Ed Buford - Just Another Geek

Dawn of a new era

Technorati tags: Mac Switch Mac vs PC Mac Convert

In order to better serve and understand the Mac users at GCC, Jason and I have switched to Macs as our primary laptop. Jason bought us each a Macbook Pro and I have been tasked with learning to use it. You might remember about a year ago I had one in my possession for a brief time, that won't be the case, this time it's my mine.

I've had this in my hands for a couple of days now, so here are my initial observations:

It's light and compact .

It feels nice and sturdy.

The Graphics are very crisp.

There's no place for an Auxiliary battery.

The battery life is abysmal

 I'll be posting more about my observations, experiences and Mac Life in general. It's true that I am of the PC persuasion and am bent in that direction. It will be interesting to see if this Mac can win me over.

and did I mention...

I recently discovered that Trace over at SeaCoast is not only Brilliant, but is also a man of great courage. I would never have the guts to step up onto a Dell Laptop that I depend on. Trace however took to heart my challenge to step up onto his laptop and prove his Dell was up to the challenge. His Dell also has some of the features of my Lenovo, it seems his "cool" laptop fairs well. There are a few other things I'd like to mention about my Lenovo before I turn it over to some Lucky end user.

First the hard drive(s) are protected by an accelerometer which pauses and locks the hard drive(s) to avoid damage when it's moving or dropped.

Find out more about this feature here:

Another sweet feature for those of us who work in the dark is this built-in light:

and did I mention the ultrabay? well you can swap out different hardware depending on your need. Here are some ultrabay items I use:

From the top down is:

 an extra 100gig sata drive at 7200rpms

an extra battery

and the DVD burner.

And last but not least is the awesome battery life!  It's true that I carry a spare battery, the main battery is a whopper to begin with. As you can see in this photo it hangs out of the back slightly and gives awesome power:

Even though the primary hard drive is spinning at 7200 rpms I still get some awesome battery life! LOOK FOR YOURSELF:

and did I mention...

The one button updates...

The Connection Manager...

The built-in Bluetooth...

The Protection and recovery...

The ThinkVantage Productivity Center...

I'm certain Trace has a nice laptop...

My Beautiful Laptop

I've heard it said that beauty is in the eye of the beholder, I guess this is especially true when it comes to my laptop. I've heard many "cool people" complain about the looks of Lenovo's Plain Black Wrapper. They think it's not cool enough.... well, looks can be deceiving.

Here's something you might miss about it if you're not looking carefully

Just in case you don't recognize it, it's a fingerprint scanner.... a very sweet way to log on!

Here's something else you might not notice at first glance:

Unless someone were to tell you, you might not guess that is the antenna for EVDO wireless from Verizon. Yes it has EVDO built in... how beautiful is that?

One other thing I don't think you'll get anywhere else, is the structural stability that would let you stand on your laptop.... yes!

Here's a couple of Pix of Jason standing on my T60P:

Try that with your "Cool Laptop"

This tribute to my beautiful laptop comes because I'm on the eve of giving it up, alas, all good things must come to an end. You can read more about my future transition here.

Home Again

Well it's been almost a month, but our little car came home today. You can't tell it was ever damaged.

It's true that we did have to cover the deductible, which is $250 bucks, but we had $20 dollars a day to cover a rental car, and the rental car came to $19.98 a day. So other than the deductible we were taken care of.

The Lord gives and Lord takes away, sometimes the Lord even gives back.
Blessed be the name of Lord.

Super Service!

Yesterday I had the honor of spending the day with Jack Chen from Equallogic. He brought a loaner SAN to help ease my fears (probably unfounded fears) about recent drive failures.

What's most interesting is that we didn't ask for this special attention. Equallogic, has just blown me away with the way they've treated this case.

Since the expected amount of drive failures are about two out of a hundred per year, Equallogic is as concerned about the drives as we are. Unlike any other vendor on the planet, when they get concerned they don't just send you an email, they show up and make it their problem.

Even though we've lost a few drives, this SAN has turned out to be a great product and the service that comes with it has been unexpectedly wonderful. Even if they made a bad product (which they don't) I would still recommend it based on the service alone... but it's awesome to get both, a great product and great service! 

More time listening...

Recently Chris Bell posted something about Joshua leading Israel in the promise land. Chris asks the question "What is God doing upstream in your life? ". I started thinking about this and began to wonder how many times I must have missed stepping out into that stream because I haven't heard God tell me to step out into that stream.

All this reminded me of something I heard from Mark Beeson recently, which is basically that You must be methodical about your relationship with God. The blog post from Chris and the words from Mark came together to make me understand that I need to be more deliberate about spending enough time with God to actually hear from him.

Thanks Chris and Mark!

Puzzler

I'm fighting a strange problem so I thought I'd ask my Geek friends on the other side of the screen to give me a hand.

The trouble has to do with the SAN's ability to send email to the email server.

Synopsis:

For Performance and Security reasons the SAN is on it's own network, in order to bridge the networks I've placed an El cheapo Linksys router between networks.

The SAN has the Linksys router set as the default gateway.

The workstation and the Email server both have a persistent route added to the SAN network that look like this:
Route add -P 192.168.10.0 mask 255.0.0.0 172.16.100.50
The route tables are exactly the same on both machines.

The SAN has limited troubleshooting tools but does include ping. So from the SAN I can always Ping the workstation but from time to time I can't ping the email server. However if I'm trying to ping the email server from the SAN and I start to ping the SAN from the email sever both will get through.

For a patch I've written a script that will ping the SAN from the email server every couple of minutes and this working right now, however I don't like Band-Aid solutions and would like to solve this mystery.

This is a simplified picture of the networks, the IP addresses are Fictitious.

 

Bad way to start the day - UPDATE

I've had a few people ask me what the scoop was on the exchange server from this post.

So here's the story...
While troubleshooting this problem I found that the SAN had been registering an alert (that I wasn't getting - more on that very soon) for an error on drive 7. So I called Equallogic who led me through the process of pulling a diag on the SAN. I mailed it off to them and they went over it and got right back, saying to pull the drive and replace it with our spare. I did and they shipped another drive.

So in the mean time I dork around with email alerts and I start getting them again, all is well.

The next day the drive showed up and I headed to the server room to put the spare drive in a nice safe spot and there are red lights on two drives, 7 and 10.
Freaked out I call Equallogic again, I pull another diag, mail it to them and they call me back. Looks like drive 10 failed over to drive 7 (was currently a hot spare) and it failed also. So I take the drive that just came in the mail and replaced drive 10, and dork around with email alerts... whew they're working again (wish I had more time to keep an eye on this).

The next day two more drives show up, I replace drive 7 and put the spare on the shelf.

This past Tuesday Dustin (awesome volunteer) calls me into the server and there on the SAN is a red blinking light... drive 9 has died. Yep that makes 4 drives in 16 days.  Stay tuned for more about the email alerts!

Pix and Clips

Here are some pix and clips I've taken from the past few days: 

Winter Rainbow

There was an interesting rainbow in the sky this morning.

 I snapped some pictures with my phone.