rsts11: #VFD2 Day 0 rollup

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Greetings from the Silicon Valley representative/delegate to Virtualization Field Day 2 by Gestalt IT. In about 9 hours we’ll be on a bus/limo to the first presentations of #VFD2 (watch our updates throughout the rest of the week on Twitter!).

Let’s Get It Started In Here

We had our opening ceremonies/hometown gift exchange/thorough discussion of kangaroo scrotums (hope there wasn’t an embargo on those) and great dinner at Zeytoun across the road from our home base at the Doubletree. I won’t write much about the meal (although I will probably Yelp it later).  It was fun getting to know and chat with the other eleven delegates and our fearless leader Matt Simmons (@standaloneSA). We’re missing Steve Foskett, but he had family priorities that meant it was right for him to miss his first of 14 TFD events.

I have to admit it’s weird being the only one from Silicon Valley here. It’s easy to live in the Valley and feel like technology only exists here, or only thrives here. But we’ve got folks who make their living and livelihood at virtualization from across the country, across the pond, and somewhere that has a famous opera house on the other side of the world. So it can give a sense of proportion, although I am happy to have Fry’s, Central Computer, Action Surplus, Weird Stuff, and Halted within a couple miles of home, and most of the big names in technology nearby as well.

wolfgang puck single serve

In-room coffee done right

Welcome To The Hotel (in) California

I’m back in my room, and I think many of the delegates took the opportunity to get wound down for bed in their respective rooms across the hotel (we’re not the only geeks in the house — Ethernet Summit is winding down tomorrow it seems — but we’re not wearing name tags).  I have to make some comments on the hotel experience, having spent some time in hotels in Las Vegas, Seattle, and Los Angeles in the last six months.

The in-room coffee is, in fact, the best I’ve found yet. W Seattle and Hard Rock Hotel did not have in-room coffee, and LAX Marriott has weird disposable-brew-basket coffee that, while it tastes good, is really enough for one cup but they only give you one unless you ask. Doubletree is putting out a two-bay Wolfgang Puck branded pod-based coffeemaker that uses Senseo-style pods (Puck’s line is provided though, individually wrapped). There are two cups, two sleeves, two lids, and enough coffee and treatments for 2-4 cups. It’s probably not as good as I would have made with my Clever Dripper and some fresh-ground coffee, as I went for on my LA trip last weekend, but it’s pretty good, convenient, and drinkable even after Starbucks closes.

Also, the service is excellent so far. I called their “careline” to get help with the wifi, figuring out how to get my free service provided as part of the reservation. It was explained promptly and courteously, and I even had time to add my Hilton number to the reservation before I got overly annoyed with the phone itself. 🙂 The people are great, greet you by name, and provide all the information you need (and a warm chocolate cookie at check-in too).

I have to say the room and the experience almost rise to the level of a Disney deluxe resort at WDW. Cell/wifi is better here than at Wilderness Lodge, but it’s much closer in experience quality than any of the other hotels I’ve been in over the last few months. (When I last stayed at Wilderness Lodge, I was not a cast member, so I didn’t get special rates or treatment… my last visit to WDW was as a cast member but at a moderate resort.)

I’ve already discovered a thing or two I’ve forgotten, and while I could drive home to pick up a few things, it wouldn’t be in the spirit of the event, so I’ll just rush to the lobby store in the morning… and be grateful I had a spare mini/micro USB adapter still packed from the weekend to charge my phone up.

Tomorrow, Tomorrow

Tomorrow we’re off to see Symantec in the morning (did they really say we’re leaving the hotel at 7:30am? AIEEE), and then Zerto and Xangati will come see us in the afternoon. I’ve worked with Symantec in the enterprise antivirus/endpoint protection arena as a customer before, and have long used their Norton end user security products at home. Never got around to deploying their backup solutions (one of my two certifications ever was Legato Networker about a decade ago).

Zerto is new to me, other than an amusing Twitter exchange last week… I met Xangati at Tech Field Day 5 over a year ago now as a fly-on-the-wall sort of guest, and am looking forward to seeing where they’ve come with their offerings.

Disclaimer

As you’ll see me mention a few times this week… the presenters/sponsors for VFD2 are providing for my lodging, meals, and entertainment over the next 48 hours, and may also provide gifts or promotional items. We definitely appreciate their support for this event. However, as Tech Field Day delegates, we’re not beholden to the presenters as far as content and perspective (or even reporting/blogging at all)  by virtue of their generous support of the event. If something is interesting, noteworthy, yawnworthy, or downright unfathomable, you’ll hear it from me because it’s what I think, not because the provider of said something supported the event. If it’s just bleh, you may not hear about it at all, but hopefully that won’t happen. Same goes for the other delegates as well; we’re here as independent thought leaders, not cheerleaders (I’ll be the first to say I shouldn’t be wearing a skirt anyway).

More tomorrow… watch Twitter for live treatment of the presentations, and check back on rsts11 for more detailed coverage as time permits and interest warrants.

rsts11: Gallifrey One and Virtualization Field Day 2, and a one-two-three-four?

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It’s February, the month I traditionally miss the BayLISA meeting (OpenLDAP backend with Howard Chu, and SSL with Heather Stern, if you’re interested, btw). Do you follow me on Twitter? If not, go ahead and do it! But if/when you do already…

This weekend will be pretty quiet. I’m moving stuff into my store’s warehouse, which I will write about soon.

First things first, but not necessarily in that order…

Next weekend is Gallifrey One’s Network 23, 20,000 Years Into The Future. The largest and longest-running (I think) Doctor Who fan convention in the world takes over Los Angeles with over 2000 fans from around the world, and cast and crew and writers and famous fans of the longest running television show (with continuity) in history. It will be my fourth year, and we’re expecting the entire primary cast of the 1996 television movie (including the TARDIS console), and guests from Waris Hussein and William Russell who were in on the first episode in 1963, to people who were involved in the most recent series in 2011.

I probably will not live-tweet a lot of it, partly because cellular reception in the bowels of the LAX Marriott is epicly bad. But if you see anything from me on Twitter, it will likely be Doctor Who-related. New to the good Doctor? Head to Netflix (or iTunes or Amazon) and watch yourself some.

Virtually the next week…

And just before the following weekend is Virtualization Field Day 2, a production of Gestalt IT which brings together thought leaders and truly interesting vendors for an intense two-day conference on IT technology (sometimes focused, as this session is, on a narrow area like virtualization or wireless networking).

I’m very honored to have been chosen as a delegate this time, so I’ll be camping with several other tech prognosticators and making the rounds of some of the most interesting virtualization players in Silicon Valley. You’ll likely see a blog post or two, and quite a few tweets, about what I find interesting, abominable, intriguing, or totally whiskey-tango-foxtrot.

Tech Field Day, and its WFD/VFD brethren, are interesting in that the sponsors pay to bring the thinkers together, covering the travel and living costs of the delegates for the duration of the event. Some of them choose to give freebies to the delegates, like typical vendor schwag or a sample of the company’s product.

However, there’s no requirement or expectation that delegates write about everything, agree with the sponsoring companies’ pitches and perspectives, or paint an unduly rosy picture of the sponsor or its products/services/roadmap/choice of tie. You’ll see what I think about the presenters (and my co-delegates, who I don’t believe are subject to the FTC disclosure rule but might give me cool stuff too), from an independent and personal viewpoint.

For example, if the fine folks at Xangati, who I saw at TFD5 as an evening guest, pitch their new iPhone-based VM monitor software, you will probably see me forget the </yawn> tag. But (hypothetical example only) if VMware shows up and announces the return of the VMTN (which is just a pipe dream, I know they’re thinking about bringing it back but I doubt they’ll present or announce it), that’s something that affects me and my team/company/world, so I’ll make some noise. And if Eva Longoria, Eva Mendes, and Leonard Nimoy show up for the party on Thursday, I will probably be posting pictures.

You think you’re funny?

The week after VFD2, I’ll be back on stage at Rooster T Feathers in Sunnyvale for the first round of the 10th Annual New Talent Comedy Contest. This will be my second contest appearance, and my fifth time on stage. I may get a chance to go on stage at Plan B in Sunnyvale the following weekend, for any local readers who want to see the backwaters of Sunnyvale. I don’t really expect to win the contest, but at least this year I don’t have a Disney World trip planned for finals week so, if it happens… it happens.

And so fourth…

I’ve started writing up my VMware lab configuration (with the Shuttle SH67H3 and a HP N40L Microserver), and got the Microserver installed last night. Now to find a place other than the living room floor to set them up, take a couple of pictures, and make it slightly more interesting reading.

What’s Rob been up to this year?

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I’ll try to blog a bit more in the near future… had a couple of big projects take shape this year so far, and some of it may be interesting to my readers.

1) I’m building a new compact home virtualization environment. Decided the full tower i7 with 24GB RAM wasn’t quite enough, so I’m building a Shuttle i7 with 32GB of RAM. Well, it’s built, just needs more disk, and my NAS box came in yesterday.

2) I’m taking my standup comedy “career” a bit more seriously, with more stage time and some classes. Someday you may see me making geek jokes on G4 or something. You never know. I don’t even know.

3) I’m opening a brick-and-mortar store.

There will be more details on some of this, coming soon. Stay tuned!

A positive Dell customer service experience…

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The home NAS project has kinda stalled, although I’ve been collecting bits for it still. But I had a weekend experience I thought I’d share with my readers.

Sometime in 2004 or 2005 I purchased a Dell Inspiron E1405 (Core Duo, DVD burner, Windows XP Media Center Edition 2005). I ran it, occasionally updated, from then until probably 2008 when I got my D830. It then went into storage, and somewhere in the past six years I lost the install media.

Late last month, a friend wanted me to help her fix her dad’s Thinkpad 600e. Nice machine, but somewhat anachronistic (and is it really worth fixing a Pentium II with 64MB of RAM?). I found the E1405 and figured I’d pass it along… but since it had Media Center Edition and not Home or Pro, I had no media handy (and Microsoft’s Action Pack only includes current products, not historical ones).

I did a bit of web searching, expecting I’d have to pay $25 to an eBay seller as I’ve done before once or twice (mostly for Thinkpad recovery media). Found Dell’s replacement disk page, put in a request with my serial number, and sent it off.

I didn’t really expect a response, but I got a personal confirmation that the discs were being shipped, and a couple of automated updates. Today the discs arrived via Fedex standard overnight. They even included what appears to be the Linux support DVD (the blue one on top that’s labeled “Dell Portable n Series”).

Even these days, not all vendors respond to support requests if you don’t have an active contract or a seven figure corporate account to hang off of… but I gotta give Dell credit for making this semi-fanboy (I probably have at least a dozen Dell machines, laptops and desktops and workstations and a couple of rackmount servers) very happy to be a Dell customer.

Thank you, Dell.

That is all.

BayLISA is almost old enough to drink

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BayLISA

Okay, that headline is a bit misleading… as a person BayLISA would be almost old enough to drink in California, and as a red wine it might be a bit past its prime. But as a system administrators group in the San Francisco Bay Area, it’s still going strong with room to grow and improve even more.

BayLISA came out of discussions at LISA 4, as I understand it, and we incorporated as a non-profit in California in April 1991. The folks who started this local org later contributed to the creation of SAGE, the System Administrators Guild SIG of USENIX. So we have a long and storied history, some of which has even been captured on video.

After the LISA 2010 conference in San Jose, I decided to make good on a promise I made to past BayLISA president Jennifer Davis (either at LISA ’00 or ’05) to come see what BayLISA was all about. And in three months I went from “Oh, I keep meaning to go” to Director to “sure, I’ll be secretary of the board.” And as a result, a number of you may have heard more from me in the last 11 months than ever before. I’m happy and sorry about that, as applicable.

Anyway, in the past year we have seen outreach (much of my contribution to the org) and attendance growing, but board member availability shrinking. And while I try to make it look easy, it takes a substantial investment of time and energy when it’s just 2 or 3 people arranging meetings and speakers and sponsors and so forth.

So I’m looking for a couple of professional system administrators in the Bay Area to join me in this cause, to expand the reach and the strength of BayLISA in the Silicon Valley and beyond. What’s it going to cost you? Less than the price of thirty Ginsu knives with free shipping, that’s what. Or more practically speaking:

  • Got 1-2 hours a week? This includes coming to the monthly meeting, retweeting or blogging or sharing news with your colleagues, coworkers, followers, etc. Doesn’t even have to be every week.
  • Help us by running a meeting every six months, on average. You can do it in parts–find and coordinate the speaker one month, introduce the meeting another month, coordinate with corporate sponsors another month, run the video camera one month, sit in the audience a couple of months, whatever it takes. With 7 people each doing the equivalent of two meetings a year, someone can even get sick now and then. But you don’t have to do that.
  • Expand your connections in the Bay Area, both with system administrators, vendors, and sponsors.
  • Get BayLISA membership for free for the duration of your board term, which entitles you to discounts, early access to videos as we catch up on those, and other benefits that you can help us choose.  This is a $45/year value.

I can tell you more in other venues if you have questions, answers, suggestions, or comments. Drop me a note, leave a comment here, find me as ‘kavonr’ on irc, or email me as rnovak on gmail if you like.

And if you’d like to join me on the board of BayLISA, let me know through one of the above methods, and come to our annual “business” meeting on November 17. Before the guest presentation by Message Systems, we’ll be holding the board elections. (We would want you to come to your first board meeting  on November 28 for officer elections, by the way, although we can also arrange a phone bridge for the meeting if you can’t make it.)

Want to get behind BayLISA but you’re not quite up to the 2 hours a week commitment? Become a full paying member of BayLISA for just $45/year (may be expensable or tax deductible; consult your manager or tax consultant as appropriate) and show your support for our work to further the profession of system administration in the Bay Area. We’ll be adding to our list of benefits, although I don’t think “a pony” will ever be one of them. Sorry, Bruce.

Well, that was easier to fit into a blog post than into a tweet… wanna get involved? Get in touch with me soon.