Joined Channel: [1: Blog - Joe Gough]

In the spirit of the popular Wack’a’Mole game I am just on the train trying to “wack” an internet connection. It comes and goes – you need to be quick, you need to be fast. If you’re not 100% committed then don’t bother trying.

Trying to download a file at the moment and finding myself in an epic battle between good and evil. But I know I will prevail in the end… hold on – maybe if I hold the phone to the window…. Hmmm people are staring….

I may well moan about it now, but I guess once the network gets better and there is a stable 3G connection it will almost take the fun out of it… almost.

Ok, I had hoped to go into more detail on my choice of laptop, but hey – life got in the way. I have been busy enjoying a nice little holiday from work and decided that I would focus on resting up before starting my new job in London Village .

I originally decided it was time to try a 17” MacBookPro and as Apple are kind enough to offer a 14day money back returns policy I walked into my local Apple shop and picked one up for the horrendous price of £1,889 incVAT. It is expensive, but Apple charge a premium for their brand so I decided to test it for 14days and see if it was really worth it.

I didn’t really spend much time in OSX, I tried to install a few basic apps for work and as soon as I found they didn’t have OSX variants I lost interest. I needed to do some “actual work” so installed Win7 via boot camp immediately. Once I got Win7 installed, I was pleased to see windows update found almost all the drivers, but for argument sakes installed the driver package from the Apple CD. Even with their own tools installed I immediately had issues with the keyboard.

The first thing I did was join my domain and reboot…. upon reboot I went to press Ctrl-Alt…. erm…. there is no Del key?! Fantastic. How do they expect me to log on then? After sourcing an external keyboard for the Del key, logging on and checking the web for a solution it became obvious I wasn’t the first with this issue. I ended up using an old Windows Server 2003 resource kit tool to remap the keys in the registry. It worked but still wasn’t ideal and if I didn’t have an external keyboard handy I would have been well and truly knackered.

There were a couple of other issues as well, the laptop gets hot and I’m not just talking about warm. I’ve had my share of hardcore gaming laptops in the past and this thing was right up there in the “I used to have skin” category. Some of the reviews mentioned it gets warm – they were being very generous. Especially on the left palm rest.

Despite this, I did really like it. It is thin, light and the battery life is amazing. Despite being based on the old dual core Core2 technology it was quick and the graphics were acceptable. Credit where credit due Apple have really done well on the drivers and the system just works. That said, with the new model just around the corner I just couldn’t justify the massively inflated price for under powered last generation hardware – so I took it back after the 14days was up.

Back to Dell for me….

With some free time before starting my new job I have compiled a list of jobs that need doing around the house (oh the glamour!). One of them was moving the hallway light approx 30cm left to accommodate a new light so the front door didn’t smash it when opening!

The reason I bring this up is because as my good lady will attest, my (lack of) DIY skills are legendry.

Exhibit A – The mirror that I wanted to put up “quickly” using a piece of string to measure the distance between the screw holes (6 holes for 2 screws = WIN!) and the phrase “yeah that looks about level….”.

Exhibit B – The Clock that required a single screw hole, that took over 30minutes to put up and ended up in more plaster on the floor than left on the wall….

Anyway – check this out! two screw holes perfectly placed and a single hole for the electrical cabling, plus a junction box in the loft wired to give additional cable length covering the distance.

If ever the phrase “BOOM HEADSHOT!” was to be used – this is it!

Screenshot or it didn’t happen? See below:

http://img442.imageshack.us/img442/9238/capturewz.jpg

Let the applause begin.

Edit – Yes I do plan on sanding down the Polyfiller and painting over it! First thing Julie said….

About 2.5 years ago I went on the VMWare VI3:Install and Configure course in preparation of designing and maintaining my previous company’s ESX infrastructure. The course was good, I designed the infrastructure, implemented it and it has been happily running ever since, with upgrades to the latest versions (ie VI3.5, etc) along the way.

I was the only IT admin at iMeta at the time and things were exceptionally busy. I finished the project, everything was working and people were happy so I immediately moved onto the next. Sounds good right? wrong!

I was in an interview Monday afternoon and was asked the question: “Do you have your VCP qualification?”

In total confidence I immediately answered yes and didn’t give it a second thought. It wasn’t until the drive home that I had a very disturbing thought – I did the course, but I was so busy I never actually got around to taking the exam!

While taking the course is arguably the important part, especially considering that VMWare won’t let you take the exam until you have done the course – technically I wasn’t actually qualified in VMWare and I just told a potential employer that I was….

Panic.

Wait a minute, VSphere has been out for about a year now – what if they have retired the VI3 exam?! VMWare only let you take the exam if you have done the course, so if they have retired the exam I will need to take the new VI4 course before I can take the exam.

Panic.

Get home, browse web. The exam was due to be retired on the 31st December 2009 but they extended it to the 31st March 2010. Pearson Vue shows the last possible exam as Wednesday at 2pm, which was 36 hours away! Fail and I can’t retake. Fail and I’m not VCP qualified. Fail and I need to take the VI4 course in order to take the VI4 exam. Good thing I work best under pressure.

Fortunately I took the exam yesterday with just a few hours revision and passed. Phew!

EDIT – There was another person just finishing the exam as I went in. He failed with 69% – ouch!

EDIT2 – This is *not* an April fool! ha ha

Okay I’m jumping ahead here as I haven’t had a chance to post regarding the choice of laptop and reasons behind it yet… but I’m in such a good mood about how it is performing right now I needed to post something short.

You may have already guessed, I’m a VM junkie! I am currently prepping for something and have just spun up three different test environments to test with:

Exchange2010: 1x 2008R2 DC, 2x 2008R2 Exchange2010 in DAG, 1x Win7 Client
ESX3.5: 2x ESX3.5, 1x VCMS Server, 1x Client
SQL2008 Cluster Env: 1x 2008R2 DC, 2x 2008R2 SQL2008 Clustered

All ELEVEN VMs are running right now, I’ve used 10GB RAM for VMs and still have 2GB left for the OS. The first environment on the first internal HD, the second on the second internal HD and as the laptop has USB3 – the third env is on an USB3 external disk.

I love this laptop! More on what it is and why I chose it coming soon…

The reason I ask is I’ve had a bad history with laptops over the past few years, although one side effect is that I haven’t actually paid for one since 2006 so, I guess I shouldn’t complain. My previous laptops are as follows:

2002 – Dell Inspiron 8100 – I bought it with my university student loan and wrote my dissertation on it. Great laptop and I have fond memories.

2004 – Dell Inspiron 9100 – A true monster. It was bigger than my car and weighed more than my house. I remember reading a review once that argued the PSU was so big and heavy it was actually a bludgeoning device used to repel attacking intruders. That made me laugh until it actually arrived… at which point I stopped laughing. Great laptop, but a tad big.

EDIT – Just found a good picture of it in a review (http://forum.notebookreview.com/showthread.php?t=1442) that shows the size:

2006 – Dell XPS 1710 – Probably the best laptop I have ever owned. A good size, powerful and 100% reliable. My fiancee’s brother still has it and it’s rock solid.

So far so good…. unfortunately it is all about to go very, very wrong:

2007 – Dell XPS 1730 – Probably the worst laptop I have ever owned, the build quality was beyond a joke. The first one was replaced because it seemed a child had assembled it with a hammer. The second was replaced for the same reason. The third one would just overheat and turn off 2-3 times a day. Dell replaced the motherboard, CPU, RAM and both graphics cards to try and fix it, but it was eventually replaced. When the fourth one started to do the same I politely informed Dell that it was unacceptable and they were going to give me a full refund.

2009 – Alienware M17x – Fantastic, utterly fantastic. High spec materials, top notch build quality and ran stone cold 100% of the time – which considering what was in it was nothing short of amazing. The only issue was an audio stutter from DPC latency. Dell assured me after purchase it would be resolved shortly in a BIOS update but when they eventually released the “fix” 6 months later it only fixed the issue for ATI based models and naturally I had Nvidia. Seemingly unable to fix the issue Dell then changed the chipset, moved to i7 CPUs and stopped selling it with Nvidia cards. I sent mine back for a full refund, but was genuinely sad to see it go – it was a fantastic piece of kit and was very tempted to just live with it, but a full refund on kit >6 months old was too good to refuse. Especially since the new generation hardware had since been released.

So now, armed with the same £2.5k I had back in 2007 from Dell refunds I had to choose a new laptop. I have done so and am typing on it right now, but it hasn’t been a quick or easy process and I did trial the MacBookPro. I will be talking about what I have learned in the hope the information is useful to others.

Well today is my last day at iMeta Technologies. Sadly due to circumstances outside of our control (some of our clients going bankrupt) over half of our workforce has been made redundant. Once a 90+ strong company is now down to <20 people and as such my role has been made redundant.

It’s a real shame and I will definitely miss it here. I joined the company 6.5 years ago and it’s been a fantastic experience. The people have been great, the work has been fascinating and saying goodbye to my beloved server room and the infrastructure I built from the ground up will be quite a hard thing to do.

On the plus side, I now have the opportunity to look for a new challenge with new people and new experiences. I am also creating this personal blog to replace my old company blog and will be moving some of my old company blog content worth keeping over shortly.

In the meantime – I’m looking for a new job at the moment so posts might be a little slow. If anyone knows of a good IT Systems/Architect job then me know!

UPDATE – I’ve just moved the articles I felt like keeping onto the site and changed their posted dates to match when they were originally posted.