HP Touchpad Fire Sale Burns HP
If were under a technology news rock yesterday you may have missed the news that HP decided it was no longer going to be competing with Apple in the phone or tablet business. The HP tablet prices dropped from $600 and $700 to $100 and $150 Saturday early morning.
A price drop this significant causes some big news. Websites like slickdeals.com picked up on it almost instantly and spread the word far and wide. Leading to a run on web retailers’ websites like bestbuy, officemax, walmart, and others. I even went out to stores on Saturday morning to see the effects and maybe a chance at scoring one, but my luck was poor. Not a poor as the guy working the phones at Staples… That guy was getting nonstop calls and angry walk-ins. I even let a disgruntled customer waiting in the computer isle in on the story and that the kid in the comouter department got sucker punched by HP last night… And on one of the busiest back-to-school shopping days around here… Dickish move, HP. You could have waited a few weeks.
But that’s not the worst of it. HP’s own web store couldn’t handle the traffic. Actually, it utterly crumbled under the load. The entire site was lethargic, more than normal, and even before getting to the actual product page you could tell it was getting hammered. The store was unresponsive and took three minutes to process my intent to purchase. After all that, I ended up with a VB Script error about running out of memory. Very classy.
Let me give you a little side story. HP is betting big in their cloud services, managed services, and high performance data centers. They’re looking to spin off or dump their consumer products like tablets and PCs because they aren’t profitable. They want to sell you servers (good products), network gear (crap), and software (hit or miss) to make it all work. They want you to come to them when you have problems with your network, websites, and business.
And they showed how completely unprepared they were for a simple spike in traffic that equalled, I’m estimating, the traffic any major retailer site gets on black Friday.
So here we are… with everything clearly in perspective. HP is going to take a beating from consumers who have stood by them and defended their consumer products, CTO and CIOs are going to question their professional services and data center designs, and me… well, I just wish Michael Dell would shut the fuck up about it all. His company isn’t doing all that hot in this market either and he’s not doing much to fix it.
It’s a shame really, this is not the company Hewlett and Packard worked their lives to make. The history of the company was one of greatness – a Google of the last generation. If you get a chance to read “The HP Way” give it a read. You’ll see this isn’t HP anymore.
Ultimate Deployment Appliance
I’m excitied to begin automating vSphere (ESX) server installations. I now have four servers, ready to install vSphere for our VMWare View environment. I could easily just bang them out one at a time with a USB DVD drive and KVM – but where is the fun in that?
I’m going to use a community built deployment appliance running in VMware workstation to PXE boot and install vSphere on these four servers.
First problem I had was actually getting the appliance file. It seems the original source of the appliance has a horrible network connection or is just really busy – 15b/sec isn’t going to cut it. So I went to Mike Laverick’s RTFM Education site. http://www.rtfm-ed.co.uk/vmware-content/ultimate-da/
Mike posted an OVA file – which can be installed into vSphere, but I need it to run on Workstation on an isolated network during deployment. Workstation would normally be able to import this OVA, but it’s missing some descriptor file.
Never giving up, I found another VMware utility called OVF Tools that you can download here: http://www.vmware.com/support/developer/ovf/
After installing, you get to run this command to convert the OVA file to a vmx/vmdk virtual machine:
C:\Program Files\VMware\VMware OVF Tool\ovftool.exe path_to_ova/uda20-build##.ova path_to_vmx/uda20-build##.vmx
For my example, I just placed the converted VM into the same path:
C:\Program Files\VMware\VMware OVF Tool\ovftool.exe d:/uda20/uda20-build17.ova d:/uda20/uda20-build17.vmx
Really it’s that simple. A few seconds later, you have yourself a vmx file that you can open and run in VMware Workstation.
Exchange 2010 SP1 Outlook Web App login customizations.
I’m updating the code in this article using BitTrack Decode HTML to provide you with easy to read code.
I needed to add some code to the OWA page to help our Help Desk get people logged on quicker without so much hand holding.
So here are the three changes I did to the file logon.aspx found in the path (if you let the Exchange 2010 installer chose the default path): C:\Program Files\Microsoft\Exchange Server\V14\ClientAccess\Owa\auth\
Login Domain Reminders
Customize this however you wish with any HTML code you want. I have two domains that log into this interface, and the email addresses only match Domain2′s UPN, so to make it easier for everyone – we’ve standardized on domain\username. But this code will show up above the username login table but below the Public/Private radio buttons and explanations.
Look for the following lines of code:
<%=UserNameLabel%></label>
<input id="username" name="username" type="text" />
Below the
tag but above the
Insert a new line of code (or multiple, you have the entire table width available):
<span style="color: #ff0000;">♦</span> Domain1 use: <strong>domain1\user name</strong> <span style="color: #0000ff;">♦</span> Domain2 use: <strong>domain2\user name</strong>
Invalid Credentials
If a user enters incorrect information, the login page will change to display an alert to tell the user why their email hasn’t appeared on the screen. We wanted to make it easy for a user to find our password reset page, so we included some additional html to provide them a link to the page.
Look for <%=LocalizedStrings.GetHtmlEncoded(Strings.IDs.InvalidCredentialsMessage)%>
%> and the following text:
Visit https://pwreset.domain.tld to reset your password.Obviously, you could include any other text that is relevant to your environment to assist your users.
Connected to…
I have to client access servers setup using MNLB, so they both respond to requests to our OWA URL. If either one of them is having a server specific problem, it’s a pain typing in each FQDN URL to test, when I can just insert a little text at the bottom to tell me or the user which server is serving them.
Look for (Strings.IDs.ConnectedToExchange)%>
Insert between %> and the following text ”’Client Access Server 1”’ or ”’Client Access Server 2”’ as appropriate.
The finished line of code should look like this:
<%=LocalizedStrings.GetHtmlEncoded(Strings.IDs.ConnectedToExchange)%>Client Access Server 2
iPhone Night Maps
I’ve been using a car holder to place my iPhone in view while driving, which allows me to use the GPS and mapping capabilities safely. Trying to eek out as much value as I can, ya know.
The only trouble is at night the maps can be very bright – even with the backlight turned down to its lowest settings. I’ve found a quick way to switch the screen to an inverted color scheme that is easy on the eyes at night.
DroboPro Performance Testing Part 2
My original post included a quick and dirty test on raw hard drive performance using HDTach to give me an idea of what I was working with with my new DroboPro. Of course true to any benchmarking test – there are so many metrics that can be tested that may be able to give me a clearer picture, but I didn’t have the luxury of time to do so.
After publishing my testing, I felt that it was worth going back and getting more data. It’s obvious from the hit count I’ve seen – that this is an interesting topic that a few people actually find interesting. I’m in a unique position as a consumer to be able to test this unit in a great development environment against some really good equipment that others can identify with.
So, without further ado… here’s what I did.
