The Myth of Common Sense

I’ve been thinking a lot lately about common sense, and why does it seem that no one has it? You see the statement all the time, and as a IT person, I see–and say–it all the time. But I began to wonder if common sense even exists, and I believe I have the answer.

It doesn’t. It’s a myth. Not there, not going to happen, get over it.

Well, clearly, common sense says there’s common sense, right? Damn, just did it again.

My theory is simple, and I’ll label it “Affinity”. Some of you may be familiar with the Myer Briggs personality test? It’s, in a very simple form, a test to see what kind of personality type you are based on overall characteristics. Extroverted/Introverted, Sensing/Intuitive, Thinking/Feeling and Judging/Perceiving. HR departments love this stuff, and it can be kind of facinating. I’m an INTJ for those who are interested. But the Myer Briggs index really deals in architypes, and while it might help you in your interactions with other personality types, I’d like to take a more meat and potato’s approach–which fits, considering my type.

Imagine a wheel, and on this wheel is every skill out there. Accounting, computers, writing, carpentry, you name it. Now, everyone’s wheel is different, so don’t expect me to be publishing the wheel of skill any time soon. But imagine this wheel, and your primary affinity is “Underwater Basket Weaving” (UBW for short). Then the skills around it are all related to that and start diverging the further you get around the wheel. Scrapbooking might be close, but car repair might be far away as you can get on the other side of the wheel.

“Common Sense” is your general knowledge and ability to intuit answers that is close to your affinity. How do I weave a basket in a tree, you ask? That’s pretty close to your affinity so you would be able to “common sense” an answer. Or at least avoid some common mistakes typically to tree born crafts.

How do I replace the o-ring on the booster rocket of the shuttle? That one is pretty far away from your affinity, so you’re libel to look and feel about as stupid as possible. But if your affinity was car repair, you could probably common sense your way through the problem. You might not get it all right, but you wouldn’t look a complete fool.

Affinity and happiness are also closely tied together. I believe that the type of job you have can tie into your happiness. This isn’t news. Most people have known this for a long time. The closer your job is to your affinity, the happier you’re going to be. Let’s talk a little bit about affinity and jobs in general. It is my belief that you can teach most anyone, most any job. But how good they are at it all depends on how closely that job is aligned to their affinity. I can teach you, the uber basket weaver, how to be an IT person. But the job is so far away from your affinity that you’ll never really be any good at it, and you certainly won’t be happy doing it. We’ve all met these people in our workplace. They’re slow, make common mistakes (again and again), arrive late and leave early and are generally unpleasant to be around. How many of these people could turn their lives, and outlooks, around if they just found a job that was closer to their affinity?

It’s important to remember that everyone’s Affinity wheel is different too. Many of the things I’m talking about can break down once you start applying it to the individual. For example, most people who have an affinity for some kind of sales job typically have a very low affinity towards computers. But not always. I work with a person who is a Director of Sales and used to be an IT guy, and is probably a bigger gadget guy then I am! An unusual combination.

To bring it back to common sense, the closer a problem is to your affinity, the better you are equipped to figure out situations and make the appropriate decision. Common sense. But the further the problem is from your affinity, the less you are able to deal with it, and the more likely you are to make a mistake. Lack of common sense.

So I argue, there is no common sense, just things your good at, and things you aren’t. Now, I have to drive home from work and hopefully none of these idiots will get me killed! Is driving really all that hard?!

Self inflicted pain – part 2

August 5th, 2010: the day I really began to wonder why I do this stuff to myself.

So coming back from lunch, I decide it’s time to get that VM backed up.  I do NOT want to go through another morning like that again!

Setup the backup job and immediately get a error taking the snapshot.  The funny thing is, the initial snapshot file in VMware is very small.  Since the primary disks have been frozen, the snapshot file is all the changes since the time the snapshot was taken, so within the first few minutes this is quite small.  The problem is VMware calculates about how much it thinks it’ll need and sees if the volume it’s on is big enough.  Mine wasn’t.

Two choices, change the calculation settings or change the location where the snapshot is stored.  I decide to go with the latter.  Shut the VM down, edit the config file (*.vmx) and then have to remove the VM from inventory and re-add it in.  Except that it won’t let me add it back in.  In hindsight it’s pretty clear I had an error in what I put in the file, but I just didn’t think of it at the time.  I reserve the right to be an idiot at any and all times.

No problem, I think.  This is the beauty of virtualization.  I’ll just create a brand NEW VM and had these hard drives to it and I’m good.  So delete all the extra files I don’t need anymore, create the new VM and add the hard drives.  Boot up successfully but the archive software bombs out completely.  Hmmm.  Research and realize that 2 extra virtual hard drives are missing.  My heard sinks.  Remember how I removed the files I didn’t need?  Oh crap, what if I deleted the drives??  Not as bad as earlier because I do still have the data drive, so worse case I reinstall the software and figure out how to use the data but still many hours of work ahead of me.  Oh crap.

But then I get to thinking.  I like to spread my virtual hard drives out a bit and not put them all in the same folder, mostly for performance.  What if I did that?  So I look at one of my other volumes and there they are!!  But which one is which?  Spiceworks to the rescue, compare disk sizes and set the new volumes in place.  Reboot and everything comes back online.

Edit the config file again (this time doing it right) and snapshot works perfectly.  Finally got the backup going.

Days like this make you wonder if you chose the right profession!!  On the plus side, I now have good backups all the way around!!

Self inflicted pain

Nothing much worse in IT then server outage.  What is worse, is when you do it to yourself.  This is the sorry tale of August 5th, 2010 and how I inflicted a horrible day upon myself.  Unrelenting stress, fear of job, the whole nine yards.

It all started innocently enough on Wednesday the 4th, when I started installing my new virtual machine backup software (Veeam).  No big, right?  Just carve out a little more space on my backup SAN and get my backups going.  Well, it’s been awhile since I have last used OpenFiler and it took me a little while to re-figure out the interface and get my volume attached to the proper iSCSI target.  But I did and everything seemed OK.

Until the 5th, when we discovered that the email archive server was not functioning.  This happens to be a virtual server who’s primary data virtual hard disk resides on the same SAN as the backups.  So I immediately jump to the conclusion that I screwed something up and dropped the configuration off.  Not a huge deal, right?   Just reconfigure it and VMware will detect it and everything will be happy.  This is where it all started going bad.  In retrospect, it turns out that the iSCSI target I was using went “bad” and even though it was configured OK, it was not showing up on VMware.  But at the time I didn’t realize this.  So I try many different things and I just can’t get the storage to attach.  What’s going on?  Normally with VMware if it see’s a VMware formated volume (VMFS) then it will just mount it and you’re good.  Not today.  But, I can see the volume so let’s try adding storage.  So I do that and go through the formating process.  But I know I’m not actually going to format it, because VMware doesn’t do that.  Right?  Nope, it formated it.

I’ve now destroyed the data volume.  The data volume that I don’t have a backup of.  The data volume that I was waiting until I got my virtual machine backup software before taking a backup of.  Ironic, huh?

Several minutes of panic’d thoughts go by.  All I can think is to reinstall the archival software, then start pulling all my monthly backups for the past year and restore them.  But the email archive software, when it removes an email from Exchange, it leaves a small shortcut file.  So first I need to discover if I restore an email will it overwrite the shortcut or simply duplicate?

Go to the Backup server and getting all kinds of error messages on there.  Great, now I need to save the backup server before I can get to the actual problem.  Why me?  But as I log on, I discover that the volume where I keep my real-time backups is just gone from the server.  This is great news!  The volume I formated must have been THIS volume, not my archive data volume!  Jump back on the SAN and still can’t get the archive data volume to get recognized.  This is when I create a new iSCSI LUN and attach the storage there.  BANG!  Data volume back on VMware and bring the server up minutes later.

So you think this would be the end of the story, wouldn’t you?  Surely I’ve learned my lesson and will stop messing with it… right?

Right?

VMware Loosing the SMB

I’ve been a VMware Virtualization Certified Professional for about 2 years now and I’ve been a fanboy even longer–a client actually introduced me to it out of the blue a few years back and opened my eyes to a new vista!  We never got along all that great–though we were hardly at each other’s throats–but I always thank him for showing me Virtualization.

As most of you know, I’m also a fanboy of Spiceworks which gives me a great window into the mind of the SMB IT department.  What I see is a lost opportunity for VMware because they are so focused on the Enterprise.  Microsoft’s Hyper-V and Citrix’s XenServer are making great strides in the virtualization space and offer many of the advanced features of VMware’s ESX for free.

VMware made some good strides with vSphere in creating some SMB minded license bundles, and for most SMB’s they are great packages.  But you can get the same stuff with more options for free or for less from both Microsoft and Citrix.

Want live migrations of VM’s between hosts?  Free from MS and Citrix.  ESX?  Nope, you need to purchase the VERY expensive Enterprise level licenses.  For 3 hosts with vCenter and vMotion you can easily drop $20,000 on VMware, but from Microsoft and Citrix it’s FREE.

Another thing I’ve noticed on Spiceworks is the number of SMB’s that are distributed across multiple sites.  VMware’s current licensing restricts the “SMB” bundles to a single site, essentially knocking themselves out of the race before they even get started.  And it’s a repeating pattern on Spiceworks, ESX is a good fit if you fall within the tight pocket of their licensing parameters but if you don’t then the other products are just better (not from a technical standpoint, but from a licensing one).

It kills me to watch VMware loose the SMB because of licensing policies.  It kills me to see people picking less mature products, just because they can’t afford VMware.  With a decent pricing structure, VMware could be killing this space, absolutely KILLING it.  They have a robust 3rd party application infrastructure, they have the name recognition.  Remember the old saying “no one ever got fired for buying IBM”… unless it was literally 10 times more expensive then the competitor.  Most SMB’s are more then willing to take that risk.  And frankly, with the latest XenServer and Hyper-V releases there isn’t all that much risk!

I evaluated Citrix XenServer and loved it, but I’m sticking with VMware because it’s what I’m trained on and what I know.  Because switching to XenServer would mean hours of weekend work for me.  Because the 3rd party infrastructure is superior and because I’m one of those lucky SMB’s that fall in the “window” where VMware’s licensing works for me.  And if I’m being perfectly honest, I’m NOT.  I have 2 remote sites that I just won’t be able to centrally managed in VMware, but it’s a hit I’m OK with taking!

But the window is closing and I just don’t see how VMware is going to keep itself from being locked outside.

Spiceworks

For those of you who don’t know, Spiceworks is a program that helps IT departments manage the IT infrastructure.  It’s help desk, inventory and monitoring software all rolled up into one package and one of it’s primary attractions is the fact that it’s free.  Yep, you heard me, free.  Spiceworks, the company, gets revenue a couple of different ways, one is through Spiceworks the program embedded ad’s and the other is through direct support from vendors, who are in turn given direct access to the Spiceworks community–trust me, this isn’t nearly as scary as it might sound.

So why am I writing about it?  I’ve been aware of Spiceworks since around version 2.1 (they’re at version 4.5 now and their upgrade cycle is insanely fast!) but really started getting involved with it in March of 2008.  The help desk package was–and still is–very basic which for me is one of the best things about it.  I’ve used a lot of Help Desk packages through the years, Magic, Lotus Notes (custom database), Track-IT, SysAid, etc and they all captured a ton of data but frankly we never used any of it.  Spiceworks let’s you create, comment and close a ticket all from one easy to use, appealing web page.  No extra tabs, no extra steps.  Bang bang and you’re done.

Inventory is agentless, so nothing to install on the workstations and it supports Windows, Linux (SSH login) and SNMP devices.  For SMB’s this pretty much covers most of your devices.  Inventory also recognizes special applications like MS Exchange and MS SQL which is a bonus. 

Monitoring is pretty basic, and frankly still needs some work but for your regular day to day needs it will get you where you need to go.

All of this is fantastic, and alone would be more then worth the cost (did I mention it was free?) but the one thing that really sets Spiceworks apart from other packages is the community.  Most applications these days have forums where you can post questions and hopefully get answers, but the usual experience is you post a question and 2-5 days later someone might respond.  In most cases you have to ask a follow-up question and that never gets responded to and you end up wasting a lot of time waiting and not getting your problem resolved.  At Spiceworks, the experience is quite different.  You post a question, and in most cases you’ll get multiple responses within a half hour!  It’s the most vibrant and active community I’ve ever been involved in.  As an IT professional it’s invaluable to have this kind, and level, of expertise so quickly at hand.

What finally prompted me to write this article though, was my experience at work.  When I first started at SeraCare we didn’t have any Help Desk package at all, so one of the first things we did was implement one.  Over a year earlier the previous IT manager had purchased another product called SysAid and while it wasn’t my favorite package, it had 2 things going for it.  Number one was the ability to email from within a ticket to another user.  At the time, Spiceworks did not have this ability, you could only email the creator of the ticket.  The second thing going for it was it was already there and the current staff was somewhat familiar with it.  Reluctantly we went forward with it.  It’s a pretty good package and for nearly a year we used it and were pretty happy with it.  But I stayed involved in the Spiceworks community and saw the rapid growth of capabilities in the product, while our paid software didn’t change in the slightest.

Finally, Spiceworks introduced version 4.5 of their product and my frustration with Sysaid was hitting a high.  What was my primary frustration?  All the clicking needed to get things done!  Want to read email correspondance associated with the ticket?  Messaging tab.  Want to close a ticket?  Change the status to closed, then click on another tab and fill out the resolution.  The reporting on SysAid was quite bad too.  Good, canned summary reports, but no detailed reports so I could always see how many tickets were open, but not what they were!  I finally solved this problem by creating a custom report in Crystal Reports but this was far from ideal.  Also, to get an inventory on a device required the SysAid agent to be installed.  The last straw was when we ran out of user licenses and I knew I’d have to purchase more just to have all the users in SysAid!

So in December of 2009 I created a test virtual machine, downloaded Spiceworks 4.5 and installed it.  What a difference.  Setup machine scanning in about 5 minutes, no agent installation required.  Help Desk setup in 5 more minutes.  Spiceworks clean and simple interface quickly reminded me why I liked it better!  And with 4.5 they had so many cool new things to do.  In version 4.0 Spiceworks introduced a plug-in architecture and there are now some really cool things you can do with it.  Intel’s Power Manager and Microsoft’s SQL monitor being top of the list!  So I opened up to the rest of the staff and the feedback was immediate that they liked it better.

Good enough for me!  In January 2010 we switched over Help Desk operations to Spiceworks and haven’t looked back.  If you’re in IT, do yourself a favor and check this product out.  The combinations of features, functionality, community and cost are unparalleled. 

Tell them Martin9700 sent you!  Click here to visit Spiceworks and see what I’m talking about.

Volume Licensing Dis-Service Center

The following is a post from a fellow IT person over at Spiceworks, Limey.  If you don’t know about Spiceworks, click the link over to the right and check it out.  If you’re an IT person for an SMB it may very well be the most valuable tool you’ve ever used!

We all have it happen at some point, a planned upgrade doesn’t go so well and you have no choice but to roll back to the way it was while you assess what went wrong and plan the next steps. Unfortunately it seems that if you are Microsoft having a fall-back position doesn’t apply.

 Due to a planned transition from the functional, yet dated eOpen portal to the shiny, new Volume License Service Center customers were unable to access their licenses over the weekend. Something obviously did not go to plan as the new site was throwing error message on a steady basis until Wednesday morning. Unfortunately, just because the site was back up did not mean that all the problems were fixed. At the time of writing this, Microsoft’s Open License customers can not add new agreements and therefore can not obtain Product Keys or download software for them, leaving those agreements unfulfilled.

The only known workaround, according to Hector at the Microsoft Support Center and confirmed by CDW, is to contact Worldwide Fulfillment and have them ship physical media at no cost. Sounds great but if their inventory system shows only one copy of the product you need then you just may not get it for 10 business days. Some workaround! Microsoft no longer gives Open Business agreement vendors the option to ship media meaning that it’s either online or WW Fulfillment, but Open Value agreements can still obtain media through the vendor.

According to one of CDW’s Microsoft licensing experts it should not be necessary to actually add new agreements to the VLSC as this should happen automatically upon purchase. This is not how the actual site appears to be operating, there is a definite spot to add Open License agreements, it just doesn’t work, a fact confirmed by Nick, Raoul and Hector.

 Multiple Google searches bring up nothing on this issue except one article at http://tonymackelworth.wordpress.com/2009/10/29/eopen-replaced-with-volume-license-service-centre-vlsc which is dated October 29. Maybe I’m the only Microsoft customer trying to get a product I purchased installed and operational but I know that’s not the case as the message for the Support Center has been changed to reflect the abnormal hold times. I would suggest calling the Support Center but the number is now busy. Trust me, it’s for the best – I have about 5 hours of hold time this week already, and their hold music isn’t that good.

After five days, and five hours of being on hold this has been escalated to a lead supervisor at the Support Center. I’m now getting High Visibility, which should mean hourly updates via email. He also pulled up the account and apparently did something as I just received three emails that I have been granted additional permissions. While I was on the phone I also received notification that my media has shipped, so now the race is on to see who can get this problem resolved first. Either way it has been an exceedingly frustrating experience, in my eyes Microsoft really dropped the ball on this one.

Something the Lord Made

Somehow, my wife and I got roped into a movie last night that kept us up until 1am.  It was an amazing film from HBO called “Something the Lord made“.  Really an amazing story that was written, and acted, well.

It’s a quiet film about a doctor and his black assistant, set in the 40′s.  This doctor pioneered heart surgery in the modern era.  But the real story is, he was too busy and his assistant, a man named Vivien Thomas did the actual work and created the procedures, tools and technique’s to make the surgery’s possible.  Vivien is played by Mos Def, and he gave what I feel is one of the most brilliant acting performances I’ve seen in a long time.  Despite the obvious opportunities to firebrand, preach or any of 1000 obvious things Hollywood is famous for, this movie–and this actor–resisted all of it and turned in a gentle, subtle performance that moved me as few movies do.

You can find this movie on HBO and probably on video by now and I highly recommend it. 

To quote the movie:

“Vivien, are you sure you did this?”
“Dr?”
“Because it feels like something the Lord made…”

DFS Adventures

DFS, or dynamic file system, is a cool feature introduced in Windows 2000 that allows you to have a “virtual” file system.  Essentially, instead of using traditional methods of attaching to a server to get files you attach to a virtual name (the domain name) and then Windows will direct you to the proper server (all done in the background).  The nice thing about this is you can setup multiple servers so you’ll go to the nearest server to you that has a copy of those files.  Replication of the data is even included (could use some much better tools for monitoring that, but that’s another story).  As an administrator, this feature is fantastic because I can change servers in the background without users ever really seeing what I’m doing.

But sometimes, the tools can be a little frustrating.  So in Windows 2000 we had GUI called “Distributed File Service” that we controlled DFS with.  In Windows 2003 R2 a new tool was introduced “DFS Management”, a much better tool for creating and managing the DFS folders.

So, as always happens eventually, we had a server crash that was a part of one of our DFS folders.  Of course, we hadn’t migrated the users to the DFS folders yet so they were still going directly to the server and lost their files.  No big, we repointed everyone to the DFS shares and good to go, except now they’re connecting to files across our slow WAN.  But at least they have them (and thank goodness we had already set replication up!)

After a couple of days and finally replacing was looks like a bad CPU we got the server back up but during troubleshooting a consultant did format the C: partition so we had to start over.  Done and files were fine and replication restarted and everything was good.

Except that the users couldn’t access the DFS share anymore.  What?!  A little research finds the old server name still in there (additional problem may have been that the new server had the same IP address).  OK, no big, right?  Let’s delete the old name and see what happens.  Nope, won’t let me delete the name because it can’t contact the server.  Huh.  It’s never going to be able to contact the server so this is a problem.  A bit of Googling and messing around and no solution. 

So for grins I bring up the old DFS console and try deleting the old server from a different DFS folder and that fails too, but then asks me if I wish to forcibly remove the server!  Yes!  Works!  Nice.  Try on the new share… nope, the messing around I did early now has me in a bad spot.  Who would have guessed that the old tool would work and the new wouldn’t—don’t answer that, it happens all the time!?

Anyway, blow the old DFS folders away, clean some other things up and recreate and we’re back in business again.  So this post is part rant and part documentation for when this happens again!!

Sysprep and LSASS

Oh, epic fail!

So Dell has a service for $60 a PC to load your image onto the PC at the factory.  Then you just unpack and plop on the desk.  Easy peesy.

So we built the image and got it all working, down to Office 2003 Resource Kit to automatically configure Outlook, etc.  Sysprep and save the CDKey and everything looks great.  We receive our 24 new PC’s and turn them on to a brief message from LSASS.EXE that the password does not match but before you can really read it it reboots and repeats.

A little Google research discovers that if you turn the PC on and start the mini-setup Wizard, but then power off will cause this error.  Which is exactly what accidentally happened before we shipped the hard drive off to Dell.

Now we have to rebuild the image and do everything manually, which is what we were trying to avoid.  <sigh>

Signed, fail

New Look and Feel

I finally decided to move my old website from a self hosted Microsoft SharePoint site to a hosted WordPress.com blog site. There just wasn’t any traffic on the old site to warrant keeping the service up all of the time, especially with Facebook taking over for family contact and picture postings.

I’m still going to keep this site up just for random posts, blogs, rants, etc. And, of course, just to drive everyone nuts it all gets tied together with Twitter & Facebook!  :)