Key to a successful IT business is communication. At times, marketing does a better job than technical support does in communicating technical events – mostly because marketing has a heads up and technical support is our version of FEMA.

At Own Web Now we offer phone support, online support through Shockey Monkey and we also offer a digital NOC blog. We do not and never will offer email notifications of outages – our primary service is email so sending an email to someone hosted on a server that is experiencing technical issue would border on ridicule.

What we have encountered in our experience is that at times we are just not fast enough at alerting our clients and partners when there are technical issues. The person with the knowledge of what is going on may be the one updating the NOC blog or we may be alerting about issues minutes after the issue has been identified and tickets have started pouring in. Crisis management is tough.

Shockey Monkey Dashboards

We have made a conscious decision that all our systems development going forward must be tied to Shockey Monkey. So even though we’re writing a system for us, we will build it inside Shockey Monkey and share it with all of you for free.

What’s the catch? Well, we hope you know better than us and are willing to share something we may be overlooking.

Click on the image above for a brief overview of what we want to build. Most of it is a lunchtime doodle but here is the summary.

Overall goal – Tied into Shockey Monkey. Provide an API for it from the getgo, allow the partners to customize it and tweak it because everyone has their take on the dashboard.

Issue reporting – Allow the user entering the issue to provide the time and date. The two should support fakery – after all if you’re reporting an issue that has been around for 30 minutes the users should be told when the problem started – ideally I’d like it to show the entire interval of an issue so that users reporting problems will know if it’s related. I would like to list a severity of the issue – I could care less if we’re experiencing performance issues but you better tell me when stuff is on fire. Allow updates to be provided and allow quick creation and updates – I want to be able to let people know we’re working on stuff quickly – but I also want to update them as we go along. I want the ability to remove things as well, if an update was incorrect I don’t want it leading to confusion. Finally, I want canning. We do this for OWN support and abuse the canned update system to it’s fullest – the update should be quick, approved and let the staff focus on addressing the problem not massaging the issue notice.

Subscriptions – Who cares about the issue? Shockey Monkey is used widely – both by businesses that manage their own IT and IT Solution Providers. Some systems are used for external alerting, the others for internal alerting. So the flexibility of displaying this information should be key. I’d like to be able to embed the monitoring dashboard in a web page, in an email, in a sidebar of a blog and I want it to send notifications. I for one will never allow email alerts – but you don’t run the kind of business I run so maybe the email reports are critical to you.

We have been disappointed looked at the dashboards used in our industry and we just did not see something that fit our need. To be specific:

We need an elegant, time efficient and portable dashboard system for internal and external alerts.

So.. what’s missing? Let me know via comments, email (vlad@vladville.com) or chime in at the forums at www.shockeymonkey.com/jungle (must be a current Shockey Monkey user, though the software itself is free)

First of all, we are a happy Intuit client. As much as I hate Quickbooks and everything Intuit produces, it pales in comparison to dealing with a CPA, IRS, Florida DOR, Dallas Tax Appraisers office, anything in California, and of course the VAT overseas.

However, the sketchiness of cloud operations is something that has to come to an end. In the past 24 hours we’ve seen huge failures in privacy at AT&T and it’s been nearly 24 hours since anything @ Intuit Online has worked. For the past day or so we’ve been trying to figure out why our employees @ Own Web Now have not been paid and have been greeted various Apache errors and then finally this:

You can see further outrage at the Intuit Community.

The Difference Between Cloud and Vapor Promises

The organization I run delivers cloud services.

We have done so for longer than most people and I can tell you, without a slightest shade of pink on my cheek, that everything crashes.

Everything.

We boast about redundancy, and failover, and clustering, and enterprise software – all of which works – until it breaks.

When it does break, there needs to be a safeguard. I don’t care how much money is spent on redundancy, there always needs to be another system to take over in the middle of a disaster. For some things, you can’t expect it – there is a reason you pay $10/hosting or a few pennies or dollars for a gig of offsite backups. It’s a risk you take.

When you get Exchange 2007 and 2010, or ExchangeDefender from OWN, you know it’s fail tested. It’s been broken in more ways by more people in more countries than anything else. For petes sake, it protects Exchange, the worlds most unstable and outrageously overcomplicated mail server software on the planet.

We know it will fail. So we have LiveArchive. Powered by Exchange 2010. Which itself has failed a ton of times.

But overall, our network has a 100% uptime. If the Exchange hosting fails, ExchangeDefender LiveArchive is there. If the LiveArchive fails, Exchange hosting is there. We do it because it is mission critical.

If you buy or sell network services, the difference between mission critical and everyday software is indistinguishable – you have no idea how much you rely on something until you’ve lost it. So take a moment of sitting in your despair and anger and plan for what happens the next time you see the cloud vendor take you down.

Next weekend we’ll be sponsoring the Autotask conference, if you are one of our partners and coming to the conference please drop me an email (vlad@vladville.com) with a jacket size (L or XL). As usual, we got some special swag for the people that contribute to Vlad’s Ferrari Collection Fund aka Own Web Now Corp.

Now on to the vague stuff. Would you like to be famous?

1. You must be attending the Autotask Conference.

2. You must be available for a 2 minute video spot on afternoon of Sunday, March 29th.

3. You must be an active Autotask user (Pro or Go) and grant me access to it.

4. You must sign a corporate NDA through the end of next week. No unincorporated SPFs.

5. You must be good at hearing.

We wrote something special for Autotask. We are using the Autotask event to launch the relationship between the two companies, and to highlight our commitment to it we’re doing a publicity stunt with something that is profoundly useless but also very creative and imaginative. You know, like Microsoft Surface.

There are times at which I amaze myself at the dumbass things I do with my skills. Earlier today I completed a contract and service configuration process driven purely by JavaScript. There is even an entire layered page constructed entirely with JS. While there are maybe 2-3 AJAX calls just to check for username or domain availability, exactly 611 lines of code drive the client-side-only UI that is clean and uses 0 popups, alerts and all the other distraction junk.

Oh.. and it’s fast. It’s really, really fast.

You’ll be able to check it out in our portal or Stuart Selbst’s portal next week. As for the rest, it’s in SM3.

I spent most of last week and will likely spend the rest of 2007 on the dark side.

Google

If you are looking to chat with me and don’t do business with OwnWebNow, you can find me on Google Talk. My address is vlad@vladville.com, which consequently is also my community-related email address. Please do not send indirect/junk/newsletters to that address, thats what v@vladville.com is for. Likewise, don’t send personal (or email that needs my immediate attention) to v@vladville.com because I am unlikely to see it.

The new company will run on completely open and free technologies. Considering that OWN almost exclusively operates and sells closed/Microsoft technology I feel this gives me a more balanced experience… and to that end:

Mac OS X 10.5

I have been trying to use it for the last few days and I must admit I am hating it. On the other hand, I am not nearly as disappointed with it as I imagined I would be. What I believe I am saying is that if you need a serious business collaboration platform, Vista is the way to go. But if you need something to do the basic computer stuff quickly (check mail, burn a DVD, browse the web and play videos) Mac is your tool.

I am half/switching to the Mac for 2007. I say I am half switching simply because the tools I rely on to do my business do not exist on the Mac and I can’t justify switching to the platform completely just so I could virtualize the production platform on top of it.

The biggest leg up Mac has on Vista is the elegance factor. Case and point, Katie came down to my Office yesterday to help me do some last minute things before skipping town. She sat at my table, I turned on the Mac, she turned on the PC. I remembered that I had completely powered things down so I cycled the router. The Mac immediately got the connection and started. The Windows, not so much. So, dig through four menus to get to the network connection properties. Disable adapter. UAC prompt. Enable adapter. UAC prompt. Nothing. Open properties, set static IP. UAC prompt.

Just a brief update on the progress as I’ve made some changes to the original hardware in my Building my Hackintosh blog post due to some unforseen compatibility issues. The major change is to the motherboard, I got a Gigabyte GA-945GCMX-S2 and it works flawlessly. The original Asrock motherboard worked perfectly fine as well but the kernel driver that was written for it did not support line in or mic, and the sound itself was shaky.. so $50 down the shute.

Few other notes:

• Nearly all motherboards need to be flashed back. Asrock ConRoe 1333 needed a BIOS of less than 1.50 in order to support Leopard.
• The vanilla rollout (default) needs to be tweaked to work with the standard PC AMI or Phoenix BIOS, so when you create the partition make sure you use MBR instead of the other options.
• The “hack” post-install scripts are nothing more than dd and bootloader provisioning, for some reason the setup doesn’t set the partition as active or bootable.
• While getting the boot loader to work can be challenging, you can just boot into the OS by using the boot loader that spins up on the DVD. Same basic process used on Linux, BSD, etc, go to the boot loader options and let it know where to load the kernel from. If you have a single hard drive and single partition this will do it: rd=/disk0s1
• Make sure your hard drive is on the first or second SATA port, if your board has more you’ll run into issues (or at least I did)
• There is a huge scene / community around OS X, perhaps its finest quality. One forum I spent a lot of time on was http://forum.insanelymac.com
• There is also an IRC channel, though as with all IRC channels, stupidity is not welcome and they won’t hug your dumb away like most other places tend to. So if you haven’t read every topic on the problem you’re having at Insanely Mac, don’t bother. The server is at irc.osx86.hu and channel is #leopard
• I was not aware that the beast works with AMD chips; Apparently, it does, there are a few cooked DVDs that will work.
• The basic requirement is SSE 2 / SSE 3 instruction set, so technically anything from a $35 Celeron on up will work. For home browsing purposes I don’t see much of a reason to go beyond it.
• The ICH7 chipset I picked worked out of the box, sans sound. The Realtek 888 chipset on the Asrock did not have the kext to make it work, but Azelia (880) does and requies just a slight patch. Video, network, USB and other fun stuff worked out the box without tweaking of any kind.

Overall, works as advertised. I am not particularly impressed with the operating system, way too cartoonish and simplistic, yet practically useless (something so simple as expanding zip files stacks them on top of one another, doesn’t expand the window as more files are populated, makes it impossible to tell what came from which archive); for the life of me I can’t figure out why people like this garbage but hack accomplished.

P.S. I can’t say enough good stuff about Arctic Silver, I love that stuff. I used the retail kit for the processor/heatsink/fan assembly and its provided thermal compound had the unit smoking at 46 on the average in BIOS (80% load); When I moved the processor and assembly to the new motherboard Katie cleaned off the stock termal compound and I applied AS5 – haven’t gone above 26 degrees. Can’t beat that.

HTH, Vlad.

Microsoft has made the long awaited Windows Server 2003 SP2 available as a release candidate (read: beta, broken, not for production) with some fairly interesting and worthwhile updates.

Click here for the SP2 site.

MMC3 is going to be a must for those that will be early adopters of Exchange 2007 but most of the improvements are going to be a hard sell initially. I can tell you from experience of thousands of Windows Server boxes we manage that they are rock solid and have performed remarkably well. Still nice to see Microsoft continue development on its flagship server product and adjust to the market needs. Niiiice.

If you have Windows Mobile 5 and Vista RC1 you might find that the Windows Mobile Device Center is missing from Vista RC1. As a matter of fact, you won’t even be able to get your device to be recognized by Vista RC1, it will keep on prompting you for a “Generic Serial” driver when you plugin your device. This was not the case in previous versions of Vista and there are some great details on why/what/who/where at Mel Sampat’s blog.

There’s just one little problem. If you try Windows Update today, it will not detect the WMDC download. This is because one additional step needs to be performed to allow this detection to take place. Unfortunately that step is restricted to internal Microsoft beta testers at this point. The friendly Program Manager for WMDC, Lydia O, sits in the office next to mine. So I asked her what was preventing external RC1 testers from using WMDC. She explained that they’re still working on some critical issues which make it necessary to restrict public testing. Judging from the steady stream of people walking in and out of her office all day, it looks like Lydia’s team is working as hard as possible to resolve those issues and release WMDC publicly to Vista RC1 testers very soon. We don’t want to keep you from enjoying the great WMDC experience, but it simply isn’t available externally at this time. When it’s ready, it will automatically show up in your Windows Update list without any further action on your part. WMDC will certainly be ready in time for Vista RTM and hopefully long before that - sometime in the next few weeks.

Mel also points out that the Windows Mobile Device Center download for Vista RC1 is available as a separate download on Microsoft’s Windows Mobile site. WARNING: still a beta but if you’re running Vista that’s not a major concern now is it? On the positive side, the feature set for mobility on Vista looks very impressive:

• Streamlined setup – A simplified new partnership wizard and improved partnership management.
• Robust synchronization – Synchronization of business-critical data such as e-mail, calendars, contacts, tasks, favorites, and files.
• Photo management – Picture management helps you detect new photos on your Windows Mobile powered device, tag and import them to the Windows Vista Photo Gallery.
• Media synchronization – Use Microsoft Windows Media Player to synchronize and shuffle music files on your device.
• File browsing – A new device browsing experience enables you more quickly browse files and folders and open documents on your device directly from your PC.
• Enhanced user interface – A simple and compelling user interface helps you to quickly access critical tasks and configure your device.

I have Outlook 2007 on my laptop and Outlook 2003 on my main workstation – and the latest Technical Refresh seems to be causing a slight bug that made my Outlook 2003 view ugly. If Outlook 2007 fires up first with Outlook 2003 being offline it resets the default font on the default Inbox view from Tahoma 8pt to Segoe UI 8pt…. a font that looks really ugly in Outlook 2003. Anyhow, here is how you reset it back: (click on the screenshot to enlarge)

Right click on From/Subject/Received header in your inbox and select Customize Current View.

Click on Other Settings button to adjust fonts.

Click on Row Font button and reset it back to Tahoma 8pt.

Thats it. Bugged…

Beta software, suicidal only, yada yada yada.

Latest version of Vista beta (build 5456) is up on Connect. If you have no life and are reading my blog on Saturday ~9 PM EST you’ll be happy to know that. Also, in case you can’t do the math, it also helps to remember that most of Europe is asleep right now. So instead of hitting the USA mirror that most  will attack, aim for the European mirror to get the really beefy transfer rate. USA ~60 KB/sec with Europe kicking butt at 522 KB/sec  I installed the first really useful build of Vista at TechEd and promptly turned off UAP – according to the few that have been working on this latest build the UAP has really undergone a severe amount of changes to make it more appealing to the end user and still adequately protect them.