One of my goals for the new system is redundancy. If something goes down, I’d really like a second system around to stay up and running, in particular when using virtualization it does create bigger single points of failure (one phyical server going down takes down multiple virtual servers), which is one of its biggest weaknesses. This can be mitigated by using shared storage (hence the SAN) and multiple servers that can take on the virtual machines the “down” physical machine can’t run temporarily, even if it runs a bit slow from the additional load (even better if your secondary server is not heavily loaded!).

Having the R805 would be great, but my next-best server is a Dell PowerEdge 1800 that’s three years old, with a single Xeon 3.0GHz processor and 6GB of RAM. It’s a very nice server, but it wouldn’t be able to shoulder a load the R805 could handle easily so it would only be able to run absolutely critical machines. Additionally, the Xeon processor is too old to support Intel’s VT (Virtualization Technology) extensions that make running a virtual server hypervisor easier, and allows 64-bit guest operating machines to run. If we make the move to Exchange 2007, there would be no backup server for it to move to, and it would be one of our most critical servers!

VMware’s ESXi hypervisor runs just fine on the PowerEdge 1800 (as long as you don’t need 64-bit guests); I have it running now with a couple of VMs and it’s barely breaking a sweat. It will work even better on the nice “new” PowerEdge 1950’s, but the other thing that having VT-capable processors will help me with hypervisor selection options. If I don’t end up running the now-free VMware ESXi, which I’ve tried and like but keeps you from using some of the really cool features unless you buy their Virtual Infrastructure/Virtual Center packages (these easily get into the same price as the hardware for both servers I bought!). Microsoft’s new Hyper-V virtualization platform (separate entirely from the old Microsoft Virtual Server product) is capable of running only on processors supporting VT, and now I’ll have two of them, the magic redundant number. It does preclude using the PowerEdge 1800 as an third backup, but down the road it will offer some of the similar moving of “live, running” virtual machines from host to host, and Microsoft is releasing their Virtual Machine Manager (VMM) soon as well for management, which will be siginificantly more cost-effective for us given charity pricing than VMware’s Virtual Center. But some of this stuff isn’t going to be here right away, and VMware’s solutions aren’t necessarily lacking anything we desperately need. What’s the answer? For now, it’s keep researching, maybe even try both when the servers arrive, and see which is the best fit for us. Microsoft certainly wants to take over the market and they’ve been successful in other areas in doing so after entering late, but it’s way too early to tell in this case, in my uneducated opinion! I do think VMware will be around for a while, and is not a poor choice from a longevity perspective yet.

Licensing is the only “kicker” with my new servers. Microsoft licenses (that link has a cool calculator, but it gives retail and not charity prices!) their Microsoft Server Datacenter software per socket (physical processor) in each server. So if you have a dual-processor system, you buy two licenses. The R805 is a dual-processor system, but the 1950s are as well, and I just doubled my processor count and therefore licensing cost! That’s OK, I’m likely going to, for now, use the Datacenter license from the PE 1800 for one processor in one of the new servers and use a Server Standard license on the PE 1800 for now that I’ll be freeing up by virtualizing to pre-licensed VMs. This will just add around $500 to the cost of getting a second server, making the hardware and licensing increases in going from one to two servers come in right at $800. That’s not bad for a second server, doubling your quad-core processing power and RAM as a consequence!

Because these servers were in the Dell Outlet, where items in your cart last only 15 minutes unless you modify them, the server have now been purchased and are estimated to ship on October 1st. I’m still waiting to pull the trigger on the MD3000i SAN and I’m still researching backups (which just had its budget cut a bit with this server swap!). I did hear from my Zones rep that October 1st begins Microsoft’s new fiscal year, and they will be announcing any pricing changes at that time. Pricing on Datacenter could go up, or stay the same (well, it could go down but how likely is that? Exactly!). Since I have the servers for sure now, I may go ahead and grab the Datacenter licensing before the end of the month for that reason if I can (my boss is out of town at the moment; he approved the server purchase earlier waiting to change airplanes at an airport in the Bahamas on a business trip. No, he called me first for some technical assistance, I didn’t bug him until I had him on the phone already. Yes, I should have asked if he needed an assistant for his business trip :-)

So, one more step completed in the process, many remaining. Also, I’m possibly going to need (or want very much to have) a cheap or free server rack that I can pick up locally. Just saying, if you happen to be throwing one away and are nearby :-)

• A Dell PowerVault MD3000i iSCSI SAN (with 10-15 near-line SAS 1TB drives and dual controllers)
• At least one new server (likely a Dell PowerEdge R805 with dual quad-core AMD processors)
• Microsoft Server Datacenter licensing for the same
• An iSCSI Ethernet switch
• Battery backups for server and SAN
• Backup software and some drives for backup
• A rack for the server room (maybe. If I can find a free or dirt cheap used one, locally)

Unfortunately, my budget for all of this as assigned is going to be a bit of a tight fit to squeeze the last few bits in and I’m still trying to figure out the best and most cost-effective way to do this. I’m also struggling a bit with which backup software to use. The server we were using to mirror our data is now dead, and although we have a RAID 5 array that is nowhere near the level of protection we need to have, but I am starting from scratch as far as which data backup software to buy. I have no tapes nor the budget for a tape drive, but I do have some PATA hard drive arrays that are only half-full that are SCSI-attached and will probably work in tandem with an existing server to become my disk-based backup server. Figuring out how to do offsite backup, within the same budget, is high on my todo list :-)

My budget for all this is actually less than the retail price of just the server and SAN. Fortunately, I rarely pay retail and this is certainly no exception! The plan, if isn’t obvious, is to virtualize. I’ve already been doing virtualization for a while to some extent. I used Microsoft Virtual Server a long time ago but switched to VMware Server product when it was released for free. I’m currently running four virtual Windows machines and a virtual Linux machine for our helpdesk software. Recently, since VMware’s ESXi became available for free, I’ve started running it on our newest server, a 3-year-old Dell PowerEdge 1800 Xeon 3.0GHz system with 6GB RAM. It runs very well and I love the management interface, even just using the VMware Virtual Infrastructure Client it comes with (since we aren’t paying for Virtual Infrastructure 3, or VI3 as it’s known!).

The goal of the new system will be to move virtual machines and file shares onto the MD3000i SAN. The Dell R805 server will be the primary virtual machine host, and although my plan was to use VMware ESXi, a good friend and mentor has recommended I examine Microsoft’s new Hyper-V virtualization platform as a strong contender, especially since Virtual Machine Manager (VMM) 2008 is coming and Live Motion will be available in the future, something that VMware does (simliarly, at least) with VMotion only for a high licensing cost. I’m open to either virtualization solution at this point, but here’s my main problem: Hyper-V will only run on procesors that support the new virtualization extensions. Right now, that’s zero of our servers. The R805 will support them of course, but the PowerEdge 1800, our only server with even a 64-bit processor, is too old to have the extensions and thus cannot run Hyper-V or 64-bit guests (although it runs ESXi just fine right now). My plan was to use the PE1800 as a backup server to run critical systems as needed if the R805 was ever down. With Hyper-V, this is no longer an option (and really, with the PE1800 and ESXi I still can’t run any 64-bit guests, so Exchange 2007 is out), and my concern is being left without a secondary server should the primary fail.

So, I’m left trying to fit a second server of some sort, new enough to have virtualization extensions but cheap enough to fit into my already packed budget. Suggestions, and of course donations, are welcome :-) I have been keeping an eye on the Dell Outlet but that is mostly pointless until I have the money to spend same-day when something shows up in stock.

At the moment I’m likely going to get a couple of refurbished UPSs from RefurbUPS for battery backup. However, I will be pursuing a contact or two who may be able to help with this as well.

The final area I’m still investigating still is data backups. There are a plethora of disk-to-disk backup options, and obviously I’m limited by price. I’m not going to use Symantec’s BackupExec for various reasons. The options I am considering so far consist of the following:

• Amanda (Enterprise for Exchange, open source if it will mix with Enterprise)
• Righeous Software’s Continuous Data Protection (CDP)
• Backup Assist
• CommVault (the Small Business version available only through resellers such as Dell)
• Microsoft Data Protection Manager (DPM)

CommVault is the solution that Jason Powell and his team use at Granger Community Church. They like it and it allows for Exchange restore down to the individual message if necessary without restoring the entire data store. The other options I have done varying levels of research on; enough to know they are still a contender on both price and features but not enough to provide an in-depth comparison summary. I am also still working how exactly how many virtual machines I will be running, and how many need to run a backup agent (some things can just be backed up with scripted backups to a file server where the data can be backed up along with everything else on that server, so I don’t necessarily have to have a backup agent for every VM).

The funding will be available most likely in the next couple of weeks or so to go ahead and make these purchases. If I can hold off on some of the backup questions, I may try to wait until after the upcoming Seacoast Fall Church IT Roundtable so I have more time to bounce ideas off of the smart guys there!

This is an overview and of course is not the only research, thinking, and questioning I’ve done about this solution! So feel free to comment and suggest away; I’m just saying there’s a possibility I’ve considered your suggestion and if so, I’ll note it. More often than not though, my thinking is challenged here in the comments, so please delight me with your insights, they are much appreciated :-)

Prior Todo System Attempts

The result is usually “cool,” and I might use it for a day or two. And then, I forget about it. (I use and love the HelpSpot helpdesk software (Lakeview is even a HelpSpot case study!), but there are tasks (and projects) I’d like to manage outside of requests in the helpdesk, and that’s just an at-work solution.) Now that I have an iPhone, although it comes with no built-in task managment program (why? Beats me), I figured someone would have made a system I could use on my desktop, laptop, and iPhone to track todo lists at home, for Lakeview, and for the Indianag A/G District Office where I work one day per week. And when I’m somewhere else, I don’t really want to see what I have to do anywhere but where I am! And oh yeah, I’d like subtasks support, tagging, sorting, searching, start and end due dates, and due time with reminders built in, and probably a few things I’m forgetting. And can you make it free while you’re at it?

I’ve already mentioned that there are a lot of online todo list web applications. On my renewed search for iPhone-compatible todos, I tried the very well-known Remember the Milk service. It has a nice interface and I thought it might just be as good as everyone seems to think, and it had an iPhone interface. Which I never tried, because although there’s a trial, you have to pay for a Pro account to use the iPhone-optimized webapp; I think it’s $25/year and you get a few other benefits as well. But I kept going back to my preference for “free” and wondered if someone else was doing it better. I’ve bookmarked some of my findings using my Delicious keyword “todo”

The other one with a funny name: Toodledo

I don’t recall exactly how I discovered it, but it was probably a Google search or a post comparing services that led me to Toodledo. The name almost turned me off from looking at it at all. It’s a nice play on words but not as “professional” sounding as I was looking for. But hey, Remember the Milk isn’t all suit-and-tie sounding either, so I gave it a shot, especially because it had a free iPhone interface called Slim. The well-done feature comparison chart also helped to convince me to try it out, given it’s completeness compared to every competitor listed (granted, the chart is a bit out of date per a few forum postings especially in relation to Todoist, which I tried briefly after I was already using Toodledo (always on the lookout for something closer to perfection :-) and if you like using the keyboard extensively it may be an excellent option, although I’m not sure about an iPhone version). Of course comparison charts are intended to be biased towards the company making the chart, but the list of features Toodledo had was impressive by itself.

This is going to get long, so for more information I’m breaking the rest out after the jump if you’re reading this on the web!

And then I gave them money

After customizing the fields I wanted to use (most of them, it turns out) and playing with the Contexts feature which lets you save a location or context for each todo item, I started to actually put a few tasks in for the next few days to get a feel for how to use it in a daily workflow. It clicked. I still find some interface things to be not as easy as they could be, but I like Toodledo so much that I’ve purchased a Pro account for $15 per year to unlock some additional features. The fee is more reasonable than any other pro account I’ve encountered for task management, and although my preference is of course for stuff that’s free, the Pro account just added enough value at a small enough price to make it worthwhile (subtasks and longer completed-task history retention were the two that put me over the edge, but the Scheduler and Stats features are also nice). However I haven’t seen the need for a 1GB file storage area that doubles the price, so I stuck with a Pro rather than a Pro Plus account; the file storage and going from 2 years of completed-item retention to forever are the only additional features for the upgraded plan.

Sidenote: Project Management Still Elusive

The definition of what I look for in a productivity app keeps changing. Universally available todo lists with all the features I’ve mentioned were the biggest need I had and Toodledo fills that void nicely. Some people, especially those using the GTD system, use Toodledo to track projects (GTD defines a project as “anything requiring more than one specific action to complete” while I both like that and have an additional one, something like “something I want to get done including collaboration with others” or something along those lines). Toodledo provides task sharing (read-only unless the other user has a Pro account) and you can use Toodledo’s Projects field to track GTD-like projects, but at work I’m still missing something between todo list and helpdesk.

What I’m looking for is Project Management. Something like Microsoft Project without the complexity, on the web, for one to several people working together on multiple projects to use for tasks and collaboration. There are nearly as many options in this space as there are todo list services! The most well-known of these is probably 37signals‘ Basecamp and their associated services (like Backpack, for todos and calendaring–but it’s not free!). Basecamp is nice but their free account only allows for one project, and their paid accounts are more than I’m willing to shell out for right now, and they don’t offer non-profit discounts (I asked). That’s OK, copycats are a dime a dozen, but the problem is finding the one that does everything the way I want it to, at the right price! Unlike Toodledo, I’ve not discovered the perfect-enough solution for this yet, but I’m still looking. My biggest concern is that most project management systems include their own todo list system, and I want to make sure I don’t split my nice Toodledo system and have to check two separate todo lists all the time! I’m keeping this in mind as I evaluate.

Ideally, I’d like a system that coworkers helping me with projects as well as volunteers can log into and update with research findings, progress, and that sort of thing. The ability to collaborate with volunteers is one of the driving reasons I want a web-based system! Projects in this context might be things like:

• Upgrade Microsoft Exchange to 2007 from 2003
• Run wires to X for Y purpose
• Use compressor to blow dust out of all desktops (recurring)
• Upgrade all or most servers to Server 2008 from Server 2003
• Purchase and implement a SAN solution with virtualization

Centrally managing a list like that would be much better than me having to come up with it off the top of my head like I just did! Yes I can just write down a list, and I have a few of those, but that leaves out the collaboration opportunity. One of the few entirely free options I’m contemplating is called ClockingIT. The interface doesn’t seem as clean as some competitors, but it has many features including a Wiki, chat, forums, and files, along with reporting and charting options. And the price is right.

This is one of many possibilities several of us in the Church IT IRC channel (#citrt on the Freenode IRC network) discussed a week or two ago when we went Googling for project management options. No one in the group has a perfect solution but several have none (hence the looking!), and others are using things like Basecamp, Sharepoint (WSS) or Microsoft Project. I refuse to get sucked into using Sharepoint and the other two I’ve already eliminated for reasons above, so that’s why I’m still looking! I’m tracking things that show some promise using my Delicious keyword “projectmanagement” if you care to browse. For churches, TeamWorkLive stands out as another very nice option, although the price is too steep for me right now. I can see this being a great all-church-staff project management tool, if everyone gets on board and you’re OK with the $200/mo for 50 users (or $150/mo for 25 users…there are other plans too).

My Toodledo Workflow

My District Toodledo context (click to enlarge)

This is a brief overview of how I use Toodledo. I have most of the fields except for the sharing-related ones enabled. I used Google’s Chrome browser to create an “Application” out of the Toodledo website so I can easily open a separate Toodledo-only window, preventing it from getting lost amid my many tabs (no, I’m not kidding! Too many tabs to provide an exact count right now though…). I have the same setup on the desktop I use at each office and on my laptop, and I have an iPhone home screen icon set up for the Toodledo Slim iPhone webapp interface (I’m also presently using the Appigo Todo native iPhone app, which is nice, but it is missing several features including subtask and context support that prevent it from being as useful in general, even though it syncs well with Toodledo. Appigo has said they are working to add these features in the near future).

Basics

I have Toodledo set to default to the Contexts tab, since you can select any of the fields to start with by default. This lists all the Contexts I have set up in tabs across the top of the screen, and I can easily select which one to view (the number of tasks in the context is shown in parentheses on the tab but that can optionally be hidden). The main contexts I have (plus a few infrequently used ones) are: Any Computer, Lakeview, District, and Home. I default to sorting tasks by Importance and then Auto. Importance is a foruma defined by Toodledo that takes into account both the priority of a task and how soon it’s due, and assigns each task a numerical value of “importance.” The higher-importance items are shown at the top, and for each task the due date or priority is displayed at the right side (whichever is the reason for the importance level is displayed, due date or priority, per task).

A quick scan shows me what I need to do today and I can pick a next action to work on based on only tasks that I can do (that are in the context I’m presently in; at Lakeview for example). I have keyboard shortcuts enabled which lets me type “n” to create a new task quickly, and I can tab through the fields to set the folder, start and due dates, priorities, context (defaults to the context I’m in) and other settings as applies to that task. The Folder field I’m using kind of as a categorization field and kind of as a “project” field, I’ve not decided 100% how I’m going to use it yet. But that’s an example of flexibility; I can use the Folder field for whatever I want however I want to! There’s also a Tags field which allows for multiple, comma-separated tags which you can view and sort just like any other fields. I’m using tags sparingly right now, but will throw “web,” “order,” “blog,” for categorization, or a person’s name (like my boss) to create an agenda to talk to that person about the next time I see them.

Subtasks

Subtasks, which are a feature of the Pro account I paid for, are nice but not as easy to use as I’d like. Without seeing or using it I’m not sure I could explain it very well so I won’t try for now. Suffice it to say the usability of the interface for subtasks has a ways to go to make it as efficient or easy to use as it needs to be for me to get much use out of it. Like others on the Toodledo forums, I would also like to see the ability to assign an order to subtasks so as each was marked complete, the next one would be “active” until it was complete, and so on. This would make tasks with subtasks very usable as GTD “projects->next actions” which I would like to get into more in-depth as I work toward trying to implement GTD myself (I am currently trying to use some of the GTD concepts but I haven’t dived in to the program all the way). I presently have 55 active todo items in Toodledo, which is the important suff I can’t forget but is not close to the full brain dump GTD requires to really work well!

iPhone

The iPhone interface is mostly full-featured but obviously limited in the amount of information it can display at once, and the lag time for the webapp to refresh is occasionally annoying. However I use it to enter new todo items at least as often as I use a computer, I think, and I edit and mark tasks complete on it as well (it’s nice that I can review pretty much anywhere when I have downtime, without having to be in front of a computer!). The biggest benefit to having an iPhone interface is that I’m more likely to follow through and use the system the more contstant and “anywhere” my access to it is. I don’t want to rely on something that goes away when I’m not at my computer; that’s when I need to be reminded what I need to do the most! Especially as I’m running around the building away from my office. Between Appigo Todo and the Slim webapp, I get what I need to out of the iPhone side of Toodledo access, but it’s not perfect. I am looking forward to the Appigo Todo updates that will add Contexts especially (and subtasks!), and Toodledo developers themselves have mentioned in their forums that they are looking at iPhone native apps themselves but have not released any details about when to expect anything concrete to materialize.

Other Ways to do Toodle

Some other ways that Toodledo provides to interface with their system are email, Twitter, and Jott. I have enough ways to add and view tasks on the go that I don’t think the Twitter integration will be very useful to me despite my extensive use of Twitter. Jott is an excellent service that I’ve used for a long time off and on, but recently they switched to a paid model and left beta status. Basic Jotting is still free but connecting to productivity services like Toodledo requires a paid monthly subscription now. If I get desperate enough to need quick voice-to-todo translation I’ll contemplate a subscription; until then I may use the iPhone Jott app to capture quick items that I can manually enter as a Toodledo task later. Email is one piece that I haven’t really gotten into the swing of using but should be pretty powerful, because you can forward an email to your secret Toodledo email address, changing the subject to the actual todo text (add exclaimation points to bump up the priority, and @context to set a context) and the body of the email becomes the task’s note. This should make creating tasks from emails quick and painless, but like I said I just haven’t started using it heavily yet, even though I need to. The same command-shorthand works to create new tasks via Twitter using a Direct Message, by the way.

There are several other ways to get information out of Toodledo, including iCal subscriptions, Vista and Apple dashboard or sidebar widgets, a Firefox extension and sidebar (the sidebar uses the same Slim interface as the iPhone), and there’s a third-party Outlook Synchronization Tool that does just what it sounds like, using the Toodledo API. I tried this (it does work!) since I use Outlook but the lack of contexts turned me off and I’ve tried and failed to use the Outlook Tasks feature for tracking todo items, so I’m not sure why I wanted to try again :-) You can display your tasks in your Google Calendar in at least two ways (as a drop down item each day to see tasks due that day, or as actual calendar items if you’ve set a due time as well), and you can get text-message or email alerts about an hour before a task with the due time field set is due (for now, you can’t configure how early to remind you, and if on, all tasks with a due time will remind you up to the maximum number of reminders you want per day).

Conclusion

Is Toodledo what I’m going to use long-term? Well, I’ve spent about $25 on Toodledo Pro for a year, and the Appigo Todo and Notebook iPhone Apps. I’ve been using the system for about a month I think, successfully, and with money invested I (hope) I’m nore likely to stick with it longer. Only time will tell! It’s full-featured yet flexible, but it doesn’t quite provide the collaborative project management that I’m also looking for, which may end up being another tool to juggle when I find the right one, rather than replacing Toodledo. Sometimes you just need a nice, smart, flexible list to give your mind some sanity by offloading the “stuff” to the system.

That’s the premise of GTD, and Toodleso is my favorite implementation so far. I just have to be careful to avoid something I recall reading on Merlin Mann’s 43folders blog a while ago (I’m not sure what article) that mentioned it was too easy to spend more time looking at, examining, and setting up a system that you more busy with that than actually using it! I agree, that is easy to slip into sometimes! I guess I’ll just have to stop and use this for while!

It looks to me like the issue is the prongs break off in a power outlet sometimes. I move my adapter daily (until I get a second one so I can keep one at work and one at home) and haven’t had any issues. I’m not going to stop using it as they recommend, but I will be on the lookout for any problems and if it does break off, I’ll make sure to notice and take action to prevent any injuries or issues. If you can’t manage to do that safely, sure, stop using it and charge via USB all the time :-) Don’t blame me though, officially I’m telling you to stop using the adapters now and wait until October 10th to get a new one. Go ahead, I’m sure you’ll always be close to a USB outlet to charge your phone a few times a day!

Thanks to whoever I follow on Twitter who brought this to my attention; I’m not entirely sure at this point who it was. If you haven’t seen it here, you probably live under the tech news rock that I do much of the time (tech news can suck me in, so I often stay away for lengthy periods of time!).

The trip is off to a good start, with milk shakes at Steak-N-Shake as a late night treat. Ritters was our first choice and Culvers our second (were trying for custard! We have some custard virgins among us!) but it was still good!

It’s time for bed, going to be a long day tomorrow! I’ve also got some server and storage infrastructure upgrades in the works that I need to find time to write about, some exciting stuff! See some of you tomorrow, and the rest of you in #citrt? We didn’t make it in in time for dinner with Dean Lisenby or Sheldon so will get to see them tomorrow along with Jason Powell!

Yep. That’s right. In case Firefox, Opera, and Safari all don’t satiate your burning desire to be rid of Internet Explorer (even if it is improving with age, after it started to ripen at least), Google said they are releasing the beta of a new web browser called Chrome today, Sept. 2nd, 2008. It’s been in development for two years, and they’re beta-testing it with thousands of webpages automatically after each build. How? Well, they have this little archive of webpages stored somewhere… :-)

They accidentally leaked the news a bit early but have now come clean and written a blog post announcing it, and have released the original leaked “comic book” describing the project, which will be open source and they claim has pulled from both Mozilla (Firefox) code and Apple’s Safari WebKit rendering engine. The comic book is very descriptive and indicates that each tab of the browser will run in a separate process, which will reduce memory usage over time and allow multi-threaded JavaScript, as well as allowing individual tabs to crash without taking down the whole browser. If this works as advertised, a few tab-users I know (with myself as the number one offender!) may flock to this quite a bit faster than users have moved to, say, Flock. Sorry, couldn’t resist…pun fully intended :-D

I, for one, will be grabbing the beta ASAP and taking it for a spin. As long as rendering is consistent enough to not intruduce more headaches for web designers (basically, standards-compliant, kind of ), I’m excited to see if it lives up to its claims! And I love testing new software. I’m always amazed at the things I haven’t thought of yet, that others have. Nowhere is it easier and quite flexible to showcase stuff like that than in software! Just bang a few keys, hopefully in the right order, and you have something new. The only thing easier? Web design (which is correspondingly more limited most of the time). Of course, both can be done very badly…

Now I’m rambling. But this is unexpected and exciting news! I would say, don’t knock it ’til you try it, and read the comic :-)

Speaking of the national one (wow, what a natural transition! :-) it’s coming up next month! October 8-10 at Seacoast Church. Check out the official website for details. Early bird registration was extended by a month until September 8th, so you can still get in at the cheaper rate! I’m planning on going to this one too and so is my wife, unless plans change at the last minute.

You should go too. See you there!

In addition to Remote Desktop, you can also open webpages (HTTP or HTTPS, using Internet Explorer or optionally the Gecko rendering engine that Firefox uses if you download xulrunner…see the instructions within mRemote). And connect to SSH sessions using PuTTY, which comes with mRemote, right inside other tabs.

There are other tools out there that do similar things. Royal TS is one, and in fact was the first one I found (see review from 4sysops here). There are others in the original 4sysops post I linked to, which compared six free RDP clients and mentioned a paid one. mRemote does everything I need in a comfortable way that I’m very pleased with, at my favorite price. It works fine with Server 2008 and Vista, and using the smartsize setting so the remote desktop fills whatever resolution is available inside the mRemote window makes for an efficient work area that’s as large as you can fit on your screen!

If you use Remote Desktop on more than just an occasional basis or to connect to more than one system, you need mRemote, or one of the other similar tools if you find it’s a better fit.

What if you’re away from your laptop or desktop and need to Remote Desktop from just about anywhere you can get cellular data coverage with AT&T? Well, you have to have an iPhone too, but I highly recommend WinAdmin for the iPhone to fill that need. That’s a review I wrote as a part of my iPhone Apps reviews over at my personal blog earlier today, and it ties in well with this full-sized mRemote companion :-) (As you might have guessed, writing about WinAdmin actually sparked the idea to blog about mRemote. They complement each other well! Seriously, I think I hear mRemote telling WinAdmin how it thinks of it fondly as a younger brother, whenever my iPhone is next to my laptop :-)

The obligatory “why I haven’t been blogging”: Busy playing with iPhone :-D Too much fun to waste time writing about other stuff (even writing about iPhone Apps has taken a backseat until today!), but I’ve got a few ideas planned and things to write about up ahead. For now, enjoy having a bit less in your feedreader; I know I’ve been falling quite behind in my own blogreading too! Twitter and the #citrt IRC channel are also to blame in large part, but not in a bad way. I’m not the only one; see Jason Powell’s post about it.

I’m going to have to work on getting a server available to play with this at Lakeview, but it came at a great time for the Indiana District Assemblies of God office where I work one day per week: I had a server that I was about to transition into a role as a virtual server host and ESXi was released freely at just the right time to try it out! My server is a ProLiant DL580 G2 model, which isn’t on the “officially supported” HCL (Hardware Compatibility List) for ESXi, but is for the full ESX. Worth a try; I’m not planning on buying support anyway.

After registering, downloading the ISO image file, burning it to a CD, and booting the CD on the target server, the installation process completed without a hitch. It was so quick and easy, there’s no point in describing the process in detail! If you can’t make it install on supported hardware, you shouldn’t be using servers anyway :-) (You can find how-to guides online easily enough if you do need one, and I will mention that you need to change the BIOS on the DL580 G2 to indicate that the supported OS is “Linux” before installing.)

After installing, the server boots and you get a screen that you can’t actually use to do much. It tells you your IP address (if it obtained one using DHCP, which mine did) and lets you set a root password (which I recommend). Then, you need to visit the IP address of the server from a client machine on the network. This page gives you a download link to install the VMware Infrastructure Client, which you’ll need to actually setup and manage ESXi. Connect with the Client to the IP of the server using the username root (and either a blank password or the one you set earlier if you changed it–you did change it, right?).

I’m using an onboard RAID controller with SCSI storage rather than a SAN (I’ve been told ESXi does not support IDE disks but does work with SATA drives if you need it to), so I didn’t need to set up any iSCSI targets or anything like that, although that appears to be very easy if you’re fortunate enough to have a SAN.

One thing to keep in mind is that you’ll need the free VMware Converter if you want to convert Virtual Machines from a VMware Server installation to your ESXi box. It’s a rather simple process I haven’t really gone through in production yet so I won’t say more, but you can’t just copy the files over and run them.

So far I’m only running a LAMP (Linux/Apache/MySQL/Perl-or-PHP-or-Python) appliance from VirtualAppliances.net, which I absolutely love when I need a quick webserver! Installing this from the Virtual Infrastructure Client is very, very easy. File menu->Virtual Appliance->Import. I used the Import from URL function, and used this VirtualAppliances address to the .ovf file needed to install the appliance. Confirm and wait, it has to download the disks from the internet and transmit them to the ESXi server!

I’m using the LAMP server to run the HelpSpot helpdesk application. Since I had this running in a VMware Server appliance already, I simply used the “scp” command to transmit the web files from the existing appliance to the new one, and moved the MySQL database dump over as well. I logged in as root to the appliance and used “aptitude update” and then was able to use “apt-get install php5-imap” and “apt-get install php5-tidy” which are required or recommended for HelpSpot, and I used the web-based configuration to turn on the Zend engine in the Apache configuration, which HelpSpot requires. It popped up and took off like I’d never moved it! I also copied over the cron entries needed to execute the regular email checks that Helpspot does. Note that I’m leaving off a few steps involving DNS changes and firewall modifications because I gave it a new IP address, but basically the move was very easy and straightforward.

Then I ran into trouble, because I like to experiment :-) In the VMware Infrastructure Client, I right-clicked the LAMP VM and told it to “Install/Upgrade VMware Tools” on the VM (it said the Toold were out of date…wouldn’t want that now, would we?). I used the Automatic option with no Advanced Options. Everything seemed to complete successfully, and I rebooted the appliance. Oops, no network! The eth0 network interface was nowhere to be found! (Using “ifdown eth0” and then “ifup eth0” normally disables and re-enables the Ethernet interface, in case you didn’t know (I didn’t, until recently, thanks to #citrt!), but in this case only the localhost “lo” interface showed up at all.) This could be a problem, since the whole point is to be a “networK” server! I tried asking around in the #citrt Church IT Roundtable channel on IRC, where usually someone knows what to do, but I didn’t get much help on this issue from the folks currently in there when I asked. Time for Google! Without too much effort I’m pointed in the right direction, to this forum thread on the Ubuntu Forums (The VA LAMP appliance is based on Debian linux). User “modifiedmind” had the same problem as the original poster, and then found the solution and posted it later…thanks! I couldn’t quite find what to enter as the argument to the modprobe command, but I managed to track it down and this is what I had to do:

1. Edit the /etc/udev/rules.d/70-persistent-net.rules file on the appliance and delete the last two lines (the one starting “1. PCI device…” and the one beneath it, starting with “SUBSYSTEM==”net”…” (I like using the nano text editor because I’ve never spent the time to learn vi or emacs, so I did an “apt-get install nano” first; make sure to use the -w argument to nano so it doesn’t line-wrap for you, like “nano -w /filename“. Or use whatever text editor you’re comfortable with!)
2. Run this command: /etc/init.d/udev restart
3. Run this command: modprobe -r pcnet32
4. Run this command: modprobe pcnet32
5. Run this command: ifdown eth0
6. Run this command: ifup eth0

That’s it. Back to working order! So far I’m very happy with ESXi and I’m going to do everything I can to use it everywhere possible :-) It also has the capability of adding the higher-end features (HA, VMotion, VirtualCenter Manager) just like you can with ESX, if you’re willing to pay for them. I’ve never used them, this is my first ESX/ESXi experience ever, so I figure I’ll be happy without them as long as I don’t use them to see what I’m missing! The biggest thing that ESXi doesn’t have that the “full” ESX has is a “service console” that lets you control the machine locally. I’ve heard that many people have had great success running ESXi on even non-supported hardware, and it should at least run on anything that ESX will run on without a problem (just don’t try to pay for support!).

Also, the Church IT Roundtable Fall 2008 is coming up in October, but the registration price goes from $50 to $75 if you don’t register by August 8th! The actual Roundtable is October 8th and 9th, but there are pre- and post-activites planned for the day on either side if you can make it (see the schedule). My plans aren’t firm yet, but my wife and I will likely both be there!

I’m using the free WordPress app to compose this post on the iPhone and it seems to be pretty solid so far but it needs some more features like page editing capabilities and not just posts. In time. For now it is good!

AT&T iPhone Status: Shipped!

Yesterday, my iPhone shipped to the AT&T store where I’m going to pick it up. It ships overnight FedEx, which I’m very happy about, because it means I can go in the store and pick it up today! I’ll be going after work this evening. The FedEx tracking number shows that it was delivered at 10:17am to the store, and I’ve confirmed that the phone will be available for pickup later this afternoon!

In order to not bore you with posts about iPhone apps that I find, I’m going to post most iPhone-related stuff over on my personal blog (which I’ve recently redone so there’s not much there), ExistDifferently. I’ll probably make a post or page here with a table of contents that I’ll keep updated as I write stuff, or I’ll pull in the posts in the sidebar. If you really want to hear about a ton of iPhone stuff here, let me know…but it’s going to be more for me than anything, since there’s already a ton of info out there if you want it!

Why did I choose the iPhone? Well, I’m tired of my Treo 650, which is showing its age. I like the multi-touch interface, I like the data speeds, I like the screen size, and I like that, because it’s so popular, people are writing sites and apps (both!) specifically to work well on it. That means I can do more with it than with any other phone, or at least I can do so much so easily compared to other phone options right now. OK, I have to correct myself, will be able to do…gotta get the thing first! Oh yeah, and now it does Exchange ActiveSync with Push email, calendar, and contacts! That’s the one thing that made me sit up and take a look. Before, I at least told myself (and others) that I was OK giving the iPhone a pass–yes it was cool, but it wasn’t truly functional if you need Exchange access. Supposedly, that’s no longer true! It seems that the $30/mo data plan, unlike AT&T has been claiming per my previous post, works just fine with ActiveSync, which makes sense from a technical level.

It’s a 16GB black iPhone, if you were wondering, and I’m going to use it to replace my iPod Classic 80GB I think (the first Apple product I’ve ever owned) which is why I opted for the larger version; my iPod has over 20GB of podcasts and I’ll still have to pare that down to fit on the iPhone! Shouldn’t be hard; I didn’t try on the iPod because there’s plenty of space. I’m already with AT&T (but no longer in a contract), and the monthly plan will only cost me $10 per month more than what I’m already paying as part of my family’s FamilyTalk plan, so while I considered a 2G used iPhone, the 3G made enough sense given the subsidy for me.

The short story is yes, I got them working! At least two so far; I’ve tried a third but it won’t even power on. The answer came through Googling and guessing. Here’s how I got them working (mostly the working part, but I’ll add a few notes about the journey).

First, I had to locate a PS/2 keyboard and mouse. There are two USB ports on each of these units, but I don’t know if they’ll accept USB keyboards or mice and PS/2 ports are there and are the lowest common denominator (I tested a USB keyboard later with no success). With that done, I took one of the few power supplies I have, plugged it in with the keyboard and mouse, add Ethernet and VGA monitor (an analog input on one of my LCD panels worked fine, and hit Power. Took a few seconds to boot up, right to a login screen. Wow, that’s helpful, given that these were in another environment! No hint of a way to configure what server to connect to, either. Time for Google!

A few unfruitful searches finally brought results with the term “wt3350se update firmware” (without quotes) since I figured maybe updating the firmware would be a good method of getting control over the devices. The link I found was to Free Wyse Monkeys, specifically an article called Reset to Factory Defaults or Unlock a Wyse Terminal. This article seems to contain the world’s last remaining knowledge on getting into old Wyse terminals (as far as Google is concerned). I even hit up the Wyse official website without finding any documentation other than some firmware updates available for download (I’ll be coming back to those later).

The biggest key that helped me from Free Wyse Monkeys’ article was the note to try holding the “G” key on the keyboard while booting to reset and get into the settings screen. It worked! When I tried it, instead of a login screen I ended up at the Winterm Connection Manager with a “Default ICA Connection” staring back at me with beady black-on-gray eyes, and a title bar that said “Press F2 to select Terminal Properties.” Proceeding thus, there were all sorts of options available, but what I wanted was to connect with RDP to the Terminal Server and not Citrix, which we don’t have. The Terminal Properties window has a lot of tabs, but the best one for me ended up being the Upgrade tab: this tab let me input an FTP server to use for firmware updates! Wait a minute, didn’t I find some of those earlier? Why, yes I did! Firmware v3.5.1 was available in both Citrix (ICA) and RDP types, the one I wanted was called l44122rdp-wye.exe which I promptly downloaded and extracted. Yay, a bunch of files that were mostly meaningless! There was a bootstrap.exe file and such…it looks like there are a few ways from the Monkeys article I could use to perform the upgrade but they all required a DOS box. I’m a bit short of those at the moment.

But back to FTP. What if I just stuck the files on an FTP server and pointed the terminal at it for an upgrade? Couldn’t make things work worse than they already did, since they didn’t. I grabbed Filezilla Server because I didn’t feel like setting up the IIS FTP service just to test my theory. Set up a test user with access to the directory inside my extracted firmware (the firmware was a .exe that extracted files to a folder, inside the folder there was another folder called “441-223350rdp” which is what I set as the FTP root, with the actual firmware file being called “L441224F.wye”). Back to the Upgrade tab on the thin client. I input the Server Name of my machine, left Server Directory blank, and entered the User ID and password I’d set up in Filezilla Server. Then I clicked the button I assumed would begin the upgrade, if it worked (how did I guess? Fortunately, the button said, “Upgrade.” Clever!). Up pops a little warning box saying something to the effect of “Warning! This will do an upgrade. Don’t stop once you start. Are you sure?” only a long longer (OK it wasn’t too bad).

Twenty seconds later the flash was downloaded, and precisely 70 seconds later from the time I clicked Upgrade the terminal restarted itself, only to come back and let me create a New Connection in the Winterm Connection Manager, this time of type “Microsoft Remote Desktop Client.” Bingo! I’d say that’s exactly what I was looking for. I created a new connection with the details of our terminal server, and tried it. Success! There are still a variety of settings available in the Terminal Properties (hitting F2 at the connection screen) and it appears if I want to get fancy, I can configure a lot of this stuff through DHCP options to the thin clients as well. Time to look for some additional power supplies, keyboards, and mice, and contemplate some monitors. I’ve got a couple of people needing some “computers”! The color depth isn’t great but Outlook and Word will run just fine.

Just one thing unsolved: what does the third Wyse firmware do? There are three downloads, one ICA, one RDP, and another called L369_20Wye0.exe. I have