If I have a million dollars... I would?

Geeks reading this will know the answer right away? If you don't, TURN IN YOUR COMPUTER! For shame.

While I don't have a million dollars, the answer for me is the same. I have been on vacation for the last few days and I did... NOTHING! Loved every minute of it.

I have been designing a home theater setup in my home. Along with adding it to my home network, its all one project to wire the house in a way to stream audio everywhere. One of the reasons I am looking for a NAS at home. I have been planning it out mostly (at night.. MOVIE?). I have been uncertain to post my findings here at on my other blog that is more personal. However a lot of technology will be involved with my home project. I really want to come up with a cool name for it.

Well I will mention some of the progress here and in other places. Hopefully you will enjoy the ride.

-Boston Tech Guy

Never Enough Space

I am looking for a home solution for a NAS. I have simply come to the conclusion that I need one for all the music and photos I have and keep acquiring. I have been consolidating all my music for several years now on MP3. I know have moved onto my wifes music collection and its getting fairly large and I am getting tired of having it on either my external hard drive or pc. I am centralizing my whole house on a larger project that I wont go into right now.

I cant find a descent home NAS solution. Its driving me nuts. The solution I want is an external hard drive with Network Options. This shouldn't be that hard, and I shouldn't have to pay several hundred dollars for it.

My colleagues are laughing at me as I should build a solution out of an old pc. But thats the problem and the point. I dont want nor need a whole pc running just to act as storage.

I shall keep going looking for that right solution for me.

-Boston Tech Guy

Windows 2008 iSCSI Initiator

Learned something new today in creating a Windows 2008 Failover Cluster. The iSCSI Initiator is part of the Windows 2008 install.

Start-> Administrative Tools->iSCSI Initiator

Good to know for the future. Still learning Windows 2008 and hey why not learn while building a cluster ;-)

-Boston Tech Guy

Disable IE8 in Windows 7

Usually I like to start my blogs with a quote or a play on words. Been too busy to come up with one for this.

According to this news article in Network World and confirmed by this article on Microsoft Blog, you can disable Windows Features in Windows 7. The big one of course being Internet Explorer.

I find this an incredible push for Microsoft. I like the idea, don't remove the software but have the option to disable it. I have been a Netscape, Mozilla, Firefox almost my entire "webbing" history however I do agree that Microsoft should not be forced to remove it from the OS. Apple is not being forced to remove Safari. I state that as proof of the other side, not to start Apple/Microsoft war.

Windows 7 is looking to be interesting. I am still using XP and will keep it as long as I can.

-Boston Tech Guy

Windows Core

Got the chance last week to play with Windows Core. Very interesting. I like the idea behind it. Not a lot of resources out there on it.. yet. A few more people using it and I think it will be the way to go for a lot of system admins.

It is sad how much Windows Admins use the gui. Linux Admins chuckling in the background.. yes we know. I have always considered myself open to many different platforms. I always try to keep up with command line use. With windows it was helpful for admin cheats. Power Shell is really cool, but Windows Core takes it to the level of "WOW I still use the gui alot more than I thought."

Side note: Admins out there, learn Power Shell! You will be glad you did.

I am trying to learn Core for Clustering. See where it can take me.

-Boston Tech Guy

Time heals all wounds

Unless you bleeding like a stuck pig.

We have a cluster that is going down for the count. Last week my company ran into an issue where the cluster would stop functioning for about one minute. Here is the really weird part, the node would not fail over.

What we saw was a classic windows "queue" problem. The Windows Server 2003 on Node1 would just stop for about 1 minute. Strangest thing I have ever seen. I was on the phone for 7 hours with Microsoft Partners Support and they were just as confused.

I wanted to point it out here. I will add to this posting later with details of whats going on.

-Boston Tech Guy