Will write more soon… Thandiwe says hi!

Send letters or postcards!

Brian Deyo, PCV   (or Krista Clark, PCV)
U.S. Peace Corps
P.O.Box 2797
Mbabane, H100
SWAZILAND

Just kidding.  I just had the last hot shower I may have for a long time.  Same to the running water, electricity in my room, and flat-screen TV.  Good way to pamper us before we get to see what the real Peace Corps experience is like.

Internet access so far is highly limited and expensive, clocking around $9 per hour or $15 per 250MB.  I’m certain this won’t be the last you hear of us, it just might be a few weeks before anything else gets put up here.

Thanks to everyone who helped make our goodbyes so pleasant!  We will miss you and write often!

Please Please Please contact me either through this blog, email “brian[at]briandeyo.us” or please call the Tucson Police about case 1006220819.  This laptop was to be my lifeline back to this country while overseas.  There is a reward for the return.

The laptop was taken along with a SolarGorilla solar panel, an external PowerGorilla battery , an external Toshiba 320GB black & white hard drive, several MicroSD cards, and other small belongings.   A reward will be offered for ANYTHING returned.

Please contact me if you have found this laptop!!!!!

Say goodbye to my Cisco VPN client, and say hello to BitLocker.  Say goodbye to Exchange and say hello to Windows Live Mail.  I haven’t been a user of information technology in close to a decade.  All my adventures in advanced IT has gotten my this far, so I can’t discount my appreciation much.  I am thankful for a new page turning in my life.  There really is as much stress working on huge projects with deadlines as portrayed on TV and in the movies.  I am suddenly free of the mantle of IT administrator, and I am no longer expected to develop technical solutions to technical problems.  I am free to mount an offense to suffering in the world and try desperately to do my part in making the world a better place.

It’s an exciting time for myself, and I’m sure for Krista as well.  Thanks for everyone for being so supportive and patient over the last several years.  I feel relieved and loved for having so many incredibly positive and encouraging people in my life.  Thanks!!

With that in mind I have set out looking for the easiest way to distribute information, updates, photos, and notes online with the least amount of effort.  It’s difficult to want to type and maintain multiple social networks, when I know that the point of technology is to enable more efficient processes.  With that in mind I have set about a slightly complicated yet hopefully worthwhile attempt to maintain as much useful content as possible in one single upload.  If I have an internet connection once a month, it would be nice to have to write one post that reaches all my friends, and not have to write something for every network. 

This all starts with the blog at www.briandeyo.us.  I can use Windows Live Writer to compose blog entries offline, and will be able to post them when I am able to.  Once I post them to the main blog they should also update MySpace, Live Spaces and Facebook.  The biggest issue with this is any comments that are made on one network will not transfer over, so comments will still be disparate.  The easiest way around that is to ask all of you to check the website for updates and photos.  When I post something on the site it should update my status and write on my wall that I have posted something new.  It should be a link that you can follow to see the complete post. 

Sounds great in theory, but I’ll wait to see what happens after I publish this.  I haven’t fully tested this wonderful mass-publishing yet, so the results will be unpredictable for a few days.  In the meantime I will say that I am completely without a phone, check email a few times a day, but otherwise I’m very hard to get a hold of suddenly.  Additionally I’m starting to understand how debilitating it is in modern society to have the option of constant contact revoked.  Please look for me on Skype and check the site for any news or pictures that are worth seeing.  I will be more vigilant in my communications through this medium as long as an internet connection exists.

Camping was great at Thomas Woods this weekend.  We played lots of games, ate lots of bacon and used 4 or 5 cans of bug spray just to get a fighting chance.

Now that we are back, it is off to the races.  We are wrapping up a bunch of loose ends, including changing my Skype info, updating this page a bit, exchanging my hat, last minute online ordering, cleaning, and eating everything in the cupboards.

If I were to use 140 characters would that be enough to satisfy my urge to communicate and experience technology?

I guess if my speech recognition can post to Twitter which updates my Wordpress which then updates my facebook and through a plug-in then updates the HTML on my blog and that gets backed up to after a my server just in time for me to realize that I have better things to do then be on a computer all day.  Was that 140 characters?

I wrote this entire post using Microsoft speech recognition that is included with their latest OS.  What to me

took me 10 minutes to complete using speech recognition would have taken the 20 microseconds to type.  So there is a small learning curve for the computer, but reasonable considering what is happening.  It is incredible! 

You too can speak to your computer just like Star Trek if you have lots of free time.  Believe me technology has come a long way from the days of Windows 3.  1.  It used to have a long way to go but if this is proof is starting to be realistic.

Do yourself a favor And spend 2 hours in the next few days or weeks and set up speech recognition on your computer by going to the following tutorial

click start menu, type “start speech recognition” and press enter.  And follow the wizard.

OK for you should give it 3 hours and it takes a longer than 10 minutes to complete your first post, but the thrill of it recognizing your voice so incredibly well it is worth it.  Thank you Microsoft for showing us why touchscreen technology is only a single part of the  future!!

Years ago the idea of using simple pings took hold and network monitoring was born.  Since that time innumerable applications have been written to address the issue of monitoring.  It is only within the last few years that I have had an opportunity to find out how essential it is to be in control of how you monitor your infrastructure.  Since I’ve been a Microsoft Administrator for so long, it made sense to use a Microsoft product to monitor my systems.  About a year ago I setup and installed Microsoft Systems Center Operations Manager 2007, and since then my appreciation of monitoring has been tempered.  And my expectations of a what to look for in a monitoring system have been raised incredibly high.

It is essential to have trust in your systems of course, trust that you have designed, managed and maintained your systems well enough that you can sleep at night.  With demands for 24×7 uptime on practically every aspect of an IT ecosystem, it is essential that you know when a system is behaving aberrantly.  Is it too much to ask that when you go to bed at night, you will be awaken by a phone call only in a real emergency?

And how do you decide what is an emergency?  And therefore how do you decide what you need to monitor?  My current preoccupation with monitoring systems comes from several miscalculated attempts by well-meaning staff.  “Build it and they will come” is not a best practice to monitoring IT systems.   It is misguided at best to buy an over-priced and over-complicated solution and then identify what you need to monitor by finding out what that shiny-new monitoring system doesn’t address.  But without experiencing first-hand what a system can or can’t deliver, how can you ever decide what data you’re missing? If your parents purchased you a bike as a small child, did they spend a thousand dollars on a 26-speed Tour De France worthy bike?  Most likely you received the Toys R’Us special with training wheels.

Do you need a ping test?  Then dozens of free tools can solve your needs.  What if you needs are more complicated?  What if you have no way of knowing what your needs will be a week from now, two months, or two years later? 

A real-life scenario could be encountered such as this:

It’s 2 am.  Something happened that you won’t find out about until the morning when your users are calling.  You rush into work only to find your VP and other angry management figures waving hands in the air.  “E-mail is down!  No one can work like this!  Fix it or I will fix you!”

What happened here?  What happens next?  For several minutes or maybe several hours, someone has to dig through event logs, hardware logs, perform tests, sweat, Google a dozen things, browse TechNet, and possibly even call product support.  All of this can happen just to find out what the problem was, and in no way necessarily fixes the issue.  Once identified the issue can hopefully be solved very quickly.  If it is a catastrophic failure it could be days or weeks before a resolution is found. Once the issue is resolved many companies now ask for an RCA, either formally or informally.  An RCA for those who don’t know is a “root-cause analysis.”  It is a blanket term to cover the what, the where, and the why of a major problem.  They usually involve angry management and very timid-looking IT professionals.  People get fired soon after RCAs, and then RCAs become another acronym: RGE.  An RCA can lead to a “Resume Generating Event.”

Enter a reasonably robust and functional monitoring system.

It’s 2 am.  Something has happened and it was logged on a system.  The vigilant monitoring system detects the log entry, matches a rule in its database, and issues an alert.  You are woken up by a text message and the sound of ultimate doom coming from your phone.  You have 4 hours to research and fix this issue before the CEO wakes up and grabs his BlackBerry to check his email.

We have bridged the gap of not knowing a problem exists for hours, and we have achieved the true goal of a monitoring system, early warning.  If you think of your monitoring system as a plane’s radar, the whole point is to detect threats before something becomes a critical event.

Since the days of the ping tests, monitoring systems have evolved into much more complicated, and much more intelligent applications.  Now monitoring systems can warehouse events to provide long term statistics on the health and performance of systems.  This warehouse can generate reports and be useful for applying strategy to your IT systems.  You can move from a reactionary IT environment, to a smart ecosystem, predicting when and where expanding systems will be necessary before the end-users and management ever notice.

In addition to long term trending and reporting, some systems can be reclassified as management systems, and not monitoring systems.  The software I am using Operations Manager 2007 or OpsMgr as I call it, not only monitors logs, web pages, and services, but it is designed to perform the first few steps in troubleshooting issues.  If a service stops unexpectedly during the night, OpsMgr will detect the failure, and issue a command to the server to restart.  It performs administrative recovery tasks so I may not have to.

The best example of this, and one reason my monitoring expectations are so high, is how OpsMgr has saved me from the humiliating experience of telling the CIO why something broke.  I wrote an post several months ago about a Blackberry error where users were unable to send or do lookups from their handhelds.  This error generated an event 20482 in the application log.  Due to the site architecture of the Active Directory forest this BES was in, this event would happen whenever the Exchange specific domain controllers were knocked offline.  The BES wouldn’t be able to perform global catalog lookups, and would result in the error.  Since this usually happened at 6am (patch window for DCs) I didn’t want to be up every time this happened.  So OpsMgr now stops and restarts the critical Blackberry Services whenever that 20482 event occurs.  Problem solved by a monitoring system.

With that direct experience in my past, I task any IT group looking for a monitoring solution to dig a little deeper.  If the point of a monitoring system is to make your life less stressful, how can it also make your life easier?

My current ISP is selling me a package of 5mbps download speeds for a nice sum of only $17 per month.  It is only $17 per month for the first year, and once that year is up the cost will triple to approximately $55.  With the dramatic increase in price from year one to year two, I will not see any improvement in my service.  This is due to the current design model of broadband service in general, as the more customers in your area, the slower your connections speeds will be.   There is a wealth of information regarding the design principles of this, but a great summary can be found at

http://computer.howstuffworks.com/cable-modem10.htm

Pros and Cons to Cable Modems

If you are one of the first users to connect to the Internet through a particular cable channel, then you may have nearly the entire bandwidth of the channel available for your use. As new users, especially heavy-access users, are connected to the channel, you will have to share that bandwidth, and may see your performance degrade as a result. It is possible that, in times of heavy usage with many connected users, performance will be far below the theoretical maximums. The good news is that this particular performance issue can be resolved by the cable company adding a new channel and splitting the base of users.

Now that only directly applies to cable modems, but every broadband technology has its drawbacks.  If the FCC has its way, in 10 years that will be a thing of the past.  The FCC will be promoting its plan of getting 100mbps internet connections to every American within the next decade.  Although this is great news, it doesn’t help anyone that is currently overpaying for slow broadband connections.  Waiting for the FCC to fix this isn’t a timely solution, so the first step in addressing your slow connections is to talk to your ISP.  It is likely they will remind you that your 5mbps plan is a theoretical maximum, and it is expected you will never see those speeds.  Be prepared for disappointment or at least an hour of your time spent on the phone or online chat with an ISP rep.  By providing this single bandwidth test, the FCC has created a speed test that will be considered the standard benchmark for consumers that want to complain about their speed.  As I mentioned there are many free test available online, but as word spread, the FCC’s speed test will absolutely catch on as the de-facto standard.  What interest does the government have in providing inaccurate results?  It could be argued that  the FCC’s results will only help to promote its own agenda.  What the FCC is trying to do is in the best interest of the American people, by pushing the ISP’s and to deliver on its service and not hide behind ‘theoretical maximums’.   I would suggest that you run the FCC speed test from every new location you happen to be at.  Spread the word about it to all your friends and colleagues.  Help promote the test as the standard by which consumers can demand the service we are actually paying for.

 

Try it out here :

http://www.broadband.gov/