lpitt's blog

We have updated the ZCM DVD on http://download.novell.com

Go check it out...

I'm sure I won't be first to post ZENworks sessions here, but Brainshare 2007 is closing in on us again. At the moment I'm presenting two sessions (although this will probably grow!), these are:

TUT247: ZENworks: Designing "Pulsar" to Scale to Your Environment

and

TUT241: Ensuring Scaleable eDirectory Design for Novell ZENworks

I'll post up some more about them as they get written, but hope to see you there!

If you're not yet registered, go to: http://www.novell.com/brainshare

Has anyone seen an issue with the GroupWise Client + SLED10 + Compiz/Beryl where the client leaves 'shadow' windows behind after sending an e-mail?

We were pretty sure that this was being caused by a specific plugin, but had no idea which one. This meant that someone was going to have to go through the lot, turn them on and off, and see when the problem cleared.

We now know!

If you are having this problem, go into the configurator and turn off 'TrailFocus'.

Voila! No shadow windows.

Not my ususal area, but it's something I use in my SLED10 configuration and wanted to pass on. This tip will speed up the GroupWise Linux Client by switching it over to GTK. Give it a shot and see what you think.

[snip]

From the SLED10 console do the following:

SU {enter admin password}

cd /opt/novell/groupwise/client/bin

vi groupwise

modify

/opt/novell/groupwise/client/bin/groupwise-bin "$@"

so that it says

add -ui=gtk to the end before the start of the " at the end of the /opt/novell/groupwise/client/bin/groupwise-bin -ui=gtk "$@"

exit from the file

Groupwise will now run from the menus in GTK mode.

Normal disclaimers here: I can't support this, but it works fine for my workstation ;)

We announced some REALLY cool new products today :)

These are the first products in our desktop-to-data centre management initiative and offer a set of solutions to orchestrate the management of virtual machines, high-performance computing and other IT resources.

Briefly, they are :

• Novell ZENworks Orchestrator for policy based data-centre automation. ZENworks Orchestrator takes a holistic approach to learn from previous events and resource demands.
• Novell ZENworks Virtual Machine Management gives organizations the ability to confidently employ virtualization in their data centers, whether running on Linux, UNIX or Windows machines. From VMware to Microsoft to Xen virtualization environments, this policy-based solution automates the process of deploying and managing virtual data center assets, as well as dynamically provisioning workloads and ensuring business continuity. This solution also manages virtualized environments in Novell Open Enterprise Server.
• Novell ZENworks HPC Management provides grid-based management of Java applications and enables workloads to be distributed for parallel execution. This includes automated high-performance multicast data distribution which can move and copy large volumes of data to remote resources for processing.
• Novell ZENworks 7.5 Asset Management, the only product on the market that runs readiness reports for both Windows Vista and SUSE® Linux Enterprise Desktop 10 from Novell, helps customers to control and manage their IT infrastructure with a clear and complete picture of their asset environment.

And this is just a brief. For full details of the announcement, checkout :

http://www.novell.com/products/zenworks/systemsmanagement/download_whitepaper.html

Well, it's a while since I've been in here. Things have been manically busy and even with best efforts I've only managed to read things recently - I would have posted but got totally carried away reading Martin Buckley's 'History of ZENworks'. That totally appealed to the geek inside :)

So, what's happening in my world? ZAM mostly to be quite honest. We're doing so much ZAM work at the moment (ZENworks Asset Management in case you didn't know) for customers that I'm flat-out. It's a cool product - REALLY does what it says on the spec sheet.

Have I learnt anything new? Well, errr... yes. Some people are going to say d'oh to this one but I want to impart anyway. My lesson learned is :

If you're installing to an Oracle back-end make sure that you use the same ODBC drivers as the version of Oracle!

Might sound simple, but I spent a whole day working on the assumption that I did have the correct drivers before I found out that an Oracle 8 ODBC client doesn't talk properly to a 10g database :(

I just hope I can save one person from this pain with my story...