January, 2009

The sad decline of Sony

I remember a time when the Sony brand was synonymous with top quality equipment. When I bought my first home theatre system every component in it was the Sony brand and while that cost a pretty penny it was well worth it.

Well fast forward, I am not sure how many of you have been buying Sony equipment lately but while they are certainly still good that premium edge is gone and yet the premium price tag remains.

This might explain the horrific financial forecasts they have been putting out lately, far worse might I add then other companies in the same field. When your company experiences a 95% profit reduction in one quarter then that is a clear sign you are doing something very wrong.

Seems like Sony exec’s have drinking the company kool-aid lately and think that there name is big enough that they could put out average equipment for a premium price tag and people will buy out of sense of brand loyalty or sense of nostalgia.The other factor is Sony’s constant belief that people in some way like their proprietary formats. Sure Blu-ray won but a what cost? They are hurting right now and Blu-ray was their success story for Sony format’s which is sad as all hell.

In hard financial times people will spend money but they want to see the value and it just isn’t with Sony anymore.

The importance of project planning

When implementing a new project one can never downplay the important of a solid plan of attack, this is especially true for those of us in the consulting field but even if your not, having a solid well-documented plan can protect you like a magic cloak if things turn south. So here are some best practices:

1) Put together a Statement of Work before you even start that details the entire project plan and run it by management for approval. IT managers love this stuff, it makes your look good and it makes them looks good when they bring it forth up the chain. Even if the high-ups a) don’t read it or b) don’t understand; they will still be impressed that you put one together. If scope creep occurs (and it will) you can point back to your original plan and indicate that you need a change request for it. You will thank yourself later for being that anal when you are later questioned on why the project a) took longer then originally expected b) cost more then originally expected; and you can reply by pushing over a stack of signed change requests, nod politely, and smugly leave the room.

2) Make the change first in a dev environment. If you don’t have a dev environment, ask for funding for a dev environment, draw up a long email on why dev environment help mitigate production problems that can cause outages. If you do not get the funding, save the email you got back denying you your dev environment. If later something bad occurs with your change and people are looking for someone to blame, divert attention away from yourself but stating that the issue would have been caught if you had a dev network to test changes on, keep a copy of that email in printed form with you at all times for the next few weeks for it shall be your magic shield which matches your cloak very stylishly.

3) If your change effect’s end users in the slightest, have a User Acceptance Training and Sign Off portion. If in the worst case scenario if an issue was missed and pops up in production and you are asked why you didn’t catch this during testing, you can quite rightly point out that the user’s didn’t catch it either and that it’s quite normal for small issues to wriggle through despite rigorous checking during the UAT phase. The UAT groups in this meeting who didn’t bother actually doing any testing and just signed off their names because they couldn’t be bothered to put in the effort will latch onto this idea that it is in actuality no one’s fault and defend it to the death, if only to avoid any scrutiny on their side.

Successful project planning is all about covering your butt, the better that it’s covered the happier you will be. Worst case scenario, if all the above doesn’t work then just blame the guy who doesn’t speak very good english.

How to increase your Disaster Recovery budget

Time and time again this point has been driven home to me, the best way to increase your DR budget is to actually experience a disaster.  Now on a very high level everyone knows that a disaster could occur in their environment but it doesn’t usually seem to hit home with some people, much in the same way smokers on some level know they could get lung cancer but they still smoke. As a network admin we can simulate failures and draw up reports and recommendations for management and sometimes that drives the point home and sometimes it doesn’t but nothing ensures you an instant DR budget increase like actually experiencing a full out “losing money by the minute” disaster.

The problem for some companies is that one disaster is all it takes to put them out of business and they never get the chance to fix their ways.

So what can we do as admin’s? Run DR model’s, simulate failures and make sure that your vulnerabilities are well documented and reported up the chain. Hopefully you get the budget you need and if you didn’t well then at least your posterior will be covered when the excrement hits the fan.

Unable to open shares on server - insufficient system resources

I was notified by some end users that they were unable to access shares on a server, they were getting insufficient system resources. I logged onto the server and got the same error trying to access the server’s own shares.

This error was in the event log

“An I/O operation initiated by the Registry failed irrecoverably. The Registry could not read in, or write out, or flush, one of the files that contain the system’s image of the Registry.”

Rebooting the box fixed the issue but here is the weird part. I did a proper reboot of the system but when it came back up it asked me to specify why the server shut down unexpectedly.

Microsoft begins laying off staff

After posting 11% drop in profit MS announces layoffs of five thousand staff. Lets put this in perspective though. Drops in profit do not mean losses. MS still posted profit of 4.17 billion dollars for the 3 month period.

4.17 billion profit  in three months … are we supposed to feel bad for them now? In the midst of economic uncertain times when many companies are struggling to survive I would think this could be considered pretty good results.

MS has also announced that they will be suspending merit salary increases for the year. The cynic in me has to wonder if this will include the exec’s or just the common workers who I suppose might accept the fact they are not getting a raise with the feeling that they should be happy they even have a job.

I wonder if MS thinks that cutting out merit increases will encourage there workers to work harder during these uncertain times or perhaps they think that fear is motivation enough.

The beatings will continue until morale improves.

Microsoft releases Med-V beta (Vista virtualization)

Microsoft just released a beta version of virtualization software designed to run legacy (XP and 2000) apps better within Vista. This has been released no doubt as a stop gap measure to appease users with never ending Vista headaches until Windows 7 comes out.

Here are two immediate issues I see

1) Installing a MS app to fix another MS app is like trying to cure your cancer by injecting yourself with HIV

2) The question isn’t whether your applications will suffer a performance hit, the question is how much.

If you need to run XP applications so badly wouldn’t the better option be to not install Vista?

Here is an article about it.

 http://www.theregister.co.uk/2009/01/19/…

The source server is currently rejecting replication requests

I got this error while troubleshooting an enviroment with two DC’s that were not replicating.  This error popped up when I tried to manually replicate in AD sites and services.

I used the repadmin tool to troubleshoot and found that the server had replication turned off.

Enabling replication resolved the issue, here is the syntax

Use both:

repadmin /options *servername* -disable_inbound_repl

repadmin /options *servername* -disable_outbound_repl

Removing a DC by force

There are times when a DC has to be removed by force. It’s really not that hard a quick dcpromo /forceremoval will do it for you. Now comes the tricky part, you have to remove the metadata manually out of AD.

Here is a really great article for this:

 http://www.petri.co.il/delete_failed_dcs…

This becomes doubly important if you want to ever re-promote the server back to the domain. Without removing the metadata it will not allow you to re-promote.

Cloning a VM on a ESX server with using Virtual Center

Without Virtual Center it is possible to clone a VM though there are a few more steps.

First create the target folder in your datastore, log into the command line and use “SU -” to log in as root.

Use the command “vmkfstools -i \vmfs\volumes\”datastore name”\”source folder name”\”source file”.vmdk \vmfs\volumes\”datastore name”\”target folder name”\”target file”.vmdk

Once the clone is complete you can create your new VM, point the disk source as the new vmdk file and Bob is your uncle!

Watchguard Edge devices missing ping utility

The ability to ping from a firewall is a fantastic and some might say essential tool for troubleshooting network (in particular routing) issues. It is for this reason that pretty much every major commercial firewall product out there has this ability (even Sonicwalls). Yet for some reason the Watchguard Edge’s do not. Why this is I have no idea, I could speculate but it wouldn’t be very complimentary.