TV Fantasy League

 Posted on August 8, 2013  |  Erik

I’ve been following many various discussions around the current state of affairs of the AppleTV and the future of media in its various forms, particularly around the TV experience. The most recent deep discussion on the topic was Screen Time #40 with Moisés Chuillan, Horace Dediu, and Guy English kicked off a number of thoughts. It seems to me that the TV discussion can be safely split into two categories: [Read More]

Managing Thin Provisioning

 Posted on June 27, 2013  |  Erik

This question has come to me via a number of different channels over the last few days. Thin provisioning is a really nice feature to give yourself some additional flexibility in managing storage usage. But things have gotten more than a little confusing lately since you can implement it on different levels with different issues. The biggest fear is what I refer to as a margin call. You have declared more storage to your servers that you really have, and at some point, you exceed your physical capacity and everything grinds to a halt. [Read More]

Restoring Open Directory from Time Machine on Mountain Lion

 Posted on June 20, 2013  |  Erik

I just ran across an ugly situation where my Open Directory account went bad and was refusing to login to any services. I was seeing these repeated errors in the System log : Jun 20 18:40:51 www.infrageeks.com PasswordService[168]: -[AuthDBFile getPasswordRec:putItHere:unObfuscate:]: no entries found for d24bd7b0-d8a7-11e1-ad93-000c29b10837 Jun 20 18:40:51 www.infrageeks.com log[3195]: auth: Error: od(erik,192.168.2.222): Credential operation failed because an invalid parameter was provided. Jun 20 18:40:51 www.infrageeks.com log[3195]: auth: Error: od(erik,192.168.2.222): authentication failed for user=erik, method=CRAM-MD5 Which were all of my various devices trying to catch up on mail. [Read More]

Mac Pro 2013 Storage

 Posted on June 13, 2013  |  Erik

There’s been a lot of talk about the new Mac Pro just announced at WWDC 2013 and I’m really liking what I see even if I have no real use for anything with that kind of horsepower. But as usual, when Apple giveth, Apple taketh away. One big thing that’s currently missing from the newest iteration of the Mac Pro is internal storage expansion. Much noise has been made about the simplest types of solutions involving direct Thunderbolt connections to external drives (individually or multiple drive cases) and the resulting problems concerning cable mess, noise issues and the like. [Read More]

Clash of cultures

 Posted on May 22, 2013  |  Erik

This is going to be a tough one to explain, and very much a reflection in progress. I’m coming up to two years of working in a very enterprisey space and finally coming to terms with the cognitive dissonance that permeates my daily existence. Internet and Enterprise cultures have some fundamental disconnects about where and how value is created. Now I’m sure that everyone went, “well yeah, duh” and I’m with you, but I didn’t realize just how much this colors people’s world view and its impact on IT. [Read More]

Jobs to be done for Word

 Posted on March 12, 2013  |  Erik

The previous article generated a fair bit of feedback, and some of it is misunderstanding the core point that I’m trying to get across. Much of the discussion turned around Word, more than the other components so I’m going to try and clear up a few things. I’m not trying to say that Word is doomed or that it has no viable use cases going forward. The observation is that Word was the default tool for many people for many jobs, and was often the driving factor for computer purchases. [Read More]

Changing jobs to be done

 Posted on February 24, 2013  |  Erik

Based on a lot of reading and listening to people like Clay Christenson and Horace Dediu I’ve a few observations concerning the current transformation of the PC market, Apple, Android and tablets. For many years the PC combined with Microsoft Office were the defacto computing standard. This combination was a product of their time between analog and digital eras. Office is made up of three main components: Word, Excel and Powerpoint. [Read More]

Stupid Active Directory tricks

 Posted on January 15, 2013  |  Erik

Stupid AD tricks One classic problem I’ve seen with using AD as an generic account repository is that you might end up running up against the LDAP page size limits pretty quickly if you need to do any kind of data extraction or reporting. I have one directory instance that contains a number of user accounts including email addresses. Many of the accounts share email addresses and we needed a method to quickly extract all of the unique email addresses from the directory. [Read More]

Apple Maps experiences in France

 Posted on December 12, 2012  |  Erik

Well after the recent noise concerning Maps and the switchover to Apple’s backend data instead of Google’s I’ve been making an effort to use Maps as my primary navigation tool to see how well it fares. Globally, I’m pretty happy with the results. Things I like: Traffic circles/roundabaouts The presentation of traffic circles is really quite nice and clearly represents the entries and exits which makes the turn decision easier than in many other navigation apps. [Read More]

Nexenta 3.1.3 on a DELL R720

 Posted on October 29, 2012  |  Erik

I’ve been a happy Nexenta user for quite some time, but there are a few use cases where the default tool kit has some issues. The biggest issue is that the core customer base is people that are building their own storage servers with COTS equipment (lots of SuperMicro) rather than branded stuff from the major vendors like DELL & HP. As such you can run into problems where the HBAs use custom firmwares designed by the vendor rather than just the original stock LSI firmware which tends to get support very quickly. [Read More]