iPhone Revisited

Last summer I blogged about the iPhone right after the 2.0 software had been released. Based on various articles I’d read and comments I’d heard I was pretty wary that the iPhone would be a usable device in an Enterprise environment.  I also didn’t care much myself, as I was on Verizon and thus there was no need to worry about a device I couldn’t even use. Man was I wrong!

As it turns out, our organization switched wireless services from Verizon to AT&T last fall. Hmmm. Then I started to talk to people who were using the iPhone 3G and gave it glowing reviews. Then I touched one myself. Then I bought one. Frankly, being in the field I’m in and routinely seeing new toys, most things don’t impress me. But this thing impressed me, Big Time. So, here’s my take on some of the criticisms leveled in the articles I cited last summer:

Battery Life

One of the biggest complaints I heard was that the iPhone gets terrible battery life. Apparently most of these complaints must have come from people used to normal cell phones and not Smartphones. In my experience the battery life on my iPhone 3G is not any worse than the Windows Mobile device that I was using, and only slightly worse than the two Treos I had before that. I think most of the non-Smartphone crowd that jumped on iPhone weren’t prepared for the “hope to get through one day on a charge, always recharge at home” routine. But for me it is business as usual since I’ve had to do that with every Smartphone I’ve owned. That said, I am not a heavy voice user and don’t rack up hours a day on the cell phone.

Crashing

My iPhone 3G is every bit as stable (actually more-so) than the Windows Mobile phone it replaced. Not sure where these complaints come from, but even after jailbreaking my iPhone it is not unstable in any way. Perhaps I just jumped on the iPhone at the right time, post- 2.1 and the software is finally stable…

Voice Quality

I have found the voice quality (and call stability) of the iPhone 3G to be better than either the Windows Mobile xv8600 (Verizon) or Treo 600/650 (T-Mobile) devices I owned before. Coverage still stinks in my office, but then again I work in a closet surrounded by steel and concrete
Perfection?

Is the iPhone perfect? Not even close. There are some really inexplicable choices made in this device. For example, the Mail app is laughable. At least when synced to Exchange (no idea about other types of accounts) you cannot choose which folders you want to sync to the phone. They all come down. And to add insult to injury, all folders are displayed expanded within the Mail app… uh, Apple? Have you ever heard of the ability to collapse a long list of items? To me this just further shows Apple’s lack of competence when it comes to the “Enterprise” and the way things work in business. In my opinion the only thing that saves the lame Mail app is the Touch interface itself. Apple has made the interface work so well and so intuitive that I am able to overcome the deficiencies of the Mail app. Here’s hoping they improve it someday.

Bottom line: while not perfect, iPhone is to-date and by-far the best Smartphone I’ve ever used. Period. Windows Mobile and Palm (the only platforms I have direct experience with) are not even remotely close.

Seagate Drive Woes

Say you have a nice 1 Terabyte Seagate Barracuda drive that appears to be working fine. You power the host system off, then back on… and it fails to see the drive.  No matter what you do, you can’t get the drive to be seen by the host machine again. Sound unlikely? Not if you have one of the various Seagate Barracuda SATA drives that have a nasty bug… Search the net for Seagate Barracuda Bug for many many threads on the subject of these drives failing prematurely.

It’s somewhat difficult to distinguish fact from fiction in the various forums discussing the issue because of the inevitable untruth and hyperbole that gets mixed in with facts, but Seagate has finally released a KB article on the subject, so it appears to be a Real Problem after all.

There is apparently a firmware bug in multiple Seagate models that, when it decides to rear its ugly head, completely bricks the drive and it can’t even be seen by the BIOS. From the user’s standpoint, the data is completely gone, though it can still be recovered by a competent data recovery service.

Oh yeah… did I mention that our new SAN has twelve of these drives in it? Joy. At least we’re (thankfully) not using the SAN in production, yet. In any case, if you have large Seagate SATA drives anywhere in your organization or home PCs, check them out before it’s too late…

VI4 becomes vSphere?

I just read about this here, but google vSphere for full blogosphere (hehe) treatment on the subject. So the product that would have naturally been called ‘VMware Infrastructure 4′ will be called ‘vSphere’. Hmmm… upon hearing it for the first time, I had a few thoughts:

“Don’t vSphere the Reaper…”

“The only thing we have to vSphere is vSphere itself…”

“vSphere: The OS with Big B….”  Errr…. scratch that one. Oops! That made it worse… I will preemptively apologize to those I’ve just offended. Sorry!

So, what’s the point of all that? Nothing, really. Just my silly ramblings over what I consider a silly name change. But I’ll be the first to admit that I’m not a creative marketing type, so maybe it will eventually make sense and roll off the tongue without sounding weird. [insert rimshot]

[tap tap tap] Is this thing on?

Sometimes you get a weird one…

Yesterday our voice mail server crashed. I immediately thought it was the same thing that happened exactly one year ago TO THE DAY, which I wrote about earlier this year. So, like last time I pulled the Cisco Unity Express (CUE) module out of the Cisco router with the intention of pulling the drive and running SpinRite on it, but as I turned the module over a small “part” fell out…

Hmmm… parts falling out of electronics is rarely a good thing. Neither I nor Mike (my IT Support colleague) had any idea what it was, and couldn’t find an obvious place it had broken away from on the motherboard. So Mike proceeded to SpinRite the drive as we assumed it was the culprit, just like last time.

While the drive was being tested I opened our spare CUE module for a comparison, and AHA!, there it was… the part that had fallen off was a small metal “U” that had been soldered to the motherboard, serving as an anchor for the clamp that holds the CPU heatsink down. That spring mechanism is under tension, and apparently the solder joints had given out and the “anchor” came free.

So, the drive test finishes and of course finds nothing wrong. We put it all back together, pop the module back into the router (sans heatsink anchor) and fired it up… voila! It came up and worked perfectly. Our best guess as to what happened is this: The heatsink anchor popped off the motherboard, shorting some random traces, crashing the server. Once removed, the system was able to operate fine.

Sometimes you do get a weird one

VMwhere?

I have been a happy, loyal VMware customer for over a year now (meaning I bought the product, not the free stuff) but I’m quickly turning into a very unhappy customer. It all started about a month ago when I realized I had not received a renewal notice for our VMware support, and already a month had gone by in which we were technically not under a support contract… not good!

So, I call VMware and this is roughly what has transpired:

First Call: I get into a complicated calling tree, have to enter my ZIP, and get the voice mailbox of my supposed sales rep. I leave a message explaining the situation.

Second Call: Three days go by and I hear nothing. I call back and go through the same routine, and leave another message… a little more emphatic this time.

Third Call: Four more days go by and STILL I hear nothing. I call back, do the routine and now leave a VERY emphatic message. I get a call back that day from my rep apologizing that it took so long, blah blah blah. I explain my situation with the support contract elapsing and she assures me she will get a quote out ASAP.

Fourth call: FOUR more days go by and no quote appears. I call back and by some miracle she actually answers. I explain again who I am and what I want. This time she tells me that their “ordering process” is taking long, so it will be upwards of 15 days before they can generate a quote. What the heck?! This is a multi-billion-dollar company that should have competence with data processing and they can’t get me a quote out in half a month??

A few days later, the quote arrives via email (note that it took nowhere near the 15 days I was told). Hooray! The price looks right and I want to purchase the support agreement… except for one problem. The instructions on the quote say I should purchase it from my reseller, OR from VMware directly, if I prefer. Since our original purchase of VI3 was directly from VMware and I don’t HAVE a reseller for VMware, I want to purchase it through VMware directly again. So I email my rep back (got her email via the quote, so I didn’t have to call!) and ask “can I purchase this directly from VMware? I don’t have a relationship with a reseller for your products.”

Her response arrives the next day and says “Yes, you can purchase this from us.” Again, WHAT THE HECK? No “yes, to purchase from us, go here…” or “please call this number…” or ANYTHING remotely useful! Now I’m mad. We’re up to today and I’ve spent 40 minutes on the phone trying to get an actual HUMAN BEING who can tell me how I can GIVE THEM MONEY. I got into a “small/medium business” part of the tree and thought I was almost there… but of course I got sent to a voice mailbox and was told to leave another message. Guess what? This time the system says “the person you are trying to reach does not have enough space left in their mailbox. You cannot leave a message” and it hangs up. CAN YOU BELIEVE THIS? This had now turned into comedy. It goes beyond reason how a company such as this can conduct business so poorly.

So, to sum it up… apparently VMware (the company) has gone under and forgotten to tell anyone. They don’t want to TAKE MY MONEY nor do they seem to care one bit about customer service. They don’t even have a voice mail system that lets you leave messages (to certain people in their calling tree) at this point. I’ve been reading in the trade rags for the last few months that Microsoft is going to eat VMware’s lunch with Hyper-V, and I’m beginning to think they will. VMware is simply not acting like a healthy company. Oh, and I still haven’t managed to pay for the support contract I need.

Anyone else out there having trouble with VMware and their service?

The Other Vote on Nov. 4

Sure, you are all aware of the presidential, et al. elections that took place on November 4, but most are not aware of the other vote that took place at the FCC regarding future use of “white spaces.” I originally wrote about this back in August, and the vote finally came down on Election Day (and some insiders say the timing was no coincidence… if you want to minimize the media exposure of a “hot potato” topic, what better day to do it on than this past November 4, eh?)

Anyway, it is done and the news isn’t great for those who rely on wireless mics, which pretty much includes every church with a PA system, the entire entertainment industry, broadcast news, etc.  (Ironically, just about every time I saw either presidential candidate talking on the campaign trail, they were holding wireless mics! A little too ironic… yeah, I really do think)  I won’t go into the details of the vote here… just search for white spaces vote and you’ll find plenty of information (and mis-information) on the results, but Front of House magazine has a decent summary of what happened and what this means to those of use who rely on wireless mics.

While my perspective isn’t quite as gloomy as the writer’s, it is pretty close. Most frustrating to me is how this whole debate has been successfully framed in the media as a way to get broadband to the “less fortunate” and all that… the same old saw about the “digital divide” and all that. What a crock. This is 100% about Big Business making more money, period. Adding insult to injury is the revisionist history the FCC is already playing with the tests done in real world conditions earlier this year to determine if the new proposed devices can effectively sense wireless mic and DTV signals, and avoid those frequencies. By all accounts I read after the tests, they were a complete failure. But now the FCC is saying they were promising enough to let them proceed.

Only time will tell how badly this affects us, but one thing is certain: if you don’t own the highest quality wireless gear that is out there, you’re probably going to find it very rough going once these portable consumer devices come online. Those of us with high-end gear have no guarantees we will fare any better, but the chances of our gear operating in the forthcoming hostile RF environment are certainly higher.

mRemote vs. Terminals

I’ve been using mRemote for my RDP and SSH chores for quite a while now, but was disappointed to see that it is going commercial. (I certainly don’t begrudge anyone trying to make a buck… I’m just cheap when it comes to tools like these).

So, while talking to a colleague about this he informed me of another free RDP/SSH/etc client, Terminals. I haven’t been using Terminals very long, but so far it seems to do everything mRemote did, and then some. On one hand, it has better credential management, while on the other hand it has some rougher edges in the UI.

Overall I like it and consider it a usable replacement for mRemote. Best of all, it’s still free!

New SAN Arrives!

Ahhhh, ain’t she pretty? We recently purchased this Cybernetics miSAN-D (pronounced “my SAN” if you’re wondering) unit to be our first “real” SAN. It’s a 12 Terabyte (raw) model using SATA-II drives and 4GB of cache.

We’ve been virtualized via VMware for quite a while now, but realized we were not taking full advantage of virtualization by using plain-old local storage on each server. We still can’t afford full blown VMotion, but by putting our virtual machines on the SAN at least I will be able to manually move them between boxes when needed.

The miSAN will also be used for boring old file storage, which we are woefully lacking right now. You may be wondering why we chose a SAN you’ve probably never heard of? There are multiple reasons:

• I’ve used a lot of Cybernetics gear in the past (tape loaders, virtual tape caches, etc) and like the company and their products.
• A colleague of mine has been using a miSAN for nearly a year, and she says it works and performs as advertised.
• Bang-for-the-Buck. Sure, I would have liked to start with a “big name” SAN like Equalogic or EMC, but these are simply out of our price range. And at the opposite extreme low end I couldn’t find decent performance or features. The miSAN seems to sit right in the sweet spot for us… good price (12 TB raw for under 13k), good performance, and features you don’t find on low-end SANs like snapshots, HA failover to an identical unit, per-LUN replication to another local unit OR a unit sitting across a WAN, de-duplication and built-in scheduled offloading to tape to name a few.

We have a bit more planning to do before firing up the miSAN, but we are moving forward rapidly. The biggest decision I have to make at this point is how to provision the base storage… multiple RAIDS, one giant RAID5 (or 6), or a RAID50… it’s that nagging balance between safety/redundancy and useable space…. Hmmm.

Another CITRT has come and gone

I spent most of last week at the fall Church IT Roundtable (aka “CITRT”) event, and have spent most of this Monday in “re-entry” mode. Kudos to Trace Pupke and Seacoast church for doing a stellar job hosting this event. The bar has certainly been raised!

I had a great time meeting new people and getting to know others much better. I come back feeling refreshed and ready to start applying all of the info I tried to absorb. If you are in church IT and have not gone to one of these events for whatever reason, or were not even aware of CITRT, I can only say that I consider this one of those “must do” events, period. If I had to make the choice between specialized training or CITRT, I would choose the latter in a heartbeat. The networking you can do and contacts you make far outweigh any specific knowledge you might gain (and trust me, you DO gain knowledge at these things And beyond raw knowledge, there is the intangible benefit of just hanging with like-minded people that have the same job as yours. You will definitely feel less “alone” after attending one of these.

The next CITRT is already scheduled for April 23-24, 2009 in Colorado Springs, in conjunction with MinistryTech. Don’t miss it!

LHC RAP

Confused about what the new Large Hadron Collider does? Here’s a brief summary. Warning: You will never get these 4 minutes and 49 seconds back. You have been warned…