Andrew Hale: IT Talk & Other Topics

Aside from being invested in the Apple/iTunes ecosystem, I'm not an Apple fanboy. However, I'll admit that while most gadgets get my curiosity, the new Apple Watch has my attention. Not just because it's an Apple device. I like to believe I'm above fanboyism. I'm interested in just such a device for many reasons, particularly the health/sleep data gathering features. Recently, I was in a conversation where someone was discussing how pointless smart watches are so I wanted to try and explain what they're for and what they're not.

So, over the summer I've been setting up and configuring SCOM in our environment.  I've gotten pretty decent with it if I do say so myself. I've written a few custom monitors, have a few management packs imported, you know, generally rocking out with SCOM. My boss wanted me to figure out how to suppress closed alerts in SCOM and I could see why. It was getting a little chatty and most of the custom monitors I had going were set to auto resolve after a certain amount of time. We'd get an email for each resolution state of a critical alert.  

OpsMgr is a very large and complicated program. It's best described as a framework. It's not a matter of installing it, deploying some agents, importing a few management packs and moving on to the next project; It's like an infant being left on your doorstep and you have to raise it up into a productive member of society.Our overall goal for OpsMgr is to handle some of the one-off tasks we can't accomplish with Cacti, not to replace or override Cacti. Cacti is our primary monitoring system. It's predates us using OpsMgr and has had 6+ years to grow into what it's doing today (which is a lot). Though we've had OpsMgr before (SCOM 2007), it was setup to handle some specific monitoring items that Cacti couldn't do. No monitoring system is plug-and-play so any product you get can do a lot with enough work. However, OpsMgr, being designed by Microsoft and part of their System Center suite of IT Management programs, can very deeply monitor the health and avail...

One of my current responsibilities at work is managing a system called InformaCast which is an IP paging system created and sold by Singlewire Software and ties into Cisco Unified Communications Manager. InformaCast is engineered with being the foundation of an Emergency Notification System or Mass Notification System. It uses Cisco IP Phones, IP speakers and Desktop computers as an endpoint to deliver text and/or audio messages to. It can also be used by schools or manufacturing plants to control bells and such.

I've had a cell phone for nearly 8 years and a smartphone 5 years now. For all this time, I've never had a case on any of my phones. After years of working in a grocery store (usually night-stock) and working with a lot of glass jars, I've developed quick reflexes to stop most of the fall before a dropped object hits the ground. In fact, I even do the same thing when I drop food (which is not recommended to stop with your foot, BTW). Back to the point though, I decided to get a case for my iPhone 5 and I chose the Otterbox Commuter case. I've been living with the case for over a year now and it's seen it's fair share of drops. I've dropped it at least 4 times, once trying to catch it only to swat it down to the ground like a football player swatting down a pass. It hit the ground hard but the case took all of it, leaving my phone still looking brand new. When small talk turns to phone cases (which actually happens sometimes), I always talk up the Otte...

I've had a cell phone for nearly 8 years and a smartphone 5 years now. For all this time, I've never had a case on any of my phones. After years of working in a grocery store (usually night-stock) and working with a lot of glass jars, I've developed quick reflexes to stop most of the fall before a dropped object hits the ground. In fact, I even do the same thing when I drop food (which is not recommended to stop with your foot, BTW). Back to the point though, I decided to get a case for my iPhone 5 and I chose the Otterbox Commuter case. I've been living with the case for over a year now and it's seen it's fair share of drops. I've dropped it at least 4 times, once trying to catch it only to swat it down to the ground like a football player swatting down a pass. It hit the ground hard but the case took all of it, leaving my phone still looking brand new. When small talk turns to phone cases (which actually happens sometimes), I always talk up the Otte...

I've talked a lot about file servers lately. I went over what a file server is in general, how to move the data between servers, discussions and walk-thrus of configuring features, the planning and etc. However, this last post on the topic is to discuss the execution, the aftermath and what we didn't see coming. The migration was set to happen Saturday evening. I was told that I could boot everyone off the server at 5pm and we expected the whole thing to take 4-6 hours. I actually got in about 30 minutes before to start collecting reports on the permissions before I started the actual migration.