For those concerned about the disappearance of the highly rack dense systems that are fibre channel enabled from Apple’s portfolio, now there is ActiveSAN:
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Active Announcement in the Morning!
For those who haven’t yet seen it, or who almost forgot due to crossing too many time zones, Active Storage, the makers of the Active RAID will be announcing their new product tomorrow morning. From what you see on the web site it looks to be some sort of rack mount device. Given their fantastic development work in the past, it’s sure to be a good addition to the bat-belts of the MacIT crowd. 9am Eastern, see ya’ there! http://www.activestorage.com
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The Qlogic Command Line
For many environments, a Qlogic switch can be as simple as plugging it into the wall to get working. The web interface is a great tool and appropriate for many a configuration, but the interactive shell environment on the switches gives a few more options. Let’s first get logged into the switch. The switch will have an IP address, so telnet into that address (I’ll use the my IP rather than the default IP of 10.0.0.1 that the switches ship with): telnet 192.168.210.87 Once you provide a password you’ll be placed into an Interactive Command Line Interface SHell environment, which Qlogic calls CLISH. Establishing connection… Please wait. ***************************************************** *…
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iPad Deployment
If you are like me then while the rumor mills were bugging you, you were focused on intel about mass deployment. Todays announcement of the iPad was a huge tell about much of what administrators will need to know, but obviously not all – only time will tell with some things. Little can be easier than deploying a MacBook (or a thousand) if you have the right tools at your disposal. Not so with an iPhone. It comes down to that pesky configuration utility and docking the thing to get the xml file onto it (or visiting a site from a browser). As we’ve seen, for 1 or 2 devices the…
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iPhone Life Article
An excerpt-turned-article of mine just appeared in iPhone Life Magazine. IT’s called The Inevitability of the iPhone in the Enterprise: http://www.iphonelife.com/issues/2011March-April/InevitabilityIPhoneEnterprise Hope you enjoy!
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Law Firms and iPads
Josh Barrett, of tabletlegal.com posted a mini-review of my latest book, the Enterprise iPhone and iPad Administrator’s Guide. It’s an interesting look at iPads making their way into law firms despite the often reluctant IT admins who have to support them. Big thanks to Josh for a favorable review!
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Adding Xsan Clients to StorNext Environments
There are a lot of people who keep saying that StorNext is the same thing as Xsan. StorNext is similar to Xsan, but not identical. Apple makes their own changes to the StorNext code before recompiling and shipping. One need only look at the output of a cvlabel command on each to see this very quickly. The similarities mean that you can mix and match Xsan clients to StorNext controllers and match up StorNext controllers to Xsan clients (although you can’t match StorNext controllers to Xsan controllers). The differences mean that you might have a tiny amount of work on your hands to get the mix and matched controllers/clients to…
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The Mac OS X App Store & Managed Environments
The Mac OS X App Store was released earlier this month as a part of the Mac OS X 10.6.6 update. The App Store, with over 1,000 applications (including a couple of server tools), allowing people to download and install applications on Mac OS X computers without needing to understand how to click through the screens of a standard package installer, drag applications from disk images into the /Applications folder or basically how to do practically anything except for click and provide a valid credit card number. As with the App Store that debuted with the iPhone, the App Store for Mac OS X is clearly aimed at residential customers,…
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Registering VMs w/ VMware ESX & ESXi
To register a virtual machine using VMware’s ESX and ESXi is a pretty straight forward process. You will use the vmware-cmd and vmware-cmd.pl respectively. On ESX, simply issues the vmware-cmd followed by the path to your vmx file and then the register verb. For example, if the path to the vmx were /VMs/XP/xp.vmx then you would use the following command to register that virtual machine to ESX: vmware-cmd /VMs/XP/xp.vmx register ESXi (and vSphere) are just a bit more complex (what, bein’ perl and all). You will need to define the -H for the host, the -U for username and the -P for password as well. The path to the vmx…
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Screen Sharing Through Absolute Manage
Awhile back I did a short article that looked at using the vnc:// handler to programatically interface with the Screen Sharing application and a follow up article on invoking RDP via CoRD from the command line. Well, if you are an Absolute Manage user, you can also remotely control client computers through the admin without passing username and password information (trust stems from the agent and server relationship). This is a pretty neat feature. Absolute Manage has registered the lanrevagent:// handler at installation time (Admin). The syntax for invoking lanrevagent is similar to a REST interface, except here you define the command, followed by what exactly to run that command…