Upgrade on Evan Hoffman

iOS 7 has ruined my life

Sun, 29 Sep 2013 23:43:29 +0000

I was looking forward to iOS 7 for a few reasons. I was glad to be rid of the skeumorphic design elements (stupid shit like the “Notes” app looking like a yellow notepad) but also glad to get the Control Center to turn off Wifi more easily - I only need Wifi to be on when I’m in my house or my office. It’s just a battery drain elsewhere. Ideally iPhone would just do this via geofencing, and the fact that it doesn’t is beyond retarded.

Upgrading ESX 4.0 to ESX 4.1 with Update Manager

Thu, 21 Oct 2010 23:57:54 +0000

This turned out to be so ridiculously easy I probably shouldn’t even mention it, but only because I remembered that Update Manager exists. I thought I was going to have to burn an ISO, go to the datacenter, pop the disc in, etc. But with Update Manager this is all handled remotely. Just download the files from vmware.com and upload them to your vCenter server through the client. This YouTube video by VMware walks you through the procedure:

The bright side of Compellent

Wed, 22 Sep 2010 16:07:46 +0000

Since I was bemoaning Compellent’s pricing recently I figured it would be unfair of me not to highlight the upside. Their tagline is (or was when we purchased it) “The only SAN so sophisticated it’s simple.” While I can’t say whether they’re the ONLY one, the idea is definitely true. This is the first SAN I’ve ever used, and aside from the learning curve for iSCSI itself (targets, spinup delay, etc.) it’s totally simple and intuitive. Create LUNs, map them to servers. Don’t worry about things like RAID levels or hot disks. We’re into our second year with Compellent and it’s definitely lived up to its promise of simplicity.

Exchange 2010 and Set-ActiveSyncVirtualDirectory Identity

Mon, 12 Jul 2010 14:43:21 +0000

I don’t really know why I put this blog up, but generally I write stuff here after I muddle through some ridiculous problem that may have ended up being easily resolved, but whose solution was hard to find. That’s definitely the case with this post. Currently I’m in the middle of moving my company’s email from Exchange 2003 to Exchange 2010. Microsoft has provided some pretty good documentation on how to do this, but they do assume a certain level of familiarity with the product. For example, I probably spent 30 minutes trying to run Exchange cmdlets in Powershell before I realized there’s a special shell just for Exchange, the Exchange Management Shell.