Ok, so you’re a business person who wants to fix the broken IT in your company. This is an admirable goal indeed, and one worth pursuing, however, before you get stuck in, there are a couple of things you need to know: It’s hard. It’s really hard. If it was… Read More
Joel Spolsky has written today about web standards, and how standards are wonderful things because there are so many to choose from. It’s a long article, and in it he mentions Jon Postel and the Robustness Principle, and his is a different interpretation of the idea from mine. The Robustness… Read More
In recent days, I’ve noticed that a couple of monitoring products out in the market are still doing something dumb. Cacti is one, and NetApp’s Operations Manager (nee DFM) is another. They both do the same dumb thing: They both poll everything in their database all at once. Cacti polls… Read More
In the last week I’ve managed to prove, and improve, the extensibility of ModiPY to be able to provision anything with a command and control interface. I have extended the base classes to use NetApp’s ZAPI, which is a form of XML-RPC. In so doing, I’ve cleaned up a lot… Read More
I’ve just checked in and tagged ModiPY v1.0. This is the first version that I’m prepared to say is ready for use doing real tasks. Grab it at modipy.seafelt.com. I’m really excited about it. :) I tested it out today running on a linux box, and using a NetApp simulator… Read More
A colleague recently had trouble finding the default server port number for EMC Control Center (ECC). Even his Google-fu failed. For the record, it is 5799. This is for version 6.0. I have no idea if other versions are different. So now you know. Read More
Dear Isilon Systems, While you are a relative newcomer to the world of storage vendors, you seem to be doing rather well so far. You have some smart people working for you, and you seem to have some interesting products that at least some people are buying. Please get someone… Read More
I wish to offer an alternative to the Government’s recent proposal to require ISP level filtering of the internet. I propose the Wideband Occluding Operational Lens, or WOOL. I believe it will be just as effective, but at a vastly reduced cost. Allow me to explain. The Wideband Occluding Operational… Read More
I finally got around to fixing the timezones for the Zope server. I’ve done this before for other servers, but hadn’t for the personal one, for some reason. Kudos to Andrew Milton for responding to my query to the OzZope mailing list last year explaining how: Zope DateTime sucks.It’s looking… Read More
For years I’ve wanted to build a tool that helps you to manage configuration in a heterogeneous environment. I’ve been frustrated by the myriad of vendor specific tools for managing configuration on their devices, and the state of the art hasn’t really advanced all that much in the 8 years… Read More
