major leases came up for replacement. To make it even better, not only did I have three servers that were due for swapping (and great candidates for virtualizing), but three years earlier we were forced in to ordering a large batch of workstation class computers. This time, with the advancement of technology, we no longer needed that class of machine.

With my good fortune, I was able to replace the three servers with two new servers (albeit much beefier units) along with the full ESX suite for both, and workstations with much better (thanks to Intel’s Core2Duo chips) desktop class units for basically the same monthly payment we already spending. It was a really win-win for company.

In some upcoming posts I plan to highlight our journey, cover some of the sites that helped us to get where we are, discuss where we are going, and finally highlight some of the difficulties and frustrations that we still face.

If you have linked to my site in the past, please update links to the new location. I will be keeping the old site alive and redirecting the traffic for a little while.

Hopefully with the change in site I’ll start posting some again. One thing that I do keep updated is my Del.icio.us links so check the out for the last things that I’ve found.

“small, high resolution graphics embedded in a context of words, numbers, images … Whereas the typical chart is designed to show as much data as possible, and is set off from the flow of text, sparklines are intended to be succinct, memorable, and located where they are discussed. Their use inline usually means that they are about the same height as the surrounding text.”

A group has released an open source add-in for Microsoft Excel called TinyGraphs “that creates sparklines, mini column graphs, and area graphs from a row of data. It generates beautiful tiny graphics that are as small as a cell and is useful for visualizing large quantities of data, such as stock prices and exchange rates.”

While I have yet to actually use the add-in it is something that I definitely can see using in a number or reports that I generate at the office.