Nate's Blog

Samsung Galaxy Nexus Here on Verizon

2011-12-07T16:00:00.001-06:00

Read news on the delay http://news.cnet.com/8301-1035_3-57338812-94/verizon-delays-the-launch-of-the-galaxy-nexus/

Macbook Air and VMware Fusion

2011-11-29T14:26:00.001-06:00

My youngest son recently trashed my home laptop that my wife and I share. Luckily I had some decent data recovery software to pull the data off the toasted hard drive. My next decision was to go the cheap and fast route of visiting Costco and purchasing the first eye candy laptop I could find, or go with the later in the year plan of splurging for a mac. After being persuaded to use the 1 year no interest financing option, i splurged for a

. I now have all the software that my wife and I used to use on a PC running on the mac, as well as

which handles the weird apps that would not run in the mac-world. I can't believe I didn't get one earlier. If only I could get my employer to authorize these as a real work computer, especially with either Fusion or View as options to get to a windows world if I needed it.

Wyse Pocketcloud

2011-11-29T14:23:00.001-06:00

Nice app for the ipad to get to your home computer. Get it here http://www.wyse.com/products/software/pocketcloud/index.asp

Application Streaming

2010-09-07T21:09:00.000-06:00

To stream or not to stream, that is the question. In the middle of a VMware View project and the decision was finally made to not move forward without investigating application streaming to virtual desktops in order to take advantage of non-persistent virtual machines. Some of the front runners come to mind such as Symantec, Microsoft, Citrix and InstallFree which will all allow the ability to control user profile, lockdown desktop and application streaming on a find me follow me principle.

iGoogle

2010-09-07T21:02:00.000-06:00

iGoogle

Wow, Trevor Hoffman of the Milwaukee Brewers just got 600 saves!!

VMworld 2010 Theme

2010-09-04T10:52:00.003-06:00

Obviously the theme this year was all about cloud computing and how VMware solutions can help you move towards that model. From cloud solutions like VMware Cloud Director, vShield Zones, vCenter and vShpere all the way to the endpoint access using mobile devices, VMware View, and Cloud based suite solutions like Zimbra, it was clear that the push was to upgrade to vSphere 4.1 as the starting point and move on to use open solutions and standards to migrate your IT Infrastructure into a private, hybrid, or public cloud.

Netflix news

2010-03-06T20:44:00.003-06:00

So, Roku started the lead with streaming from Netflix, then XBox 360, then PS3, and now the WII will have an update this spring to stream movies from Netflix. Just found another great site with open source media center called Boxee that runs on Windows, Linux or Mac and supports Netflix streaming as one of the plugins. Looks like they have also partnered with DLink and will be competing with Roku with a hardware device to act as the media center device. Also supports IPhone app to control the Boxee media center wirelessly from your home network. Read more about it here at Boxee

VMware Lab Manager

2010-01-05T20:20:00.004-06:00

How many times have you had a developer make the statement "I need a VM to test this one thing. Can I get one to user for a little while?" This generally is the concept behind VMware Lab Manager which allow you to have a VMware Lab that can be sandboxed for VMs that need connectivity for outbound traffic, in and outbound, or no traffic at all by providing a fenced network for your VMs. Best of all, it allows your developers to log in and self provision their VMs and make as many clones, or better yet, linked-clones (which dramatically reduces the disk space needed for the copied VM). Time limits can be set around the VMs that are requested in order to reduce the possibility of VM sprawl. It is a very useful tool that removes a lot of the manual intervention of a VM administrator for provisioning VMs.

VMware Lifecycle Manager

2010-01-05T20:03:00.004-06:00

Translation: An automated server request portal build on a very powerful workflow engine called VMware Orchestrator. Vmware Lifecycle Manager allow you to provide your end user community the ability to log in to a web portal and request servers that are based on your own custom VMware Templates and automate the provisioning of those Virtual Servers with built-in approval processes and placement services. The back-end is built on the Orchestrator workflow engine that can be used to build custom workflows beyond the Lifecycle Manager add-on to the orchestrator platform.

Roku HD Player Review

2009-11-29T17:08:00.002-06:00

Originally submitted at Roku

The best-selling HD Player (as known as Netflix Player by Roku) plays High Definition video and connects to surround sound audio.

Best Media box out there!!

By gr8n8 from Brown Deer, WI on 11/29/2009

Pros: Reliability, Video selection, Built in Wi-Fi, Compact, Easy to use, Great value, Easy to set up, High quality picture

Cons: Need fast internet service

Best Uses: Living room, Bedroom, Secondary TV, Primary TV

Describe Yourself: Netflix fan, Home entertainment enthusiast, Power User, Movie buff, Technophile, Early adopter

I've been using the Roku box for over a year now on my Plasma TV in the living room. I am about ready to purchase my 2nd box now that the new upgrade is here to include all the additional free channels. This little box is amazing and providing all the free services and the integration with Netflix and Amazon video just about gives you every video option for viewing movies real-time. You can't beat the price for the feature packed little device and I would recommend that anyone with netflix get one of these, or for that matter, with all the new free channels, anyone could use this box to provide online media streaming, social networking, and RSS feeds, including Pandora radio to your TV.

(legalese)

Honda VTX1300R for Sale

2009-05-17T20:37:00.001-06:00

Anyone interested? I have decided to bite the bullet and sell my motorcycle.

VTX1300

Interested parties can contact me a nrhudson@gmail.com

Tour de Cure

2009-05-14T11:39:00.004-06:00

I am riding in the Tour de Cure ride in Madison WI this year. Anyone interested in donating by supporting me in the ride can do it here. It is tax deductable and more importantly it is for a good cause.

What about V to P?

2009-04-01T21:04:00.002-06:00

I know there is a lot of buzz out there on the concepts for taking a physical server and converting it to a virtual server, but what if you need to back that process out after running a VM for a month or so and realize that the VM is sucking up all your vurtual resources. How do you go from virtual to physical. Altiris Deployment Server for clients and or HP RDP can be used on an imaging perspective to take the virtual server/client, take an image of the VM and deploy that image to a physical device. The concept is the same for prepping the machine to capture an image on a VM as it is a physical computer. You need to sysprep it if you plan on deploying it to a machine that will not be the same name, or you can use the image without sysprepping the machine if you plan on using the same name. Specifically, VMware has a technical document that will help in the process, along with some sample hardware vendor sysprep.inf files that can be used. HP RDP and Altiris Deployment Server have the integrated scripts that you can use for your specific hardware vendor, RDP for HP servers, Altiris with the Dell Toolkit, IBM Server Scripting Toolkit, and Fujitsu Toolkit as well.

Wheel and Sprocket Bike Expo

2009-04-01T20:33:00.004-06:00

Wheel and Sprocket in the Milwaukee Metro area is have a bike expo at State Fair Park. Lots of bikes, lots of deals.

VMware User Group Meeting at West Bend Today

2009-04-01T19:53:00.002-06:00

We had a great VMware User Group meeting today at West Bend Mutual Insurance. Thanks to Rod Gabriel for allowing my company to host the meeting. There was a great presentation on Vmware's vCloud concepts as well as their new VDC-OS (Virtual Data Center - Operating System) or the next version of Vmware ESX called vSphere. There was also a great presentation on using Vmware Workstation to load ESX server for portable test and presentation purposes. Also covered was a presentation from xsigo on their i/o virtualization options.

Traveling to Cabo, must see sites.

2009-02-19T23:28:00.000-06:00

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Just a little ride I have planned for the summer

2009-02-19T23:15:00.000-06:00

View Larger Map

2009 Tour de Cure

2009-02-19T21:45:00.002-06:00

Please sponsor me for this event. It's for a good cause and it's tax deductable. Details found here

Why not bike to work

2008-10-29T15:37:00.009-06:00

OK, so I finally admit that riding a bike is cheaper transportation than driving a car. If you cooincidently live far enough away from work, you can definitely lose weight as well. Since I live 25 miles from work, a ride on a bicycle three days a week, well, you do the math. This has helped me to lose 25 lbs., plus it has put a little more pep in the step and allowed me to try out a couple of triathlons too. I would absolutely, without question, take up biking as an exercise routine. If you can get away with riding to work, you take advantage of saving the gas as well. Some companies like mine provide financial assistance for car-pooling, biking, motorcycling to work. I also believe that part of the bailout bill allows for tax breaks for bicycle commuters.

The proper way to throw your golf club

2008-04-04T10:28:00.001-06:00

I love golf and came across this. Too hard to pass up.

Branding the Altiris Software Portal with your Company Logo

2008-04-03T20:30:00.002-06:00

I ran across this scenario this week and thought you might be interested in an easy way to brand the software portal with your corporate logo.

I renamed the disks.gif file in the %programfiles%\altiris\software delivery subdirectory to disks.gif_bak. I then modified our corporate logo to be the same size as the original gif file making sure the background of the logo was transparent, and named it disks.gif and copied it into the same directory.

The file I replaced provided the CD/Disk logo that was in the upper left pane of the software portal. This was easier than installing the Altiris SDK and becoming a codemaster. Although this is probably now supported, I found it an easy way to brand the software portal that we are about to use for departmental moves and software requests. The end result will look something like the screenshot attached.

How to use PC Transplant to make Userprofile Settings in Deployment Server

2008-03-28T09:57:00.003-06:00

This topic has always been a sore subject with customers and Altiris when it comes to using Deployment Server. The feature is available when using Notification Server to run something as the logged in user in order to make settings withing the users profile. With Deployment Server, you did not have this option. The options were to run using the system account or specify a user only, not use the logged in user context. One of the ways that you can get around this is by using PCTransplant. Create a template containing the information that you want to capture. Create a personality package on a machine with the settings you want to capture using the template you created. Once the package is created you can deploy the package to the target computer missing the specific user profile settings by adding the PCT Switch option -user:'options'.

Example to deploy package to all domain users on a computer silently:

myprofilepackage.exe -user:\mydomain\* -q

The trick here is that when creating a personality package from the template, you are logged into a computer with a domain account that has access to the computers you plan to deploy the package to.

How to create scripts to install printers on WinXP

2008-03-28T09:41:00.008-06:00

Our company just ran into this issue. We are undergoing a transition of employees from one section of the building to another section of the building. One of the challenges that we faced is getting the printers installed on the employees new locations. We used a combination of Altiris Software Delivery Solution and the Software Portal to publish printer install tasks to the end users to install the printers at their location. I know some of you are probably saying, login scripts to do this, searching AD for printers, AD Group Policy, etc... Unfortunatly, we did not have the time an resources from our internal staff that manages AD and login scripts to accomplish this. Plus our end users can't browse AD for printers. We decided to use an employee self help portal web page using the Altiris Software Portal and publish printers based on Department locations and the printers in the area. The printer tasks in the software portal were all setup to to contain a package for each department location with no source files, and multiple programs for the package using a command line that references the Printer User Interface. An example of how we did this on the command line is shown here:

%windir%\system32\rundll32.exe printui.dll,PrintUIEntry /in /n \\myprinterserver\myprintshare .

If you want to see the options for using this tool you can open a CMD Prompt and type in the following to see the help options for using this tool.

%windir%\system32\rundll32.exe printui.dll,PrintUIEntry /?



My company uses the Altiris Software Portal with the printers available as shown below.

HP Systems Insight Manager plugin

2008-03-28T08:59:00.003-06:00

For those of you that have HP hardware in house, you probably/maybe have your Systems Insight Manager software installed somewhere to monitor your HP devices. Well, Altiris has a connector that you can install to allow you to view the data collected by the SIM tool within the Altiris Notification Server Console. You can get this from the altiris download portal. The release notes are located on the Altiris Knowledgebase.

My Pirate Name is

2008-03-28T08:19:00.000-06:00

My pirate name is:

Red John Roberts

Passion is a big part of your life, which makes sense for a pirate. Two things complete your pirate persona: style and swagger. Maybe a little too much swagger sometimes -- but who really cares? Arr!

Get your own pirate name from piratequiz.com.
part of the fidius.org network

Running Altiris on your iPhone

2008-03-24T16:12:00.003-06:00

I don't have an iPhone, but I have an ipod touch. I ran across this the other day and thought it was too cool to not mention. Shane McLean has created .NET web application that queries an Altiris database using the safari browser on the iphone. You can see the details here . I tested it on my ipod touch and was amazed. Way to go Shane, open the options for alternate browsers and maybe altiris will follow.

Using SVS as a Portable App Creator

2008-03-24T16:08:00.003-06:00

For those of you using Altiris Software Virtualization Solution, this may be of interest. Using the SVS Admin tool to create an SVS app, prepping the app and then exporting the vsa package somewhere. Now take the vsa package and use Winzip/7Zip or whatever zipping tool you prefer, to extract the package to a folder location, put the folder on a flash drive, and browse to the program files directory where SVS loaded the app. Launch the exe for the app and voila, you have a portable app that can run on a flash drive.

Using Custom Token Variables to Write DS Scripts

2008-03-24T15:30:00.004-06:00

For those of you who are Deployment Server administrators, you will feel my pain, trying to write deployment server scripts without hardcoding the path of a server in the scripts. Why is this a problem, I only have 1 DS? If anyone has more than 1 DS you have probably done an export of a job folder and imported it into another DS for use. Heck Altiris has a DSImport utility on the Notification Server to do this for you if you have Deployment Solution installed, but that is a whole other topic. The idea here is to be able to write script jobs without having to hard code a UNC path in the script so that it can be used on other DS's without changing the path on import. How to accomplish this became a daunting task until I read the Altiris Document on custom tokens in DS6.8. By creating a custom table on each Deployment Server's eXpress database, I could hard code the path for each DS within that table. Then I could use the custom token in my scripts and write them all with the same token path so I could use them on each deployment server without having to change the UNC path everytime I had to do a job folder import. You can learn more about DS Scripting here . At our location, we use a robocopy job to replicate software between multiple sites for our DS ADmins to access when provisioning computers. This allows us to write the scripts so that they are non-unique and can easily import a folder of jobs from one DS to another without having to change a bunch of scripts.

Example:
I have a few DS servers called ServerA, ServerB, and ServerC.

Each DS has it's own eXpress database with a custom table created called 'ds_server' with a column name called 'filestor' with a varchar50 setting.

ServerA has a sharename called \\SiteA\myshare, ServerB has a share name called \\SiteB\myshare, etc....

On each DS I have added the share name to the tables so that ServerA's eXpress database table called ds_server has a location added in the filestor column with \\SiteA\myshare as the location, ServerB's eXpress database table has a setting of \\SiteB\myshare, etc... You get the picture.

Now when writing my jobs, instead of doing something like:

REM Install Adobe Reader from software share
%windir%\system32\msiexec.exe /i \\SiteA\myshare\adobereader\reader.msi /qb

I can use the option of using my custom token and make my script importable into each DS without having to change the path to the MSI package:

REM Install Adobe Reader from some file server
%windir%\system32\msiexec.exe /i %#!DS_Server@FileStore%\adobereader\reader.msi /qb

The idea here is that I have a replicated software repository\file share on each site that I manage with my Deployment Servers, and I reference the location to the actual fileshare by passing the token variable in the script and it is translated to the actual UNC path to the file server at that site.

Altiris Linked In Group

2008-03-24T15:21:00.003-06:00

For those of you using the LinkedIn network, there is a new group for altiris users. Great way to make contact with other users and find the possible altiris job you have been looking for.

Want to go Green? Use the Energy Saver Toolkit

2008-03-24T15:13:00.003-06:00

Another freebee from Altiris is the Energy Saver toolkit. Yeah, I am sure all of you could figure out how to do this with AD group policy or something, but this is a no brainer easy to configure tool if you are using altiris. Pull it down from the altiris download portal or from your NS console you can grab it under the AZ Solutions called Altiris Energy Saver Toolkit. I pulled down the info from energy star's website, plunked in the numbers and presented a great way to save the company money just by turning the monitors off after 10 minutes of inactivity. Hey, maybe it will pay for my next trip to Managefusion.

I've been on Hiatus

2008-03-24T15:10:00.001-06:00

Yes, that's right, I've been out of touch here. Too many things at my new job designing and implementing an Altiris infrastructure. Good news though, I am a customer again and no longer consulting so I may have more time to do things like post interesting tidbits on the blog. Stay tuned for more goodies as they arrive.

Dell/HP Client Manager

2008-03-24T15:03:00.005-06:00

Yes, they are vendor tools, and can help you. Both are a free plugin on Notification Server and will allow you to manage those specific types of vendor hardware. Both allow BIOS configuration changes as well as BIOS update options on a mass scale. Both require a license, but the license is free. HP Client manager registration link is here.Dell Client Manager registration link is here . Additonal features allow you to monitor hardware and get notified before the battery explodes!!!

The Oddities of WinPE

2008-01-30T14:58:00.000-06:00

I can't stress enough how important it is when using new technology in a corporate environment. An example that I want to pass along involves the use of WinPE (Microsoft Windows PE operating system) with Altiris Deployment Server. I have learned the hard way that it is better to research until you die, before implementation of a new technology. When using Windows PE on Altiris Deployment Server, I would recommend using Altiris' WinPE package and pay the 20$ to get their install of the OS. They have made some modifications to increase the speed of packet traffic when imaging. I would also recommend using the Windows PE 2005 utility CD which contains a VBS script to embed in your WinPE boot image to allow VBScripting to work properly when booting a computer into a WinPE environment that you plan to run a VBScript on. In addition to these options, I would strongly recommend that you add the Mass Storage driver information for any kind of SATA drives you are using in your laptop/desktop hardware. It makes it much easier to do scripted OS installs, let alone image using WinPE if you can see the hard drive you are about to copy files to. Just a few ideas to pass along that I hope you find of interest. Hopefully, it will help from keeping your hair from turning gray or falling out too soon in your life.

Setting Deployment Server Security

2007-12-13T22:33:00.000-06:00

For those of you out there that manage the same Altiris Deployment Servers (DS) that you use, disregard this. For those of you out there that have someone else manage your physical servers, this may be of interest to you when it comes to using the Role and Scope security options in DS. There is a DS utility located at C:\Program Files\Altiris\eXpress\Deployment Server\TechSup\Windows\DSDBSecurity.exe. Even if a user is a full dbo of the eXpress database, they are also members of the public role. The default denies in the public role will restrict access to those users. Only System Admins (members of the local administrators group as an example) will cancel out the public deny permissions. The public deny permissions need to be removed on certain stored procedures in order for the Role and Scope security to work properly,hence the use of the DSDBSecurity.exe tool. I found this out the hard way when working on a DS6.5 server after spending part of the day setting up the role and scope security options for the jobs and computers after importing a bunch of active directory groups and assigning them the appropriate roles for my organization. I believe that there is an Altiris KB article that references the use of the tool, but I thought I would bring this out in the open to stress the use of the tool if you should decide to turn on the security options in DS. The other item that I wanted to address deals with a software piracy issue that I noticed recently. Most organizations have some type of a software repository that software is installed to the eventual end-user that requested the software to begin with. Besides the options of using NTFS permissions on the share to block unwanted users from accessing the software folders, you can implement some simple security options to minimize the possibility of software piracy (your simple end-user copying the terabyte of software from you servers onto his own computer for personal use). The use of hidden shares always comes to mind as I am a believer of the coined phrase 'They can't hurt what they can't see". One of the other easy ways to 'Lock Down' your software is to modify the MSI files that you use for software deployment by adding a runtime option that requires the MSI to run with an additional command line parameter. For example, you could use a command line option such as SOFTWAREKEY=12345678. You could generate a random hash against the MSI you are deploying and use that random number as your software key variable above. So, when deploying the software, you could call the variable like this, msiexec /i \\myserver\mysoftwareshare\mymsi.msi /qn SOFTWAREKEY=12345678. The MSI will only install if you know what the command line variable SOFWAREKEY number that is actually embedded inside the MSI. If someone tried to run the MSI without the SOFTWAREKEY command line and correct number it references, the MSI will fail. These are just some easy ways of locking down your software repository and minimizing your risk of software piracy.

Altiris Infrastructure Monitoring

2007-12-07T23:03:00.000-06:00

I brought this topic up the other day at the Altiris Midwest User Group meeting at TAP Pharmaceuticals but wanted to mention it again as I hope you will use the free tools that Altiris provides to help with the day-to-day administration of Altiris products. Altiris provides a pretty decent server monitoring product, but it is typically used if you manage a server environment and it costs a bit of money that you may not necessarily have to spend. However, they provide the same Server Monitoring product that you can use on your Altiris Infrastructure for free. It is called Altiris Monitoring Solution for Altiris Infrastructure. You can download for free from Altiris. Once you go through the down load process, DO NOT forget to register it on their website and you will receive a license file good for 1000 nodes of the product. This can be used on your Notification Servers, Recovery Servers and Package Servers to keep track of their server performance and notify you of problems via email or SNMP traps. It comes with a report pack that includes reporting data on statistics of your event queue as well as the canned OS performance data reports including information on processor utilization, disk useage, database performance and event log data. You can monitor such things as:

.NET services
Notification Database
Disks
IIS
Processes
Notification Server event queues
Notification Server log files
Recovery Solution Server critical and non-critical errors
Recovery Solution Server database connections
Recovery Solution Server raw storage

This is a very useful tool that will allow you to be a little more proactive at resolving problems that may occur within your Altiris environment. There are other free applications that Altiris provides, but this one I feel has more than paid for some of the other solutions that I have used, just by allowing me to be proactive on some of the things that can go wrong as an Altiris Administrator. Try it out, it is free, did I mention that it's free?

File Permissions and Attributes

2007-12-01T12:20:00.000-06:00

I am sure that there are some of you out there that already know about this, but I find it is important enough to mention for those of you that don't know. I ran into a rather peculiar situation the other day. I needed to change the folder attributes on a remote computer and also needed to grant some Domain NTFS rights to another folder on a remote computer. After doing some digging into my old tech notes, I ran across a couple of built-in utilities that resides on just about every Windows XP computer. I decided to test my options by using Altiris Deployment Server and a couple different jobs to make the two changes mentioned above. You can use the ATTRIB command to change the files attributes of a file or folder. You can use the CACLS command to change the NTFS permissions on a file. I created a deployment server job that contained a run script command something like this --> attrib + R %systemdrive%\myfolder\myfile.txt <-- to change the file to 'Read-Only'. I then created a second job that contained a run script task something like this --> cacls %systemdrive%\myfolder /E /G %Domain Users%:W <-- to grant the domain users group 'modify' permissions to this folder. I work in an environment where the end users have their computers locked down and do not have rights to do anything on their computers. However, there are some situations where the software they are using requires them to have rights to modify a file in a directory other than their 'My Documents' folder. Hence, the reason for creating a folder on the root of the drive and granting them those rights to that folder only. Software that requires that access level is installed in that directory to allow things to work as planned. I hope this has not confused things too much, and I hope you find it as useful as I did. Especially when it comes to changing things on hundreds of systems in a very short timeframe.