Inchoate Curmudgeon

There are a number of great resources on the Web explaining how to combine VNC with SSH so that you can get a remote display of a desktop. The exact combination of tools will depend somewhat on the operating systems of your client and host machines, but there are a host of options for Windows, […]

The theme of the closing keynote by Dave Thomas at the Rails Conference was Rails is Love. But there was an undertone of anxiety in the keynote, and throughout the conference really, that Ruby might somehow become unlovely. The Ruby on Rails community has exploded. There are over 8,900 people on the Rails […]

At some level, going to the Rails Conference has brought out the absolute worst in me. This is mostly because people ask me what I do, and I’m with an audience where I can really tell them. In the keynote this morning, Cyndi Mitchell described the current state in IT as being bloated and corrupt. I […]

This popped up on the SunRay Users mailing list today. David R. Partington is running a VMware installation of 5 x4600’s hosting 450 simultaneous XP VM’s. SunRay provides the desktops for these machines through the Windows connector. … We have close to 3000 Sun Ray’s in production at Ft Huachuca. We have some Solaris Desktops, […]

The imminent arrival of a 3.5″ terabyte drive continues a trend that will increase pressure for more sophisticated storage management solutions at the low end. My office is overrun with unprotected storage, full of things like pictures I’ll backup when I get around to it. I’m actually considering the purchase of a 160Gb tape drive, but […]

A virtual appliance is a network service that is preconfigured and prepackaged to do useful work. We don’t buy dryer parts to construct a dryer, and we shouldn’t be constructing, in most cases, many components of our business systems. The only reason this practice persists is the nature of the business of buying and selling useful […]

I’ve got my 23″ Cinema Dsiplay working with the SunRay 1G. It was a bit of an RTFM thing. You must configure the SunRay for auto-resolution for the X piece /opt/SUNWut/bin/utxconfig -r auto and then set the default resolution for the SunRay hardware piece. /opt/SUNWut/sbin/utresadm -d -c IEEE802.00144f215fd8 -t default /opt/SUNWut/sbin/utresadm -a -c IEEE802.00144f215fd8 -t default 1920×1200@60d The steps are […]

I’m convinced that exposed complexity contributes to more outages than any other technical factor. The operational or human sister to this is inadequate configuration management. Unless we ruthlessly squash non-value added diversity and complexity, our systems become unmanageable, and are crushed by their own mass. The advance of technologies like Ruby over J2EE and MySQL over […]

I’ve been configuring a Solaris 11 build 48 (Nevada) virtual machine for a few days now, and have run into a couple of items Mr. Google was less than helpful with. I believe some of this has to do with the typical audience that tackles such things: there’s not much advice for the novice. I’m […]

In Cheap iSCSI Target Built, I wrote that I didn’t know what Dapper was and didn’t install it. I’m probably the last person on earth to realize it, but Dapper is apparently a version of Ubuntu. I installed on the just released Ubuntu Edgey Eft, and it works quite nicely.

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