BinaryspiralIt’s like “Hee Haw” with lasers.

I love deliveries. Especially this time of year. UPS, FedEx, AirTrans, carrier pigeon… I don’t care – it’s usually something expensive and always something that is going to make my job easier.

Today, FedEx delivered a pallet of new HP servers and parts for our new campus. The pallet also contained a few parts for servers we had just got last week.

So I’ve got five new HP DL360 servers, sixth generation. HP just released their new line last month with the new Intel 5500 Xeon processors. I like to compare them like the pro version of the i7 consumer chips. Four hyperthreading cores with onboard memory controller per chip.  Yeah, and even though it matches clock speed with our existing G5 servers – it’s smoking fast.

Opening the little 1U server chassis, shows a lot of room for expansion – given the amount of gear this unit has already. It has an onboard raid control card that can address up to eight 2.5” SAS or SATA drives. It also has an IDE controller for optical media. It also includes a USB port and SD Card slot on the motherboard… great for those moronic copy protection dongles or emergency boot drives or utilities.

I’m not going sit here and try and sell you a server by just spewing specs… what HP really did to impress me is cut the noise and power usage so drastically I seriously thought there was something wrong with it.

These servers are usually so loud I can’t build them at my desk – I had to take them and bench build them in our staging room. Not anymore.

I actually had this DL360 G6 installing windows 2008 64bit from DVD on a bench next to a Dell OptiPlex 755 sitting idle. When I placed my head between the two to check if the fans were actually spinning on the HP – the Dell was louder. I have never actually heard an SAS drive until today… amazing.

After diving into the onboard monitoring systems, I found out how they are able to keep the fans spinning at 19% while keeping cool – 28 onboard temp sensors watching everything in the box… if a section gets warmer – only the fans dedicated to that area increase their speed and only as much needed to move more air to cool it.

With a single quad core processor, three 2GB memory cards, four 10,000 rpm hard drives, and a four port gig nic PCI-x card – this server only pulled 130 watts of power out of both power supplies at its peak. When it was idling it sat at 93 watts. The only time I ever heard the fans is when I started the server after that near silence.

Yes, I’m that impressed with this new line – I’m looking forward to the next year when we upgrade our ESX environment to G6 host servers… Maybe I won’t be able to hear the server room from down the hall.

I think Microsoft may have finally created an OS that can replace Windows XP. Of course I’m only speaking about my personal experiences with the latest incarnate of Windows, but it’s all pretty positive.

Same spec’ed laptop as the Windows 7 Beta review I posted a while back. Running its native Vista 64bit installation, I decided to try the upgrade path instead of a clean install. The worst result is an unstable install that I would nuke and do a fresh 7 install.

The upgrade took damn near 2.5 hours, mostly thrashing the hard drive moving files around. The installer was detailed enough to give me a percentage of completion on each task plus an overall progress bar – but never an estimated time (that has never been correct in the history of any Microsoft progress bar anyway).

After the upgrade – everything worked. The laptop was still a member of the domain, fingerprint scanner, graphics driver, network adapters, bluetooth… heck even iTunes and Outlook 2007 was working.

I’m fairly impressed and it seems to be catching on around the office – two others have upgraded or installed a VM to see the buzz. I think we made the right choice to skip Vista on the desktops and wait for 7 to bake in the Microsoft oven long enough to be a worthy replacement.

The college recently purchased a new Sophos Email Security appliance model. It was very easy to setup and I’m looking forward to having PureMessage filtering our spam and crapmail attacks, it’ll be a good thing.

The Active Directory integration is not a polished as their Web Security appliances’ are. We have two WS1000 appliances, also from Sophos. Both hooked right into AD and pulled down both students and staff accounts without issue. Even indicated what sub-domains it found during the process. Top notch, no brainer installation.

The problem I’m writing about is the ES4000 appliance’s inability to detect our second domain in the same forest as the domain our service account is in. First off, it couldn’t even automatically detect settings using the same service account using the “Detect Settings…” feature. An undocumented bug was documented on experts-exchange.com with the workaround being you have to use an account with Schema Admin privileges in the domain’s original Users OU. Once detected, you could move the user and modify the DN used to authenticate.

Okay, that one was fixed. But I still couldn’t sync both staff and students – even if I pointed the Base DN to the top domain or left it blank.

I opened a case with Sophos and went through first level support. After 48 hours (plus a weekend) of remote support they kicked me to second tier.

Second tier connected remotely and continue the troubleshooting. After an hour or so they found a workaround and had me test it. Success.

Fix: Replace the Base DN for users/groups with a single space. Done and now it works. I’m not much of an LDAP junkie, but I would consider that a bug.

Anyway, it works for me and I hope it helps someone else out there scratching their head wondering why the eff their ES4000 is not working.

Side note: All in all, Sophos support is pretty good I just wish they would read my entire email before firing back the first canned response that essentially was exactly what I had already done. For anyone absolutely buried with this product, I can highly recommend leveraging their consulting services. Well worth the small price to get it done right the first time.

Now to be perfectly fair, I’m not going to blame all of my issues on BlackBerry or their Enterprise Server. I will however, consider their method of message relay and integration with our environment quite a hack and their support staff a challenge to work with, especially late at night.

That being said… here’s my problem and what I’ve found that fixes it - I hope it may help you.

Read more…

Silicon Valley’s Next Big Innovation: Pay Cuts.

Cutting 5% pay or lay folks off… HP made the right choice.

Also an interesting quote from the story:

MIT economist Martin Weitzman suggested in the 1980s that instituting pay cuts instead of layoffs could make recessions shorter and less painful. By setting base salaries lower and making pay more variable with a business’s financial results, companies could avoid cutting jobs and increase workers’ rewards in good times. HP is trying exactly that, with a change to its bonus plans that could make up for the pay cuts if times do well.

I’d take a job where my sallary was more flexible but rewarded when the company was doing great - I’d also be willing to accept a pay cut to help retain the quality people I work with. It makes so much sense… far too simple to be implemented by anyone.