Day: April 12, 2016

April 12, 2016

74/240

We got Nutanix racked and stacked, powered up, networked, and updating. It’s also the most I’ve walked since I started here by 40% over the next highest day according to my Fitbit. It didn’t seem like that much in the moment, but by 3:30 I was feeling it. It’s about 5 miles of walking, all between two adjacent buildings.

So, a number of things to be thankful for. All the gear is working well. The Dell tech, so far, has been quite good and works well with us. I bought lunch for the team and that went over quite well. No dead drives out of 38 to get started.

Good chance that tomorrow we’ll be out of the setup phase and ready to vMotion some test machines, and seeing if we’ll be able to use Nutanix’s in-built backup utility. The details we got initially aren’t promising on that front, and we may need to spring for Veeam B&R. If we have a VM living on the cluster tomorrow I’ll consider us well ahead of schedule.

I can already tell this week is going to fly by.

I had to put in a change request for a new Software Restriction Policy. The last SRPs I had to deploy were to block CryptoWall. This one is to block Windows 10. Despite a Group Policy named “Do not upgrade to latest versions of Windows”, a registry key named “DisableGWX” (Get Windows X), and a registry key named “DisableOSUpgrades,” I’m still somehow not being clear enough to Microsoft, because new updates are pushing the GWX app anyway.

Our users can’t perform the upgrade themselves anyway, they lack local admin rights to do so. But it still nags the user and basically asks them why their sysadmins are horrible security-haters.

It’s hard to believe that … (More) “74/240”

April 12, 2016

63/240

I strongly considered another 45 minutes of sleep this morning, which would’ve left me driving up to work instead of relaxing on the train. I don’t know where this responsible side of me came from but it’s a rather welcome addition.

I only just now found out that the Surface Pro 3 has a default scaling of 150%, when I set that to 100% the blog is tiny as fuck. I think I’ll work on that for the rest of the trip up. I’m going to let this new theme ride for a while and see what I think of it.

I would be more internet-productive if there was any mobile signal out here. I feel like it’s more correct to blame the USB modem here than Verizon, because my phone has signal for 90% of the ride whereas the modem has signal for…maybe 20%. It’s disappointing to say the least. It’s also free, so I can’t complain too loudly.

Nutanix begins about four hours from now. I’ve gotta figure out how Dell is going to get all the gear from my office to the datacenter. Hopefully we can jack a rolling cart or two or three from somewhere.

I have a couple of “soft skills” pieces I’ve been meaning to write for bluesoul.me and /r/sysadmin, including one about GTD. I think I’m going to hold off until I finish reading Time Management for System Administrators and see what can be adapted there. I’m a couple chapters in and it seems to be rather heavily inspired by GTD. But, maybe there’ll be something good in here just the same.

The other bluesoul.me piece is on the new file server infrastructure, which I might see if CSO Magazine is interested in since this is being built with security in mind first.… (More) “63/240”