another coffee, please

Today I went to a panel session.  I’ve never been to a panel session before and didn’t know what to expect.  It was run by Cisco, and FITT, and the Australian Computer Society, though, so you can expect it was pretty slick.  Plus there was a promise of “networking” – a word that scares me because it involves selling yourself to complete strangers (in a professional way!).  But I am prone to bouts of proactive career building so I registered within the first 24 hours, before I could talk myself out of it, and before the registrations closed because so many people signed up.

The panel session was called “Discover your unique strengths – Striving for self mastery”.  I can never work out what these titles really mean and I’ve decided before that I should just ignore the title of these events because sometimes it goes way off topic.  Having said that though, the words “strength” and “self-mastery” caught my eye.

The people on the panel were worth doing some quick iphone research on the way to the panel (me, organised? ha!) and they all sounded pretty interesting.  I’m just going to copy their names from the event page since they probably have CVs that go for miles:

Les Williamson – Vice President, Cisco ANZ
Sara Adams – Operational Director, Commercial, Cisco ANZ

Clive Leach – Executive Coach

Dr. Suzy Green – Coaching and Positive Psychologist
Yu Dan Shi – Director of Marketing, Cisco ANZ

So two women with Director in the title, and a Dr.  Talk about motivating – that’s where I want to be one day.  So it was with great interest that I listened to Yu Dan talking about how it was difficult to fudge a self-review at Cisco because they measure you on strengths, not weaknesses.  Two things struck me – one, she understood that fudging self-reviews usually was inevitable (she’s human!) and two, that strengths based measurements of your ability are really, really good for women.

It made me stop and think for a moment about what my strengths are, and I realised I couldn’t completely answer that question.  I know I have strengths but I have no idea what other people perceive them to be.  And normally when I’m thinking about perception I worry about looking too young, or being a female, or not wearing the right clothes, and that stops me from bringing out my positives.  So that’s one thing I decided I would work on: identify my strengths, and then promote them to others.

The other two speakers – the men! – were equally interesting.  Clive Leach talked about “flourishing”, a state that only about 20% of workers experience.  I understand this feeling because I know I’ve been there: a state where you want to wake up and go to work and you feel great.  A healthy life is where you flourish both at home and at work, of course.  Too much over-flourishing at work and you’ll affect your home life.  Les Williamson, who is Yu Dan and Saras’ boss, talked about how he works to try to combine corporate and social or human networks, to bring out the best in people so that they are, well, flourishing.  At least, that was part of what he talked about  - aside from that, he was a very funny guy, very down to earth, and not at all who you would expect to be the VP of a massive multinational like Cisco.

On the way back to work (yes, unfortunately it was only 12-3pm) I wrote down a couple of things to follow up.  Actually, I wrote down a lot of nonsense too (something about people on trains having jazzy ringtones) but I figure that’s all part of the brain dumping that helps me clarify my real thoughts:

1. Websites, tests, assessments of strengths

• http://www.authentichappiness.org/ , where you can do a VIA strengths finder test,
• Realise 2, a similar strengths finder tool that uses more business language,
• and the next book I’m going to purchase, Gallup’s StrengthsFinder 2.0

2. Word of the day: “Authentic”.

• How to be authentic when you deal with people at work (and at home!)
• Giving authentic feedback.  Asking for feedback.  I thought it might be valuable to start asking people what my strengths are.  And my weaknesses.  That all kind of scares me a little.  Gotta sleep on it.

3. You don’t have to be an expert in the field to be a Manager in it

• Something Sara Adams said, that resonated pretty strongly

4. Email a few of the people I met, to try to keep in touch and do that “networking” thing.  I really suck at talking to people in person and I promise I will try  better next time.  I did give out a few business cards, which is kudos to me for (a) remembering to bring them and (b) actually giving them to people.

I got back to work feeling energised, until I found someone’s email that made me feel little again.  Sigh.  I dealt with that one by stomping around the room creating negative energy.. woops.  Gotta make a note not to do that next time.  Fortunately the issue (storage) I am talking to the Ops Manager about later today, but that’s another story for another time.

Useful for mounting the same directory in multiple places, particularly in chroot jails I hear.

# mount –bind olddir newdir

Mount a directory olddir as a mount point newdir (of course, mount point must exist!). Check using mount -l to see that it is in fact (rw,bind).

In /etc/fstab to mount on boot:

/path/to/olddir /path/to/newdir none rw,bind 0 0

I’m interested in developing this blog as I learn, but I know something I have to do is commit to it.  I’m sitting here today on a Monday night, logged into my work email, reflecting on my career so far (all three years of it) and my career to come.  What I’m interested in, what I’m looking forward to, what I want to be in a year or five years or ten.  It’s something I think about regularly especially when work starts to get stressful or frustrating.

“It’s my choice.. it’s my life.” — Rachel Berry (on Glee)

I can see so many career choices, so many paths that are available to me.  I have a university degree in Computer Science, I’m interested in everything, I’m quick at picking up new things.  I love to communicate and share knowledge.  These all seem like useful traits/attributes or certificates to have.  I want to be the best I can be but I have no idea which of my strengths I should play on or which of my weaknesses I need to develop.

I was thinking about my career goal the other day, and I can sum it up something like this: “I want to go to work every day giving more than I gave yesterday, learning more than I knew yesterday, being more than I was yesterday”.

This is an industry that attempts to redefine “service”.  If your server is up and running, then you can’t complain about “service”.  If you can contact a service desk out of hours and get an automated email reply, then you are getting “service”.  As long as your service provider is providing something you can’t or don’t want to do yourself.. this is considered “service”.  It’s a concept that, I admit, I am rather bitter about.  I had a dream when I was younger of working in retail (one day when I am an old lady I will serve you at Myer).  I love the thrill of making customers happy, going above and beyond their expectations; in IT, however, it seems as though the base level of service is good enough, and don’t do more unless the customer is paying through the eyeballs for it.  Ugh!

It gives me hope that there are technical people, developers, IT professionals – whatever you want to call them – out there who agree with me.  Who see customer service as more than restarting services when they’re told a website is inaccessible; they will, of their own accord, conduct analysis of the problem, suggest upgrades, fixes, modifications that will improve the end product.  I love workplace environments where you don’t mind working overtime because you know that the customer satisfaction is worth it – either for the warm and fuzzies or for the extra income that will come in or maybe just knowing that they’re going to tell their own customers about you.

A company that really struck me as understanding “customer service” is Runic, developers of a game called Torchlight.  A single user posted on their forums asking if a feature was available, and with no further ado the developers added it.  The customer didn’t have to raise a request via a customer service channel, then wait for it to be acknowledged as an issue (probably only after a percentage of their user base raised the same issue), and then wait for a fix or change to be pushed out with other system upgrades.  It may have only been a minor change, but it was done without fuss, and without cumbersome processes.

I think that’s what makes “service” so difficult.  It may be that Runic is small enough that its developers can make changes to code without having to go through a huge change control process, but then again: why should any IT company have to go through such processes? Why make the customer suffer for what may be a simple change? I dislike workplace policies that require every little change to go through iterations of reviews until either the goalposts move or grow or just fall over and everybody forgets why it’s happening in the first place.

I would rather fix, install, or make the customer’s life easier than to have to wait for their server to fall over while I’m waiting for internal approval of change requests.  Customer service creates satisfaction.  Satisfaction speaks for itself: it’s advertising to everybody what kind of service they’ll get if they come to you.  And that is good for business.  Service levels should imply satisfaction with the end results, not just a way of protecting yourself if an issue is found.  It’s good to know there are companies like Runic who are really putting service back into IT.

My boyfriend is moving in today! This makes me a very happy camper! Now the interesting part (and I suppose relevant) is how we’re going to coexist happily when we’re both nerds with our own ideas of what is good (he likes MSSQL.  Enough said.)

My grand plan involves a network that can support:

• my virtual environment (VMWare)
• Macs (my macbook), PCs, the Wii, Linux, etc
• HTPC / media server – for watching movies! also for going through photos when the family comes over
• file server – because we really have that much STUFF.  We both still have assignments from our uni days!

It all sounds relatively easy, and given that we already have a wireless router at hand it shouldn’t be too hard to set up.  I hope to share my experience here particularly with anything that comes up unexpectedly and how we resolve issues… even the personal differences

Part Two follows on from my previous blog post, so if you haven’t seen that you might want to check it out first.  This post is purely from my own experience installing Dell OMSA on ESX which I did solely to gain access to the config printing and modifying tools for the lights-out card (DRAC).

There is a full set of instructions available in PDF from Dell, but they encompass other versions of ESX I haven’t used for a long time (2.5 and thereabouts) – I can say only that I’ve installed on a select number of VMWare builds.

Anyway, to cut to the chase.  Firstly check the build version of ESX.

# vmware -v

# VMware ESX Server 3.5.0 build-153875

Awesome.  This means that the patch level supercedes the warning notice in the PDF (if you choose to read it) which states:

NOTICE: On ESX 3.5 systems, Patch ESX350-200802412-BG needs to be installed prior to the
OpenManage Installation. This patch addresses an issue related to event reporting in Dell OMSS.
This patch may be downloaded from http://www.vmware.com/download/vi/vi3_patches_35.html.
For further details, refer to http://kb.vmware.com/kb/1003459.

Basically what the patch 200802412-BG does is fix a problem with reporting in the OpenManage service.  I don’t think it would have affected us anyway.. but just to be cautious it’s worth installing if you’re running an older version of ESX, I’d say.

Step 2. Find a copy of OpenManage.  Whether this is the DVD that came with your server, downloaded from http://support.dell.com, or an ISO image, you will have to mount it since it’s just way too hard to figure out what RPMs and dependencies you’ll need (at least it was in my opinion!).  Mount it on the Service Console, then do the following:

cd /mnt/cdrom (or wherever you mounted it to)

cd SYSMGMT/srvadmin/linux/supportscripts

Install OpenManage.  Note the flag -r for a DRAC server. (The others are: -b base install; -w web interface; -s OpenManage Storage Management (OMSM) which I’m not sure of.)

./srvadmin-install.sh -b -w -r -s

Start OpenManage services, or reboot here:

srvadmin-services.sh start

Then configure the ESX server firewall to allow connections to the web console of OMSA.

esxcfg-firewall -o 1311,tcp,in,OpenManageRequest

Don’t forget to unmount the CD when you reboot.

Turns out the shrink-wrapped CDs you get with new Dell servers are actually useful! Fancy that. Typically we throw them in storage for the possibility that we may need to check a BIOS revision or run some hardware diagnostics.

The useful disk out of the lot is the Dell Systems Management Tools and Documentation DVD.  The version I installed for a PowerEdge 2950 is Version 5.5 (Rev A00, October 2008), but I’m not sure whether earlier versions will work on newer hardware, or if this will work on PE2850s and earlier.

The DVD by default includes (I am reading off the label):

• Dell Systems Build and Update Utility
• Dell OpenManage Server Administrator
• Dell OpenManage IT Assistant
• Dell Remote Access Controller
• BMC Management Utility
• Dell-optimized Drivers
• Dell Online Diagnostics
• Documentation

The one I’d like to draw your attention to today is the Dell OpenManage Server Administrator, which is quite possibly the only way to check and modify your Dell Remote Access Card (DRAC) without rebooting the server.  In the environment that I work in where it’s often difficult to get approval to reboot servers, and where a lack of process often causes such things as remote access and remote management to get thrown out the window during the build phase, this is some kind of godsend.

Basically you installl the OpenManage software on your operating system of choice (from what I can tell, Microsoft Windows and RPM-based Linux is supported) and then you have a set of utilities from which you can, well, remotely manage your remote management tools.  Very nifty.

Install Process (Linux)

The install is pretty easy.  Stick the DVD in, mount, and execute the installer script.  I had a look at downloading just the packages you need (The DellLinuxWiki has a repository of OpenManage software, for example) but it’s a lot easier to just run the script.  Steps are:

rpm –import /mnt/cdrom/SYSMGMT/srvadmin/linux/RPM-GPG-KEY

cd /mnt/cdrom (or whereever you mounted the disc)

cd SYSMGMT/srvadmin/linux/supportscripts

sh srvadmin-install.sh –express (or -x)

It will run a prerequisite checker and warn you if you are missing packages.  You’ll need to install these from install media, although the DVD contains a set of these in SYSMGMT/srvadmin/linux/RPMS.

Note: If you are running a 64-bit version of Red Hat, you’ll also need the 32-bit drivers, as OpenManage is a 32-bit application.  So install the packages with “i386″ in their filename.

Output will look like:

Installing the selected packages.

Preparing…                ########################################### [100%]
1:srvadmin-omilcore      ########################################### [  6%]
To start all installed services without a reboot,
enter the following command:  srvadmin-services.sh  start
2:srvadmin-syscheck      ########################################### [ 13%]
3:srvadmin-deng          ########################################### [ 19%]
4:srvadmin-omauth        ########################################### [ 25%]
5:srvadmin-omacore       ########################################### [ 31%]
6:srvadmin-jre           ########################################### [ 38%]
7:srvadmin-ipmi          ########################################### [ 44%]
8:srvadmin-hapi          ########################################### [ 50%]
9:srvadmin-isvc          ########################################### [ 56%]
10:srvadmin-rac5-component########################################### [ 63%]
11:srvadmin-cm            ########################################### [ 69%]
12:srvadmin-iws           ########################################### [ 75%]
13:srvadmin-omhip         ########################################### [ 81%]
14:srvadmin-racadm5       ########################################### [ 88%]
15:srvadmin-racdrsc5      ########################################### [ 94%]
16:srvadmin-storage       ########################################### [100%]

You will then need to start the Server Administrator services by running

sh srvadmin-services.sh start

Using Dell OpenManage Server Administrator To Manage Your DRAC

There is an easy way to find out the current IP, or to set the IP, subnet or gateway of the DRAC card.  The tool to use is called “racadm”.

racadm getniccfg will identify the current state of the NIC, its IP address, subnet mask, and gateway.

racadm setniccfg -s 192.168.1.1 192.168.255.254 255.255.255.0 will set the NIC’s IP to 192.168.1.1, with a gateway of .254.

racadm racreset will reset this config.

The command I’m using to check that DST will change at the right time reads out of the tzdata file:

zdump -v Australia/Sydney | grep 2008

It returns output like so:

Australia/Sydney Sat Apr 5 15:59:59 2008 UTC = Sun Apr 6 02:59:59 2008 EST isdst=1 gmtoff=39600
Australia/Sydney Sat Apr 5 16:00:00 2008 UTC = Sun Apr 6 02:00:00 2008 EST isdst=0 gmtoff=36000
Australia/Sydney Sat Oct 4 15:59:59 2008 UTC = Sun Oct 5 01:59:59 2008 EST isdst=0 gmtoff=36000

Australia/Sydney Sat Oct 4 16:00:00 2008 UTC = Sun Oct 5 03:00:00 2008 EST isdst=1 gmtoff=39600

Good for checking that your clocks are in order!

My boyfriend found these awesome coffee cups.  They have eyes on the plate, and the cup itself (with a white – or brown – interior) becomes the happy mouth.  Very cute! And you end up drinking half the coffee.. which is probably a good thing, health wise.

Happy coffee cups!

Link: http://cubeme.com/blog/2008/10/21/smilecup-by-studio-psyho/

One of those things I find really annoying because I forget exactly what the lines are.

/etc/sysconfig/network:
NETWORKING_IPV6=NO
 

/etc/modprobe.conf
alias net-pf-10 off

alias ipv6 off
 

Reboot.