I love it when a plan comes together

Part of my plan for 2010 was to get more organized, both at work and in my personal life. We all have things we should be doing but have put aside for one reason or another. In my case, it's usually just laziness or a lack of motivation. Recently, I took the time to document the wiring of our server rack, something I had been meaning to do for a long time. As part of this, I was able to then go through the Netapp vSphere storage best practices and identify a few places where I hadn't implemented certain features, most notably, iSCSI multipathing. This came just after we had gone through Netapp upgrades to enable MPHA (multi-path high availability) on our FiberChannel connections.

Following this wonderful blog post on implementing iSCSI multipathing in vSphere and the best practices guide, I turned our single path failover NIC iSCSI connection into a multi-path round-robin load balanced one. You can see from the graph above when it was activated and the two NICs began to work in harmony. Since we currently only have one iSCSI LUN, the benefits are not great, but I will be adding a second one later today which should start to show the benefits of the configuration.

iTunes Home Sharing disaster (and the fix)

My son got his first iPod this weekend. It was his opening line: "Hi. I got an iPod." I had loaded it with some songs synced to my iTunes and he was quite pleased with the entire thing, even enjoying the mini games that came with. I started our evening with the simple thought of installing iTunes, plugging in his iPod and using Home Sharing to sync music between our computers. So much for simple...

The iTunes installation worked well and connecting the iPod resulting it the slightly aggravating "You have to erase this iPod" message. After doing so, I enabled Home Sharing with my iTunes account only to find it didn't see any of our shared computers. Numerous google searches directed me to the Apple technote on troubleshooting Home Sharing which is surprisingly sparse on actual troubleshooting advice. When none of that worked, I struggled with authorizing, enabled, disabling, and trying to make sure all the computers could see each other. What I discovered then is that my two other computers could see this new installation just fine while the new installation knew nothing about the originals. Very strange indeed.

I also noted that the two ports required to be open by the Apple technote were owned by different processes. iTunes itself was using the 3689 port while the mDNSResponder was using the 5353 port. mDNSResponder is part of Bonjour, which is Apple's UPnP like service for discovering network services. This led me to recall that I had once had issues using Bonjour to connect to my shared printer from my Airport Express on this same computer. After further reading, I downloaded a slightly older version of Bonjour and uninstalled then reinstalled Bonjour. Lo and behold, it worked! iTunes was now seeing both computers and the Bonjour Printer Wizard also was now discovering the printer it could not find before.

So, if you're struggling with iTunes not seeing your Home Sharing computers in one or both directions, check your firewall settings, then your authorized accounts, but then consider installing an earlier version of Bonjour and see if that fixes your issues.

Spam? What spam?

Today I was writing up what I hope will be a semi-regular email to the users of the company I work for detailing some new developments we had completed in the IT department. I wanted to include a little interesting statistic at the end so I logged into our Postini account to see how much mail we were processing monthly and how much spam we were blocking. No big surprise, we were running at about 80% of our inbound mail being blocked as spam. This is actually below some of the statistics showing as much as 95% of all email being blocked. The impressive statistic was that one mailbox accounted for 25% of all of our email while still having 93% of its mail blocked.

All of this made me think about the fact that I pretty much never see a spam message reach my inbox on Gmail or my work account as a result of these services. Google does it for me for free. For as easy as it is to block and as much spam as is being sent, how is it even profitable these days to send spam? There must be a significant number of people still, to this day, not using a high quality spam fighting service. By the way, if you happen to be in the market for one, head over to Purity Networks and take them up on their free user offer. This is a great alternative to services like Postini for your business.

Along these lines, I still cringe when I see people change their email because they changed ISPs. Since the advent of Gmail and the like, why does anyone continue to use substandard email or change their email more than once making a move to an ISP independent service? Google apps has even made it beyond simple to set up your own custom domain riding on their systems. Maybe it is just a lack of knowledge that keeps people tied to their ISP email. What do you think?

Enjoying a spring day

Enjoying a spring day, originally uploaded by kkuphal.

With spring in the air, here's a little photographic interlude to brighten your day.

Wirelessly enable your Samsung HDTV or Bluray player for cheap

So a little while ago, woot.com had their deal of the day as this great Bluray player that also handles Netflix, Blockbuster, Pandora, and Youtube. Even though I haven't upgraded to an HDTV yet, it seemed better to spend the money on this rather than a regular DVD player since mine was acting up. Once it arrived, I realized I had to connect it to the network in order to test out the Netflix service and compare it to my Roku and Wii Netflix experiences. I noticed the port on the back labelled Wireless Adapter.

I just happen to have a Wireless USB adapter upstairs connected to my infrequently used Dell Studio 19 mounted on the wall in front of my elliptical trainer. I grabbed it from the back, plugged it in, and saw it immediately prompt for the wireless network to connnect to. After configuring it and testing the service, I ordered a replacement stick (different brand) and waited for it to arrive. Well, it did, and as soon as I plugged it into the player, it did nothing. Plugging it in to the Studio revealed that it work (with drivers) but still nothing on the player.

After doing a little research, I found that Samsung only supports/recommends/offers their own brand of wireless USB adapter for their Bluray players and televisions.

So how did my USB stick work?

Turns out, the USB adapter that I have, which is an Encore ENUWI-N must have the identical chipset to the much more expensive Samsung branded adapter that is for sale at Amazon, etc. Now, I also believe there is an ENUWI-N3 adapter for sale that may not have the same chipset based on what I've been able to find online. If you're looking to get a wireless USB adapter for your Samsung device, get yourself an ENUWI-N and save a little money.

For you techies, it is likely that this device is based on the RT2870 chipset so you may be able to find other devices with the same chipset that work just as well.