C W – Page 3 – Chris Wolfe

SMH

Yup, shake my head, roll eyes, sigh… just, no:

[https://www.engadget.com/2017/10/18/giant-robot-fight-usa-japan-megabots/]

USA and Japan’s giant robot battle was a slow, brilliant mess

Team USA came out on top, but not before three rounds of action.

—-

I’ve written before about the current state of robotic affairs, and stunts like this just dropped the bar even lower.

AND… since that article came out a couple days ago, this one from today shows just how abysmal it truly truly was:

[https://www.engadget.com/2017/10/20/epic-live-giant-robot-battle-faked/]

This week’s ‘live’ giant robot battle was fake

This is a sad, sad day for us all.

—-

Yeah, guess I need to go watch ‘Pacific Rim’ again to cheer myself up.

Pet peeve time. It’s long past time for tech writers to give up their click bait attempts with articles about which internet browser is BEST. These pop up at least once every week or two on the tech blogs. They are usually a head-to-head comparison to the top four or so: Google Chrome, Mozilla Firefox, Microsoft Edge, Apple Safari, and sometimes Opera or others. Here’s a recent example:

[https://www.pcworld.com/article/3213031/computers/best-web-browsers.html]

Best web browsers of 2017: Chrome, Edge, Firefox, and Opera go head-to-head

We take a look at the performance and features of the big four internet browsers to see which one will serve you best in 2017.

Let me just ask, who uses only one browser? I realize there are grandmas and kids and other less techie people in the world who might just use whatever came on their pc or laptop (IE, Edge, Safari…) but most people I work with, and every person who I’ve every helped over the years, use at least two or more browsers at the same time. Yes, there are strengths and weaknesses to every browser (every class of software), but there is no BEST one.

For myself, I gravitate to Firefox because of the extensions and it has a somewhat smaller memory footprint than Chrome. But even to this day, leaving it running for days on end and having multiple tabs open will result in FF sucking down a massive amount of memory. And it gets slower, and slower… and s l o w e r. I found the only way to stop that is by saving my sessions, killing the FF process, and firing it up again… starting the whole cycle again. FF can also get all locked up by a single rogue tab. I know the developers are working on these problems, but as of today (v56) it still has these and other problems.

Chrome is nice but does take up a lot resources, as each tab is a new system process, though this does help by not letting one tab crash all of Chrome. I always feel I have to be more ‘miserly’ with my Chrome tabs than with FF. New versions come out very frequently and I believe that they were the first to get a functional 64 bit version out than FF (sorry, too busy to google that). I keep all my Chrome sessions across all my devices synced to the same account so that extensions stay in sync, and I can keep track of open tabs on all of the different devices.

Edge: ha, who uses Edge? Still no good extensions, still does not work with all sites. No other words necessary.

Safari: Not a Mac guy, but it works very well on the iPad and iPhone. Tightly controlled by Apple, just like everything else. I think once, a very long time ago, I tried it on a Windows PC. Not sure if normal people still use it on PCs. Chrome is a good alternative on iOS.

Opera seems pretty solid, but to be honest, I only use it to log into my Facebook account. Why not connect to FB on FF or Chrome? You must have missed it when it was discovered that FB can track you ALL OVER THE INTERNET from the browser you are using, EVEN AFTER YOU LOGGED OUT. Sorry to get all caps locked on you there, I just can’t believe how bad that speaks to FB and privacy. And it’s not just about using cookies and clicking on the Like buttons. You think FB really ever lets you go?

Ah, but another great browser is Vivaldi! Spunky and still relatively fresh to the scene, it also is pretty solid and reliable. But again, like Opera, I really only use it to stay logged into my personal Gmail account. Using Google products is funny and slightly annoying as they seem to still think, in this grand year of 2017, that people have and use only one Gmail/Google account. 🙂 So, needless to say, I don’t use my main Gmail account (open in Vivaldi) for much else in the Google environment, hence that’s why I don’t use Gmail from FF or Chrome because outside of Incognito mode they only let you have one account logged in at a time. (So yeah, it gets a bit unwieldy when you need to use four or five Google accounts on your computer at one time.. but it’s manageable!)

Just for grins, there was also the standalone portable QtWeb browser back in the day. I just checked their site and the last update was 2013! Guess they just couldn’t compete with the PortableApps group, which are the versions of Chrome and Firefox that I use… highly recommended!

Windows Phone is dead

So… that only took about seven years to crash and burn out. Microsoft announced Windows Phone 7 in the fall of 2010 but they never had a chance against the iPhone or the Android vanguard. It’s been interesting to watch the slow tank over the years and just a twinge painful because Nokia was involved and they used to make solid phones. Sure, there were a couple or three flurries of news bites where MS would make some grand announcement, like when they released Windows Phone 8 and WP10, but there was generally no interest from NO body. They were never a contender.

I used to be a MS basher, but to be truthful I changed my mind when Ballmer finally stepped down around the summer of 2014 and passed the CEO reins to Nadella, and I watched what happened with the company. Ballmer leaving was a shot in the arm that MS needed and they were able to really get to work on new versions of Windows and other initiatives, even focusing on their software to run on their phone competitors (smart!). I was interested in the platform enough that a couple years ago I bought a lower-end phone running WP7 so I could play around with it. Even with the low phone specs, it ran well and I did enjoy seeing what it offered. It’s true that one very big reason for the phone’s failure was always the lack of apps.

So I’ve softened my stance since 2010: it’s too bad that Windows Phone didn’t work out, only because competition is good for everyone involved. I’m not saying this is true about their phone at all, but in the tech industries, the best does not always win out. WP was classy and different. MS is cutting the fat and culling the herd… looking back now it seems like it was just kind of a big experiment, anyway.

[https://www.theverge.com/2017/10/9/16446280/microsoft-finally-admits-windows-phone-is-dead]

Microsoft finally admits Windows Phone is dead

“In a series of tweets, Microsoft’s Joe Belfiore has revealed that the software giant is no longer developing new features or hardware for Windows 10 Mobile. While Windows Phone fans had hoped Microsoft would update the platform with new features, it’s now clear the operating system has been placed into servicing mode, with just bug fixes and security updates for existing users.”

Work distractions

Not being distracted BY your work, lol, but distractions AT work to keep you from, you know, actually working. Here’s the real culprit that sucks down productivity:

[https://gigaom.com/2017/10/13/millennial-optimism-about-workplace-technology-ignores-a-key-problem-ourselves/]

Millenial Optimism About Workplace Technology Ignores a Key Problem — Ourselves

Curt Steinhorst – Oct 13, 2017

The bright, shiny future of meetings in augmented reality, AI assistants, smart workspaces built on the internet of things, and other Jetsonian office technologies fast approaches—and American workers can’t wait for them to improve productivity. A year ago, Stowe Boyd presented research here on Gigaom that found significant optimism about the potential for technology to make work easier and more collaborative.(1) Unsurprisingly, the research found this positivity strongest among Millennials.(2)

However, that same research found that nearly half of Millennials believe the biggest time waster at work is glitchy or broken technology. Millennial frustration with current technology might explain their simultaneous wide-eyed excitement about cool, acronymed stuff like VR, AI, and IoT. This is at odds with the overall population, which perceives wasteful meetings and excessive email as the biggest enemy of efficiency.(3)

The problem is, both diagnoses are wrong. Research shows that the most significant barrier to productivity, by far, is the good, old-fashioned problem of getting distracted. It’s not that distractions exist—it’s that we succumb to them.

Put another way: poor tech and erupting inboxes don’t waste our time—we do. We have lost our ability to choose where we spend our attention.

In one survey, 87% of employees admitted to reading political social media posts at work.(4) Other research shows that 60% of online purchases occur between 9am and 5pm and that 70% of U.S. porn viewing also happens during working hours (“working” from home?).(5) And if none of that convinces you, perhaps this will: Facebook’s busiest hours are 1-3pm—right in the middle of the workday.

To be clear, this isn’t just a Millennial problem. The 2016 Nielson Social Media Report reveals that Gen Xers use social media 6 hours, 58 minutes per week—10% more than Millennials.(6) Overall media consumption tells the same story: Gen Xers clock in at 31 hours and 40 minutes per week, nearly 20% more than Millennials.

And if there weren’t enough, each instance of distraction comes at a significant cost. An experiment in Great Britain showed that people who tried to juggle work with e-mails and texts lost an average of 10 IQ points, the same loss as working after a sleepless night.(7) And this affects essentially every office worker, every day.

What’s to be done, then? Fortunately, if you’ve read this far, you’ve already done the most important thing: understand that the true problem doesn’t lie anywhere but in our own lack of focus.

Regaining focus—becoming focus-wise, as I like to call it—doesn’t require a rejection of technology, however. Becoming focus-wise only requires we reconfigure our tech usage habits.

For instance, instead of expecting ourselves (and our employees) to be 100% available throughout the day to emails, chats, and walk-bys, set time aside in “focus vaults” where you are completely unreachable to the outside world for a set period of time. When you emerge, you can have complete freedom to check emails and Facebook, batching those communications so you don’t lose IQ points switching to and from them during the actual work.

Another example is how we use the tech itself. For instance, if you know you can’t resist checking the screen when your phone dings—turn off the sound. Or disable your computer’s internet connection for a period of time. Even something as simple as making your application window full-screen encourages your brain to focus on the single task.

Normalizing simple, focus-wise habits like these throughout your enterprise can reap huge rewards in workplace productivity. As technology starts to fill our offices with artificially intelligent robots, virtual work spaces, and self-configuring environments, you can be confident that you will use the technology to accomplish your goals—rather than letting the technology use you.

References

Boyd, Stowe. “Millennials and the Workplace,” Gigaom.com. Oct 26, 2016. https://gigaom.com/2016/10/26/millennials-and-the-workplace-2/.
Dell & Intel Future-Ready Workforce Study U.S. Report. July 15, 2016. http://www.workforcetransformation.com/workforcestudy/us/.
Workfront 2016-2017 US State of Enterprise Work Report. Sept 9, 2016. https://resources.workfront.com/workfront-awareness/2016-state-of-enterprise-work-report-u-s-edition.
Kris Duggan, “Feeling Distracted by Politics? 29% of Employees Are Less Productive after U.S. Election,” BetterWorks, February 7, 2017, https://blog.betterworks.com/feeling-distracted-politics-29-employees-less-productive-u-s-election.
Juline E. Mills, Bo Hu, Srikanth Beldona, and Joan Clay, “Cyberslacking! A Wired-Workplace Liability Issue,” The Cornell Hotel and Restaurant Administration Quarterly, 42, no. 5 (2001): 34–47, http://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0010880401800562.
Sean Casey, “2016 Nielsen Social Media Report,” Nielsen, January 17, 2017, 6, http://www.nielsen.com/content/dam/corporate/us/en/reports-downloads/2017-reports/2016-nielsen-social-media-report.pdf.
“Emails ‘Hurt More than Pot,’” CNN.com, April 22, 2005, http://www.cnn.com/2005/WORLD/europe/04/22/text.iq

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So, recently with my own group at work we’ve been trying to work on online training. We’ve found that there are just too many distractions when at our desks with many people around us, and walk-ups, and the constant interruptions from email, Slack, other projects going on, etc. We decided the best option (besides working from home cough cough) is to find an unused conference room armed with only a laptop, and to take an hour or two away from it all to concentrate on the training. I hadn’t before heard this called a “focus vault”, but that is a very appropriate and descriptive term.

Cloud storage and malware

I just read an article on a particular bad strain of computer virus (I won’t mention the name, rather not have any spidering connect it to my domain) that turns into ransomware by taking a user’s files hostage and making them pay to get access to them again. Okay, so that’s nothing new, but the article said that there was no known way yet to recover your files on your own, except from a backup. Regardless of whether a program like Malwarebytes or the like can ever get a “fix” for this, I find it disturbing that it is basically ‘game over’ for someone who picks up this pernicious bit of malware.

Let me also mention another article I happened to read today where the author was lamenting the fact that he lost his Box.com cloud storage account earlier this year, and it took six months to get it worked out (and it did work out well in the end, but he thinks that if he had not pulled his ‘reporter’ card, he would not have received anything… the Box people had to work hard to make it right). All of his files just went poof and disappeared, and Box couldn’t even find any of his old account information. He said this was more of a mild annoyance because of the type of files he kept there but went on to say that if it had been his Dropbox account he would have been in a world of hurt. I can understand the sentiment.

I am a firm believer in backups, and in layers. I use Dropbox and SkyDrive for continuous cloud syncing so that I can share select folders among several PC and laptop systems and a couple Apple iOS devices when needed. I use Crashplan and Carbonite for continuous backups to their respective cloud servers (Actually, Carbonite is on its way out in a couple months, as they ticked me off earlier this year and I like Crashplan better anyway). Once a month I hook up a 2TB USB drive (that I keep stored away from my house) and do a full backup of all the files I care about. It doesn’t seem that long ago I was backing up to CDs and DVDs… but when you get into the 1TB range of data, the DVD-Rs just don’t cut it. 🙂

What caused me pause today was realizing what could potentially happen if my main workstation at home picked up the nasty little malware mentioned above. The PC is used mostly by my wife and I trust that she is careful and practices good Internet hygiene, but all it takes is swinging by the wrong web site and it’s possible to pick up a baddie like this. So if it did get activated on the PC, it could start going through the whole hard drive and begin encrypting many of the data files. For the Dropbox folder, for example, as each file gets updated by the virus, it dutifully gets copied up to Dropbox’s servers, which then forces the file to update on my various other systems. And then Crashplan wakes up a little later and ALSO sends off each modified file to its backup servers. To make it extra worse, I may not even know this was happening for some time, possibly discovering the issue hours later when the virus has done its business.

(Okay, granted, at this point I could go into Dropbox and use its “restore from a previous version” feature. I’ve only done this once or twice, but this was on their website interface and I can’t imagine having to do this for any kind of large number of files.)

So now, if there was no tool available to counteract the effects of the virus, I might be looking at restoring from my last good backup on the 2TB USB drive, and I’ve lost all my updates from when that backup was made to the present time. Even if I could clean up the virus and get my files back, I’m pretty sure I would be looking at nuking the PC and starting over from complete scratch, because once you’ve picked up a bad virus you’ll never really know if you’re totally clean. I could then get back to a clean OS installation and a clean copy of my backed up files, but I’m still out any recent updates. And then what do I do about my Dropbox and Skydrive and Crashplan files that have all been whacked? Delete them all and start over? And regarding cloud services themselves, can you really rely on a service that might just “forget” that you even had a digital relationship with them?

Guess I have to spend some time thinking this through, as I’m sure there are even more ramifications in this scenario. I know right NOW I’m doing a full backup of my Dropbox and Skydrive files to somewhere offline. It might be a little early before my monthly USB drive backup, but I think I’ll bring that home tomorrow…

Two UPSs and a CX4

One of the big things I had to get done by mid-September was a data migration project that involved working to decommission an EMC CX4-960 array after moving all of its data to a VNX 7500 system. This took many months for several reasons:

At the beginning, we wanted to do a full set of testing of different VNX drive configurations since the VNX gave us more options than were available on the old CX4 (and we wanted to be quite certain of performance before committing).
It took some time to move the data as non-intrusively as possible. There was only one time that several production server reboots were necessary (for upgrading HBA drivers and multipathing software) before those servers could connect to the VNX.
A whole lotta little daily projects and firefights that came up in the meantime while this was going on.

Fortunately I work with a great bunch of people who were involved in the data migration and once a date was set for the CX4 to be powered down, we worked together to make it happen. And it was a great feeling to turn that sucker off… well, after the lurking, incriminating doubts subsided (“Wait, wait, am I absolutely SURE there’s nothing else connected to the array?!?”). I learned a lot about array-based migration tools for EMC arrays like SAN Copy and MirrorView, and especially about how to automate them via NaviCLI scripting! This will come in handy in the near future as I’m currently working on the second part of this VNX migration project; we have a second older CX4 that will be migrated to a second new VNX 7500. Fun times!

—-

The other huge project in September involved removing two big UPS systems from our computer room and replacing them with newer ones. It started as a meeting with the electricians, the UPS company rep, and several of us from the company. Since this outage was going to take several days, it was decided early on to happen over a weekend to minimize impact and we scheduled it a few months out. Because of how we have our computer room powered, we were going to lose power to half of the hardware in the computer room twice… once while the power feed was cut over to our generator, then a second time to bring power back over to the UPS lines. For my group, we were responsible for identifying the systems that would have to be gracefully powered down before their power was cut. Wow, that took some time because we haven’t been the best at, er, keeping internal documentation up-to-date and the power sockets all labeled (but it’s much better now! :D).

Once the hardware was identified, all the other groups here at work that used those hardware systems had to go over the list and decide the order that the systems were to be brought down. To date, this was probably our biggest internal change that affected the most number of people in our office (save the times we’ve physically moved from one office space to another). Our Change Management group took on this part of the project and did a great job organizing the sequence of events and all the inter-dependencies. It took MANY meetings and much explanation and clarification along the way to be sure everyone was fully aware of and understood the extent of this outage.

All of that organization was worth it. Starting Friday morning, non-essential systems were taken offline. This progressed through the day with orderly shutdowns of the affected components, then all power circuits for the UPSs were shut off by 7pm. The electricians moved these circuits over to generator power and we got everything started up again in reverse order. Of course there were a few minor hiccups, but it did go very smoothly. One thing that kept going through my mind, over and over… “No surprises!”, meaning that if I missed something major early in in the project, like misidentifying what hardware was on which circuit and then having an UNplanned outage… well, I was breathing a lot easier by this point.

By Sunday morning the electricians and UPS engineers were ready for us to cut over our power from generator to the new UPS power. They were about eight or so hours ahead of schedule so people got called in early and the whole shutdown/startup process happened again. Again, probably a few hiccups, but it seemed to go swimmingly.

It was quite a feeling of accomplishment being involved with so many people working together in such coordination to make a huge project come together. There were some who put in a lot more hours than than me on this and I hope they got the credit they deserved. I feel that sense of accomplishment every time we have worked on things like this in the past… but this one felt an order of magnitude larger. I’m certain there will be more like it on the horizon, but it’s sure nice that they don’t happen very frequently!

Busy

Ouch, it’s been since January since an update. Um, I’ve been busy? I know, as I usually say, we all have the same 24 hours a day and we spend time on what’s important to us. Our family took a long trip to Japan this spring, and we’ve had company in and out, include several holidays and an anniversary and family birthday thrown in there, plus Google killing off Reader, where does the time go? I’ve had a few ideas for work-related posts but then… just got busy with other stuff! Hopefully soon.

The number one ability

I’ve thought about this many times since I got involved in computers as a full-time occupation (and it occurred to me yet again this past week as we held a couple interviews for an intern spot in our group). It comes up when I see or hear discussions about what a person needs if they want to get into a computer-related job, which I would say are mostly programming (software) or system administration (OS and hardware). What is the one ability or skill that a person must have if they are to excel in these lines of work? What, could you say, is a basic prerequisite ability or skill needed to make it?

I believe it can be answered with a simple question: How are you at problem solving? I’m not talking about Sudoku or Scrabble. I want to know about how you handle tackling problems that you encounter, not just at work, but also in general, in life itself of which work is only a part. How you go about analyzing a broken system (whether it’s a PC or server, or C code for an app, or your truck’s clutch going out, or the home water heater quitting, etc.) and come up with a plan tells me a lot about how you will perform in working in IT.

I feel that this is the absolutely most critical ability that has got me to where I am today. It was a developing factor in my life way before I hit the work force. I think for about any person, it’s adopting an attitude early in life where you decide that you will try to work out a problem on your own (for me, it started out in fixing up my own bikes). It’s about learning how to analyze and think through your situation, look at the tools you have available, consider your options, and see what you yourself can do about it. I’m so grateful for a dad who was a do-it-yourselfer, and I’m trying to instill this attitude in my own children.

I admit, there are some areas in which my first reaction is to call in help (electrician work!). And there are plenty of times when it just finally comes down to having to start a support case. But, I know I’ll make every possible effort to figure any issue out on my own. I don’t think it’s a matter of being too prideful, it’s just in my nature to figure it out on my own.

Blame the SAN

Over the years, I wish I would have kept track of all the times that my SAN at work was blamed for causing problems. It’s on my mind today after some work we did…

In our main facility, we have a Cisco MDS 9513 Director class chassis, with eight internal switch modules. Looking at it from a high level, the switches work similarly to ethernet switches, as they basically allow connections between the end devices plugged into the ports. Connections are controlled by zones which can be compared to network VLANs, in that a zone allows its included devices or end points to talk to each other. A basic zone, for example, could be configured to include Server A and the ports associated with Storage Array B so that the server could access the luns on that storage array. In my switches and probably a common setting for most others, if a given server is not included in a zone, it can’t talk to anything else. Good for security as well as sanity!

So, this morning a couple FC attached tape drives were installed, and I connected them up to the MDS. Once powered up and with the switch ports activated I configured them just like normal. I zoned them up with several OpenVMS servers as they would be the ones using the tape drives for backup. After the servers scanned for available new connections, they were drawing a blank. Why weren’t the drives showing up? It must be a problem with the SAN. I double checked my end a couple times and nothing was amiss. It was a similar configuration to other FC attached tape drives we have had online for years, so I was highly doubtful that now some aspect of it would be failing.

It turned out that there were some OS-specific scanning options that needed to be done so that the server systems could recognize the new drives, so all was well in the end. And it only took a few hours to get to that point.

I am not writing this to vent or to complain, because I believe everything we do, right or wrong, is a learning experience for those involved. I am not trying to put the blame back on any other system administrator, because I too have probably been guilty before of the mentality that says it can’t be a problem with my stuff, it has to be yours. I do know, though, from many years of experience that a lot of times I’ve seen fellow workers get very defensive when a problem comes up and have been quick to point fingers at others only to find later it was their own issue. I do know that my own systems, like the FC switches, have worked without issue for a very long time, and I trust that a new change similar to what I’ve done dozens of times in the past is going to work just like normal.

I also know that I am willing to do what I can to help someone out in trying to figure out an issue, especially if it involves my hardware. I may not know everything (well, of course not!) but I’ll give you what I can. Please, don’t just keep saying it’s the SAN… what are you doing on your end to help figure it out?

Data migrations

By the middle of last year, I was up against a data crunch. I have three older model HP EVA 8×00 arrays totally full of fiber channel drives (one rack each, no expansions), and the two oldest were around 95% full of data (yes… the growth got away from me with several major requests for lun space). The third one was my safety valve but was also filling up faster than I liked. Decisions… buy expansion racks or maybe try to migrate in higher capacity drives? Either option was a lot of work, and it was pretty obvious due to the cost in time and effort and ongoing maintenance, not to mention the ill feelings about investing in older technology, that I needed to do some shopping for new hardware.

Working with our HP vendor, we arranged for a new EVA p6550 that got installed a couple months ago. With newer, 2.5″ SAS drives, and only half populated, it would easily hold all the data from those two old EVAs, with room to spare! Using the built-in Continuous Access software, we started a data migration plan that will be complete by next month. The data replication groups were VERY easy to configure, took only a few days to sync up, and run in the background without any issues. It does unfortunately require the reboot of all servers that are connected to the EVAs (HP Alphaservers and Itaniums running OpenVMS… hmmm, that’s worth another post…) to convert from their old array connections to the new p6550 but this has worked out well in coordination with our regularly scheduled maintenance. I am also relieved that I can add in more drives to accommodate for 100% growth all in that single rack system.

Our first “big” SAN array, way back in the day, was an HP EVA5000. It was a bit buggy at the time, but each iteration of the EVA that we implemented has only gotten better and they’ve been a reliable and solid bedrock upon which our company has built our storage infrastructure.

Author: C W

SMH