When Software Attacks!

What happened to the idealists?

Douglas Coupland’s Jpod has been doing the rounds in the office of late. I enjoyed MicroSerfs, so approached Jpod with excitement. Frankly, I’m disappointed. It’s not the writing - I ’ve enjoyed pretty much all of his books. It’s not that the books are similar in approach and style (they are) but rather the contrast in the lives of the characters. Overall, MicroSerfs was optimistic. The characters in the book were using their talent to make the world a better place.

Posted by Rik Hepworth on Sunday, April 15, 2007

X2100 IPMI Redux - success!

In hindsight I should have thought of it, but even if I had, others got there first. You may remember my problems with IPMI on our X2100 servers from an earlier posting. Today I had cause to revisit the matter, as we’re having terrible issues with the Nvidia RAID on one of our servers. The lack of a Windows version of IPMItool is still a pain, but I am leagues closer to a usable solution now, thanks to Cygwin.

Posted by Rik Hepworth on Tuesday, February 20, 2007

Vista Upgrade - attempts 4, success 0

I have yet to succeed in upgrading from Windows XP to Windows Vista. Each time it runs through to the completing upgrade phase, gets about halfway through that bit whereupon I get stuck in a reboot cycle. I have tried this now on three separate machines and two different installed partitions on one of them. Two of the machines were Shuttle SN25G2 SFF boxes with Nforce 2 motherboards and the onboard nforce 2 (basically a geforce 2) video.

Posted by Rik Hepworth on Monday, February 19, 2007

Windows Home Server - something for my father

On Saturday I got the email telling me that I’d been accepted onto the Home Server Beta 2. I’m excited about this product in a way that I haven’t been about new software solutions for a while. I’ve taken part in beta programmes before. I’ve been around a while, and as an IT pro you get desensitised after a while. Vista has some innovative features, but it’s evolutionm, not revolution.

Posted by Rik Hepworth on Monday, February 19, 2007

SharePoint 2007 on x64 - don't try to run 32-bit web apps!

We’re slowly migrating services onto our new servers here at Black Marble. This morning we had one of those moments where significant amounts of wall kicking and teeth gnashing ensue. Basically, we forgot that if you enable 32-bit .net support on IIS 6 it disables 64-bit support - you can’t run 32 bit and 64 bit apps concurrently. We spent a long time the other week getting our release version of SharePoint 2007 installed on one of our shiny Sun X2100 x64 servers.

Posted by Rik Hepworth on Monday, February 5, 2007