17Feb
I noticed one day that I stopped getting any SCOM alerts in my System Center Operation Manager 2007 R2 environment. As part of my troubleshooting I found a ton of the following warnings in the Operations Manager Event viewer. I contacted Microsoft tech support and discovered that my RMS was in maintenance mode. I had put my RMS in maintenance mode for 30 minutes when I did some windows updates, but it never come out of it. After stopping maintenance mode and re-starting the System Center Management service on the Root Management Server, alerts started coming in again. The Microsoft tech told me that you should never put your RMS in maintenance mode and when I asked to have some documentation where it said that, he said it does not exist. This a tip that they have discovered in their troubleshooting. During this time the RMS was unable to process agent requests, so the agent holds on to the notifications in a buffer until it can communicate with the RMS again. If you are getting this warning on the RMS there is a good chance that you lost any alerts that the agent was unable to store in the buffer.
Event Type: Warning
Event Source: OpsMgr Connector
Event Category: None
Event ID: 20058
Date: 2/6/2010
Time: 2:00:17 PM
User: N/A
Computer:
Description:
The Root Connector has received bad packets which have been dropped. It received 8374 such packet(s) in the last five minutes
For more information, see Help and Support Center at http://go.microsoft.com/fwlink/events.asp.
Tags: SCOM, System Center Operations Manager
20Nov
The Conficker worm aka Downadup worm continues to infect non-patched Microsoft computers a year after the initial outbreak. This worm scans your network and finds and infects other computers that are also not patched with the Microsoft MS08-067 critical patch. The worm can effect network performance since it floods the network with traffic while it scans for other hosts to infect. It’s not in the news anymore since most companies have updated their systems, but just as many have not and are still vulnerable to attack. So get patched and update your anti-virus software.
24Jun
If you have purchased a graphic intensive PC game recently, such as Cryisis, you realize that your computer runs the game like a choppy YouTube video. In order to get a better gaming experience you need to get the latest hardware, so a $60 game may end up costing you hundreds in hardware upgrades.
Years ago when computing power was extraordinarily expensive, you had a server like a mainframe do all the number crunching serve out results to “dumb” terminals. What if the graphics and physics calculations of today’s games were subcontracted to servers that did the heavy lifting. As computer power reaches pennies per Ghz and unlimited internet bandwidth increases steadily, the next evolution in gaming is in game streaming and subscription.
Imagine subscribing to the latest graphically intensive game that just came out over the internet. With the streaming model, video is streamed to your desktop while the game is running on a remote server at high resolution and with high game details on. That means your PC doesn’t have to run the latest hardware to play the game the way it was meant to be played. A recent article has revealed the OnLive will attempt do just that.
Of course this would only work if you have the bandwidth to support it. The internet backbones are currently being upgraded, but higher internet speeds will likely cost you more as well. Another road block would be the ISP’s proposed cap on your monthly bandwitdh. If the unlimited internet bandwitdh model changes, entire business built on internet communcations will suffer, including the upcoming game streaming.
Tags: Gaming
02Jan
I just got a Blackberry Curve and my first impression is not how cool it is, but instead how much the battery life sucks. I have to charge it up on a daily basis or the battery dies. I got a new battery and I charged it for 24 hours and I still don’t get the battery life that I expect to be getting. If I forget to charge it at night it’s dead by morning. I’m on the Sprint network and I am connecting to my home WiFi for local internet connectivity. I leave it in the holster which I thought was supposed to use less battery. I was wondering if there might be some options I can change to conserve battery life. As I was searching I found an article about a company called M2E Power that is making a device that charges your cell phone or iPod while you walk. I thought this was a great concept considering how many devices that require batteries are for people “on the go”.
30Dec
Even though you are around your co-workers all day, sometimes I feel that I have no idea what they are working on. It would be nice to send out some kind of unobtrusive message to let people know what you are up to. A service like Twitter would be a good solution to this problem.
Twitter is a great social networking tool for keeping up with what your friends are doing. Your inbox is overflowing already, so sending an email will get ignored and you might be the target of aggression if you send to many. Instant messaging is too “in your face” and is not designed to send out message to multiple people. Twitter allows people to post short messages that other people can subscribe to and read at their leisure. In my organization Twitter is blocked and to be honest I would only want my coworkers to get my updates, so a private server would be great. I did some searching and found a few open source options, but none of them ready for production or not easy to setup. In my searches I found a very interesting article that suggests using Wordpress as a Twitter-like service or more of a shared “microblog”. I setup Wordpress and use the Prologue theme to make it look more like Twitter and while it’s not exactly the same it does get the job done. You could even leave comments to an individual post. This might be useful if you asked the group a question. Now my team can just update their status via a browser or email, for mobile users, and I think this would facilitate communication among the group, especially if the group is geographically distributed. The last step to make this as effective as possible is notification when your team makes updates. This can be accomplished via the built in Wordpress RSS feeds. You can set up any number of RSS readers to notify you of updates of status. The hard part is getting others to update often otherwise it is not as useful.
Update: We were quoted on the Winning Workplace Blog.
Tags: Twitter; Teamwork