I went through the Apple features list for the iPad2 (AU) to try to sell myself one.  I already know what I think I want it for: GarageBand, and the reports of this $4.99 app’s musical instruments being “just like the real thing”, such as a pressure-sensitive keyboard.  Oh god how I want one of them! I don’t even have a keyboard because I can’t stand the mechanical lack of tone, timbre or anything resembling a real piano.  And no music program has really come close, at least without a very expensive attachment.

Other things I think I will find useful though? (for $900 I could get myself a nice electric piano, complete with a stand and pedals, probably)

The HD camera.  I imagine I won’t use FaceTime (I don’t see any need for videoconferencing at the moment – maybe if OTHER people get an iPad2 and I want them to see ‘every freckle on my face’ (eek!),  but it would be very neat to record movies on a large screen rather than looking at a tiny 2.5″ LCD on my camera for minutes at a time!

I don’t really need more than WiFi for how I think I will use it.  If I need 3G on the go, I can tether to my phone with the latest iOS update that lets you create personal access points.  This is a good thing, as it will keep my budget down.  Oh, and hey, it’s got Bluetooth.  The only thing I can see that is missing here is an expansion slot for additional storage.

Are there comparable alternatives? I really don’t think so.  I know there will soon be many more Android tablets out there (the Motorola Xoom, new Samsung Galaxy Tab, etc) but why I like the iPad2 is this one simple reason (that I like all Apple products for): it just works.  Out of the box I am 100% confident that this little beastie will do everything I expect it to do from the ads, with very little configuration other than putting in my name and email address.  When Apple says it turns on instantly, that’s what they mean.  Right now.  When they say that its accelerometer is smart, it IS – no flipping back and forth between vertical and landscape to try to see things in the right format.  (Their spellcheck could do with some help, though – must be a reason they don’t advertise it, ha ha.)

With ten hours (closer to 6-7 with real world usage, I’d imagine) battery life I could take this to work and read it on the train, something I can’t do with a netbook (though I am trying).  I could read BOOKS on this darn thing and save myself the cost of a Kindle.

The Smart Cover stand/case I should really include overall cost of the iPad2. At $79 for leather and $45 for polyurethane it isn’t cheap for what essentially looks like a sheet with creases in it, but from all accounts it is a must have for usability.  I am generally relatively careful with my techno-products (I have had an iPhone 3GS for 2+years without a case, and there are no scratches on the screen) but the Smart Cover is more than that.

Ah this is sounding more and more like a lost cause.  I don’t think the iPad2 is a PRODUCTIVITY tool.  I would get frustrated trying to use this slim and light (both in size and power) machine trying to multitask the way I love to do on my home computer.  Why I want it is because it offers more than just the tablet version of my email, of my word processor, of my music-creation app.  It is a different experience, and I think Apple knows that, and it’s why the iPad2 will be successful.

1. They haven’t posted in a while
2. The blog has shut down
3. The title sucked

That criteria is somewhat friendly to bloggers since two of the three mean that the blogger won’t actually care that I’m no longer an avid reader of their musings.  Not that I think that people who write blogs watch their reader counts go up and down like that, but come on, I still haven’t unfriended anyone on Facebook JUST IN CASE they’d notice.  Someone once told me I’m too nice.

Anyway, back to the feeding frenzy.  Google likes you to tag your feeds to aid in organisation, and you can have multiple tags for a feed, but only one folder.  However, a folder IS a tag.  It took me a while to realise this back when I was a feed-reading newbie, so I have a bunch of double-tagged feeds that are in a single folder.  The next thing I’ve done is prune off all the tags I don’t use, such as “read me later”.  What a dumb idea that was, Phoebe! That’s reduced my tag count from about eighteen to twelve.  However my reading trend says that I usually only read about two of those tags, so the next, major step is to remove the other 10 tags and create two or three larger folders that don’t sort on category, but rather, how interested I am in their content.  I think I got this idea from somewhere (probably a post on a blog that I had in my RSS feed).  The goal is to have a couple of categories, like:

1. I will read this ASAP
2. I will read this when I have time
3. I will probably read this (if categories 1. and 2. are empty)
4. I won’t read this.

The idea behind this is to actively monitor what I’m reading and move things between the four categories as I need.  I’ll initially sort them the way I think I read them – it’s pretty easy working out what’s in Category #1! – and then I will move feeds down or up as I notice myself reading them more.  Once a feed has been in category 4 for a while I will purge the whole tag/folder.  I’ll report back (hopefully) in a couple of months when hopefully my feed list has been cleaned up!

How do you manage your RSS feeds? Do you use Google Reader or some other tool? Do you use folders/tags or not at all?

Priority Inbox automatically identifies your important email and separates it out from everything else, so you can focus on what really matters.

From what I can see it prioritises people over “bacn” (like spam, but tastier!) probably by a record of the emails that you have read versus the emails that you delete or archive without reading.  I’m getting an odd mixture of stuff in my Priority Inbox, including some Facebook posts but not others (and they all get downranked straight away, anyway) and it’s missing emails from my friends that I would think are more important.

Perhaps I’m using it incorrectly, though.  I’ve only used it for about a week and I’m finding that I am almost ignoring all the new emails that come into my inbox that aren’t in the Priority Inbox, which is a little disconcerting to put that much power into the hands of a .. machine.  On the plus side, it is encouraging me to unsubscribe from those newsletters I don’t even read.  And at some point no matter how powerful Priority Inbox is I still need to go through all those “not important” emails – and I really don’t want to be hit by a nasty surprise later down the track.

My concern with Priority Inbox, and Inbox Sorters in general, is that they provide only the illusion of helping you to get organised.  Priority Inbox just adds another pane on my inbox that tells me I need to archive more emails.  I really do prefer to search for what I’m interested in, and why not, with the power of Google search behind my 4000-odd emails?

How do you you sort your inbox? Do you like to depend on a smart algorithm to tell you what’s important, and what to read later, or do you need to read every email that comes through your mail server?

# 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

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 ;)

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.

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.

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!

/etc/sysconfig/network:
NETWORKING_IPV6=NO
 

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

alias ipv6 off
 

Reboot.