coolguys's blog

I was talking to colleagues about the various types of server room we've seen in our careers. The good, the bad and the ugly.

Here's your chance to win some ZENworks swag. Send us a picture of your server room, data center or pile of clutter - and we'll send some swag out to the most entertaining or awe inspiring.

I'll post the best here.

We were also sharing stories.

My personal best story regards a UK customer who had deployed really resilient NetWare 4.11 SFT III pairs. (That was my specialty in 1998!) Very early one Sunday morning ManageWise signaled all kinds of IOEngine errors from one of the pairs. The business was unaffected; file, print and the BTRIEVE application were running perfectly. It just looked like one of the servers of the pair had 'just died'. Onsite security checked out the server room - and discovered it was six feet deep in water. The room was airtight and all that could be seen was water. A four inch water main above the room had ruptured - and all services - except for the NetWare 4.11 SFT III servers - were down.

Do you have a better story? Share yours here - and we'll put everyone in for a drawing for some ZENworks goodies.

Written at: Denver, CO

Since we started Cool Blogs a few months ago we have been very open with our comments - and our policy on accepting comments.

In all that time we have killed several thousand 'spam' comments and I'm proud to say we have rejected just a couple of others.

We like to think that we are 'open' in many ways; we encourage debate; we encourage discussion; we like to get feedback on areas of Novell that otherwise you would never see.

As Cool Blogs grows and gets more readership it's time to start publicly sharing our ideals for this blog - and especially the comments.

• Our number one goal is open communication.Novell Cool Bloggers are encouraged to blog about any area of Novell or adjacent technology. The only caveat is that we need to safeguard our intellectual property and competitive edge - so release dates will be within a calendar quarter window, we will not discuss projects or plans that are not publicly announced, we will not discuss financial matters.
• We encourage our readers and subscribers to join in. Comment. Make suggestions. Give feedback. Again - our aim is to make this a broadly acceptable community that is of interest to many people. Comments may be edited or rejected to remove offensive or profane commentary. Comments may also be removed if they are not generally 'constructive' and in keeping with the subject of the post.
• We try to follow sensible guidelines - 'spam', 'trolling', 'astroturfing' and 'flaming' are generally not acceptable and will lead to comments being edited or redacted.

Sorry this sounds like a harsh approach - we've been running with these guides for months now - and we've rejected less than 0.5% of non-Spam comments. For those that comment - please continue!

I'm interested in your feedback. Please feel free to comment directly on this post and our policy. What else would you like to see? What would you take out of that policy?

Written at: Draper, UT

If you are a ZENworks administrator - you have probably seen that we released ZENworks 7 Support Pack 1 in the last few days.

The whole ZENworks team are very proud of this release - it is of high quality, fixes problems reported via Novell Support - and adds some new features to ZENworks 7.

This post will describe how to get ZENworks 7 Support Pack 1 and how to install it. My next post will talk about what's new in this release - including platform support and software distribution bandwidth management.
This will be a longer post than normal - but there is a lot of useful information that needs to be shared!

Written at: Draper, UT

1 - Where to find ZENworks 7 Support Pack 1

We have made some updates to where ZENworks 7 Support Pack 1 is downloaded - and also how it can be installed.

The Support Pack is available from http://download.novell.com - you will notice that this is a new set of integrated CD ISO images. The specific link is here:

Documentation for the Support Pack is online at Novell Documentation. The link is here: http://www.novell.com/documentation/zenworks7
There is also a comprehensive Support document - TID 10097368 - describing the Support Pack.

There are FIFTEEN ISO images available for the full ZENworks 7 download. You most likely do not need to download them all. Here is a great document describing what is needed for each components of the ZENworks 7 Suite. This document describes what is on each ISO.

2 - installing ZENworks 7 Support Pack 1

First a note on the Support Pack itself.

You have probably noticed that ZENworks 7 Support Pack 1 is delivered as a new set of product CD images. We have moved away from a non-integrated support pack. The main benefits of this approach are:

• integrated installation of ZENworks 7 Support Pack 1. Upgrade customers do not need to upgrade to ZENworks 7 then install the Support Pack. You can get the latest and greatest with a single install.
• interactive upgrade from ZENworks 7 to ZENworks 7 Support Pack 1. You can work through an interactive upgrade, server by server and upgrade components.
• unattended upgrade using ZENworks Server Management CPKs. These support both the Standalone Package Processor and automated deployment with ZENworks Server Management

There are really three methods of installing the Support Pack - each method really depends on 'what you have' and the size of your organisation.

The CPK based upgrade is the most interesting option - it is new with this release. Take a look at the options for installing this with the Standalone Package Processor. For customers using ZENworks Server Management this is another reason to smile - you can now roll out this support pack after hours, with no interaction.

I have got about six different blog posts I need to get posted in the next few days - I'm backlogged with ideas and comments from the last week or so. I wrote lots of draft posts - I will get them posted really soon.
That brings me onto the main subject of this post - what do you expect from articles on Cool Blogs?

Written at: Draper, UT

My personal manifesto is that these are my 'PostIt Notes of ideas' - that I share with you. Some are short and quickly written, some are longer pieces. I hope all are somewhat useful. (As an aside - I post my 'other stuff' on my personal blog..)

Corporate blogging seems to have split down the middle on this concept.

One one hand their are CXO blogs - like our own CTO Jeff Jaffe and CMO John Dragoon - who blog regularly - but who write longer posts. These are aimed at their peers - senior IT management, decision makers and CXOs.

On the other hand you have something like Cool Blogs - and most other technology sites - which give you a rich, condensed post with lots of information and tend to link to the source data and articles.

I like to think that as 'geeks' and 'technologists' we prefer the latter; we are all overloaded with information (24x7 email, web, news feeds, pagers, Blackberry..) - and we like our information short and sweet.

This concept comes full circle back to us - the Cool Bloggers - and what we write. You can tell that I don't shut up. I blog here, on my family blog, on my personal blog - my 'PostIt Note' concept again. I've also found that blogging has let me get back into writing longer articles and documents again.
Please share your feedback. I'm not 'too busy to blog' - so long as it's concise.

Written at: Draper, UT

I found an interesting article via Digg about twenty years of computer viruses.

Touch wood I've been virus free for a dozen years. Good practice and a well honed sense of paranoia I guess.

My 'virus claim to fame' was being one of the first people to find 'SMEG.Pathogen' in the wild - this was in the summer of 1994. I found it on a hard drive from a customers laptop.

It infected a lot of my floppy disks and my main PC. I vividly remember thinking that 'something was wrong' with my system - and I took an example of an infected executable to the Dr Solomon's labs in Aylesbury on a day off. I remember meeting Graham Clulely and getting some raw code to at least detect and quarantine this first polymorphic virus.

I had to give a few statements to the police - including a 'financial impact statement' describing how much the outbreak had personally cost me and my company.

The virus author - Chris Pile - was famously sentenced to 18 months.

I'd love to hear your stories of close encounters with viruses and malware. Feel free to comment - anonymously if needed.

Written at: Draper, UT

Novell have talked about ZENworks futures at every BrainShare and customer event for as long as I remember. During 1999 and 2000 I remember being the Product Manager for ZENworks and talking about the up-coming ZENworks for Desktops 3 release - and how that would run on NT 4 server!

The next generation of ZENworks - you may have heard this by it's internal development name of Brimstone - is much more than an incremental update.

This next release of our Configuration Management product is designed to deliver several key promises:

1. unify and integrate the product components and architectures
2. provide a single management console which is web based
3. unify all backend services to use a single, database repository with a published schema.
4. utilise a single pluggable agent on the managed client device
5. allow seamless, yet powerful integration with corporate identity directories - Novell eDirectory and Microsoft Active Directory
6. allow rapid deployment and installation across your enterprise

My next series of posts will drill down into this next generation of ZENworks - and will include screen shots and other information from the latest engineering milestones.

For the record - Novell does not pre-announce shipping dates for products. We are looking to release this product "during 2007" - BrainShare 2007 will have a lot of information on this major innovation.

Written at: Tel Aviv, Israel

[Edit: Reposted with updates. Original post 28 June 2006]