Tough loss

This week saw me experience the first ever of my employees to resign. Tough, tough loss.

I've had Help Desk contractors who have left to do other things, which is what I prepare them to do since there are rarely opportunities for them to come on-board.

I've had employees that I've wanted to fire, but thankfully haven't, because it helped me get better at coaching problematic individuals and poor performers.

This one was a high performing, ambitious, young professional. If one should always be looking for their replacement as a way to facilitate their own upward mobility, this person was to be my replacement.

I shouldn't be surprised, given that their departure is identical to a career mistake I wish I could take back. Hubris. I was going to get my way come hell or high water, and if it meant I had to quit to show how serious I was, I was going to do it. So, out the door I went to a 45% raise and better vacation and benefits and less stress. And I liked it for exactly 9 months, at which point I began to loathe it.

This employee has taught me a lot over the 5 years I've mentored him. They challenged me when I've been less than intellectually honest, when I've been less than engaged, when I've bordered on doing something rash in the name of righteousness, when I've been unnecessarily rigid in my beliefs or decisions.

Leading this individual has also reinforced to me some lessons I had already learned.

Problems will always get fixed. Maybe not on the time table you'd prefer, and maybe not without having it brought to light and guarded repeatedly, but they do get fixed.

The grass is never, ever greener. The only reason this person went to another employer was because it was different. They might as well have gone to McDonald's. I've heard the pitch, the rationale, etc. - it doesn't add up. Bottom line, whether or not they were right, they believed that they were undervalued and that this fact would never ever change. Sounds awful familiar.

Hopefully I'll be able to remember and believe these lessons over the next 5 - 7 years, because there are periods of time where it's very, very difficult to keep going down this same road. I know that doesn't make my condition unique. I'd be perfectly justified in leaving, just as my departed employee was. That doesn't make leaving a good idea.

Now I have to identify who will be the next leader - either someone I have working for me already, or someone who we bring on-board specifically for the purpose. It would be tough for me to go somewhere else at this level never having lost a key employee. I'm actually looking forward to the opportunity to use this event to change some things for the better.

Hoo boy...

We're mid-way through our VMWare implementation project. It's been a very good learning experience for everyone. A couple of minor hiccups with an application here or there, but nothing unmanageable.

Part of this effort will involve migrating services currently running on NetWare 6.5, on to Novell's OES 1 SP 2 platform running on SLES...we've already replaced every other NetWare server in our environment with an OES server.

As you may recall from previous posts, we've been very disappointed with Novell's handling of patching for this "flagship", "enterprise class", "best-of-breed" operating system. In a word, it's a joke. Since we all value our jobs, we've decided it would be in our best interest NOT to adopt an automated or scheduled patching process for any of our OES servers...way too little quality control, way too much instability, and an utter disregard for the concepts of "stable" code bases.

Last night, that decision proved to be remarkably prescient.

We needed to see what happens when we migrate an NSS volume connected via iSCSI from a NetWare host to an OES/SLES host. So, off to the lab to build out a couple of simple servers. The NetWare box was built on a simple workstation PC in about an hour or so. The OES server took over 6 hours, and over 4 of that was waiting for the RUG update to finish (our standard process is to patch the server once, prior to productionalization, and never do it again once in the field).

We continued following our standard process for build-out after the first RUG update, which included kernels and all other manners of calamity. Once the second RUG update process completed, another reboot was in order.

Then it happened. TTY hadn't started. Absolutely nothing loaded that required a file system.

Upon further investigation, the SATA hard disks in our IBM x206 server - which, at install time, were designated as SDA1 and SDA2 by SLES, were now appearing as HDA1 and HDA2.

That's right. Running a patch process changed the paradigm for the hard disks in a running server, leaving the system unbootable.

Now, you might imagine how difficult it would be to address this issue - remotely - on 50 servers in the field. Even with the RSA cards we have and the boot-to-ISO capability, we'd be looking at untold hours wasted, recovering from an issue caused by Novell's complete and utter failure to act as responsible custodians for their product.

I'm now more convinced than ever that Novell lacks the leadership, and indeed the brainpower it once had, required to engineer and support an enterprise network operating system. The incredible legacy Drew Major created at Novell has been squandered, irrevocably. This is a company that has announced they won't have the first support pack to fix long acknowledge, significant issues in their latest version of the flagship operating system product until nearly 18 months after it's release.

What more reason do customers need to abandon Novell, with haste? All of the arguments of superiority Novell enjoyed at Microsoft's expense have been eradicated - not by Microsoft's improved product quality, but by the decline of Novell's product quality.

Certainly this will seem overly pessimistic, possibly bombastic, and over-reacting, to some of the more ardent red-blooded IT folks (and the indifferent). I am guilty of being passionate about the quality of service I deliver to my customers, and about holding others to the same expectations I have of myself - especially the vendors we've selected, especially when their performance goes into decline. This is the case far too often in our industry. It's inexcusable, and I cannot help but think a combination of Wall Street pressures, greed, and ignorance have all conspired to chip away at the foundation of our industry.

The cost and complexity of operating an enterprise IT infrastructure are growing exponentially, and in too many cases, completely without reason or justification. Nobody is concerned with making efficient, quality software any longer. Promise the world, ship tons of install DVD's, and if it doesn't work, shrug your shoulders and passively blame the customer for having either deficient requirements or deficient skill sets.

If our industry continues at this rate, the entire nation will have a very difficult time of competing abroad.

Calling On Behalf Of...

I seem to be getting more and more telemarketing calls that start off with "Hi, I'm (insert name here) calling on behalf of (prominent vendor)."

Immediate bristling and rise in blood pressure occurs here.

I can't help it. It's just preposterous, to me. What can the hit rate for cold call prospects be - 0.1% tops? I have to suffer because a sales organization has run out of real work to do and has resorted to beating bushes and shooting at anything that flies out?

The puzzling part is that I have a Microsoft account team; I know who all of them are. They know what we need, and what is off-limits. I guess it's kind of an "oopsie" moment when I ask them to clarify what "on behalf of" means.

Me: "So you're with Microsoft?"
Them: "Yes."
Me: "Because I have a Microsoft account rep, who I just spoke to in e-mail yesterday about this. You're a Microsoft employee?"
Them: "On behalf of Microsoft, yes."
Me: "Well, I deal directly with a Microsoft account team. Thanks." (click)


The call today found me a bit less tolerant.


Them: "I'm so and so calling on behalf of Microsoft, working with the Exchange team, and would like to ask you a few questions."
Me: "Well, I deal directly with an account team at Microsoft; I don't deal with partners."
Them: "Well did you about Microsoft's security product called Frontline?"
Me: "Yes, we're not using it."
Them: "Well did you know that Microsoft has partnered with Nortel and (someone else)?"
Me: "They partner with just about everybody, yes."
Them: (pause) "Okay, then thank you."

Flabbergasting. What in the world can they possibly expect to come from a cold call, much less a cold call that has you hiding your own company's identity behind your partner's?

It's a good thing for Microsoft that there exist a lot of unknowledgeable, uncritical decision makers with large budgets and a susceptibility to FUD.

A Tale of Two Analysts

Now some 14 months post-release, it's abundantly clear to all but the most severely dunderheaded IT wonks that Vista will be on the podium of the Microsoft Failure Grand Prix. Not sure exactly where it will stand relative to Bob and Windows ME, but it's certainly not distinguished company to keep.

As I had stated (not predicted, because it wasn't a guess), in January 2007:

The first (well, pair) indicated that IT Execs weren't sold on Vista, and questioned whether or not Vista presented a realistic ROI case for companies.

I'll save you some reading. IT Execs aren't sold on Vista because it doesn't present a realistic ROI case.

Well, it turns out I was right. To wit, rumblings from the very top of Microsoft have been felt in faraway lands as rumors of Vista's successor are being released, and hints that VIsta should have been aborted mid-term slowly escape.

Dell, HP, and Lenovo have all been pressured by their enterprise customers into providing Windows XP via downgrade righs beyond the June 30, 2008 deadline Microsoft imposed for halting sales of XP. That's right, customers would rather use XP - even if they have to buy a premium Vista license to do it.

I don't know about Steve Ballmer, but that's how I spell failure.

More interesting was the completely divergent track two of the "industry's leading" analyst firms took in penning recommendations to enterprise customers regarding Vista.

The Gartner group proclaimed that Windows is "crumbling". That's right, Gartner actually said something disparaging about a very prominent technology product.

Forrester, it appears, prefers the Kasey Kasim approach - keep your feet on the ground, and yada yada yada.

http://www.computerworld.com/action/article.do?command=viewArticleBasic&articleId=9080758&source=NLT_AM&nlid=1

"Vista is an inevitability, for a number of reasons," said Ben Gray, an analyst at Forrester Research Inc. He then ticked off several, including Windows XP's announced retirement and unsubstantiated talk about Vista's successor, Windows 7.

Mr. Gray invoked the wrath of Kahn in the comments section of this article. From being labeled as too ignorant to possibly hold the position he serves, all the way to questioning the integrity of Forrester. And rightly so. He is completely out of touch, and it is an embarrassment for Forrester to have this person writing on their letterhead.

One thing is perfectly clear - I was not alone in my view of how Vista would fare in the marketplace. It's done horribly, and Microsoft's attempts to pressure companies into using it have backfired. If they don't hit a home run with the next version of Windows, we may look back on Vista as the beginning of the end for Microsoft.

Two For Two

Two proposals for projects and capital expenditures in my new role, and two approvals. I've had very valuable help from my manager in fine-tuning (or totally revamping) parts of the proposals so that they're appropriate for the audience. We've done very well it would appear...despite a very tight economy and conservative holders of purse strings, we've approved nearly $250,000 of new projects.

The exercise of doing both is something everyone agrees should be commonplace for CapEx requests. I've been able to show both proposals will save real money, providing enhanced capabilities for free plus generate a return. It took a little effort and brainstorming, but it was far from impossible.

A lot of techies know when they've found the right thing to solve a given problem...the challenge is to get them to put it into terms that make sense to businesspeople. Technology hasn't been about 1's and 0's for a long time. If you want to be a technology professional, you need to link technology solutions to business problems, and sell them in non-technical terms using real numbers. If you can't do that, well, there's probably a call center hiring someplace.

Internationally Known

What a great tool LinkedIn has become for me.

Like anything, you get out of it what you put into it. I've taken some time to dredge up the names of faces I've met throughout the 15 years I've been a technology professional, and have been elated to find so many of them on LinkedIn. Reconnecting and catching up with former colleagues has been quite a joy. I only wish that more of them were on the service; I hope I've not lost all contact with those individuals.

Interestingly, participating in the Q&A section of the site has allowed me to establish connections to individuals I'd have never otherwise met or known. In particular, I'm now connected to someone in the Netherlands, someone in China, and have made the acquaintance of an individual in India. I have been able to provide career advice to a young professional searching for his way, and have been fortunate to receive many letters of thanks from both the question's authors and those who have found the words helpful.

The best thing LinkedIn has done for me, however, has nothing to do with their service. Realizing what LinkedIn really does happened in stages. There was the "What is this, really?" stage, then the "Wow, this could be a great showcase for me" stage, followed soon afterwards by the "Who else is on here" stage. Not long after that, a tiny dose of panic set in - how many people that I've known would be happy and eager to accept my invitation to connect? Any bit of self-doubt you had growing up in a cliquey school system comes rushing back. Fortunately, over 100 individuals I've known (and have recently met) are now connections; but the lesson taught by a desire to grow your network has been learned; Treat *everyone* you meet as if you'd like them to happily accept your invitation to connect.

Return of the Mac

A little over 12 months ago, I was fortunate enough to begin piloting an Apple MacBook Pro. It came with a 17" glossy display, 2GB of memory, pretty fast processor, and most importantly OS X Tiger.

After only a few weeks of use, I was so completely acclimated to the amazingly simple, elegant, efficient, effective design of the Mac that I began looking for ways to use them instead of Windows machines. Sadly, that effort stopped with Apple telling us they're unable to (and uninterested in) service broken systems on-site within any kind of SLA. This basically relegates Mac's to giant companies operating in a single campus, or companies with savvy IT hardware techs at each site - few of which are progressive enough to consider using Mac's.

After about 6 months, I started to forget how to use Windows as efficiently as I had before. What's funny about that fact is this; I held a job as a youngster which involved use of a character based point of sale system. I knew how to do everything with it, and could get around it with lightning speed - often helping my co-workers when they got stuck. Less than a year away from that job, I couldn't even tell you how to sign in anymore. It was completely gone.

The learning curve is so flat with Mac's, that you don't really have to "train" yourself to use them. It mostly involves forgetting many of the ill habits formed by using Windows. When you go back to Windows, you get frustrated very quickly at the stupid, work-losing default choices various buttons present.

Given that Gartner has recently declared Windows as "collapsing", my hope is that Apple gets over itself and creates an Apple Enterprise operating company focused on being a real alternative to the Big 3. I'm fairly certain that end-user software is slowly going to become OS independent, in one of a number of ways.

Nevertheless, I'd have been updating this blog more regularly were it not for Google's interference with the blogger.com service. It simply would not let me log in using the credentials I made to create it. After some rapid (and unrepeatable) clicking, I finally found a screen that would let me re-enter the e-mail address. I will endeavor to update the blog with more frequency going forward.

Year in Review

Since it's been nearly a year between updates here, I should point out what's transpired.

Most significantly, I was promoted to Director of IS&T Infrastructure Services late last year. This essentially means I have full custody of the teams responsible for all desktop, server, and LAN/WAN environments - in addition to our support services. I hope eventually to back-fill my position, but much of that will depend on organizational issues above my pay grade (to borrow a term from some of my former military employees).

We're returning to Dell as a customer, after being so frustrated by the behemoth of IBM that we can simply no longer deal with them. To wit, we're replacing a 3 year old BladeCenter system with three Dell 2950's configured to run VMWare Infrastructure 3. We've also upgraded our Network Appliance FAS-270 to a FAS-3020, including the addition of 7TB of new disk - a process that was a bit more turbulent than we'd have hoped; vet your service providers carefully. That should give us plenty of capacity, and opens up a host of brilliant DR capabilities which we're excited to pursue this year.

We've also decided to put literally everything we do on the table for discussion. Decisions to either change or stay the course will need to be defensible, but everything is fair game. E-mail, file and print, networking services, etc. It's very exciting actually. Exiting this process, we'll have full and complete confidence that we're doing what's best for the business.

A more exciting development is the uncertainty surrounding some of the systems which have been outside my control. I'd have been far happier if we could have made the sale so to speak, and fully leveraged the investment in our ERP solution - the reality is that we didn't, and I think we're starting to face that fact by asking "how else can we tackle the problem"? It's a great opportunity to get much more closely involved with the business we support, and that type of experience is what I'm very much looking forward to in order to further my own professional development.

Finally, it was a great shame to see Martin Buckley leave Novell recently. I certainly do not fault him for doing so, and not just because I've made his acquaintance. Novell has deserved every bit of the intellectual capital loss they've experienced over the past few years. They are an organization which appears devoid of new ideas, leadership, and increasingly, relevance. The few bright spots within Provo are growing dimmer by the day. Plenty of blame to go around, for sure - Novell represents a master class in how not to run a technology company.

Why To Sell NOVL, Part 2 - OES Patching Issues

In January, I posted an entry out of raw frustration resulting from a series of experiences and announcements with and from Novell. The straw that broke the camel's back was related to their misguided BorderManager / Novell Security Manager statement (So long, linux - hello, NetWare). However, a huge heap of the load was due to the unbelievably poor method Novell chose for applying patches to OES on SLES.

In October of 2006, during an executive briefing I attended, I had raised this issue to a Novell OES product manager. I'm no longer certain what this title entails, since there's an awful lot of product managers at Novell, and they don't seem to talk to one another.

The product manager's expression was one of simple acquiesence - he understood that our request to split patches into several channels (rather than one, as it is today), was one that made sense and would be very simple to implement.

Fast forward 4 months, and we're in January - still no separate "stable" or "critical" OES patch channel...everything's still coming down in one big clump.

Fast forward another 4 months, and we're in May - where we've just completed another conference call with another OES Product Manager who agrees that ZLM is a poor method for applying patches to production servers, and who thinks the concept of splitting OES patches into multiple channels is a valid, actionable idea.

Novell have committed to us that they'd let us know by this week if/when they can make this happen, and if not, why. The alternative is to wait for OES 2, since that's when they intend to make this 'better', but in a way that leaves OES SP2 adopters in the cold.

It seems that there really are very few people who have made the leap from NetWare to OES on SLES as we have. Our move was one of necessity - NetWare wasn't stable enough to run the mix of services we needed on a single platform any longer. In speaking to a Collaboration SE last week, we agreed that Novell could do a better job of reducing barriers to adoption - like putting placeholder scripts on OES systems that mimic the look & feel of the old C-Worthy interfaces we enjoyed (like DSREPAIR, MONITOR, etc). Even if it doesn't look the same, it can at least tell you what options to put on the command line or present a menu of common tasks.

CoolSolutions has such a script for DSREPAIR specifically - originally written for eDirectory on Solaris, by an enthusiastic user. It's a brilliant idea, and eliminates one big reason that people have for not going to OES on SLES.

If you had to get training to learn a new server OS, would you pursue a niche product like OES, or would you just sell out and run Windows like everyone else in the world?

There's lots that Novell still doesn't understand about the market and their customers, unfortunately.

That said, we were treated to an overview of new features in OES 2, and from the sounds of it, we could really make use of those enhancements. Still waiting on more details, but our fingers are crossed.

Everything You Know About Desktop Security is Wrong

This is what Ivan Kristic told an audience in Australia at their annual AusCERT conference. Kristic should know a thing or two, as he authored ''The Official Ubuntu Book". Here's some of the more interesting things he had to say during his keynote.

http://www.computerworld.com/action/article.do?command=viewArticleBasic&articleId=9020061&source=NLT_AM&nlid=1

"Everything you know about desktop security is wrong. Desktop security is about the user not protocols and algorithms," he said, adding that 75 percent of machines are infected with malware.

"Today, there are more than 100,000 known viruses, not to mention spam and phishing and that is because we rely on users to make choices about things they don't understand."

To reinforce his point, Krstic showed how a user interprets a pop-up dialogue box that appears on their screen.

"To a user it simply says: "Blah blah, technical terms, I don't understand, blah blah."

"Then it will ask the user to press 'yes,' 'allow,' or 'permit'.

"Of course they will click on 'yes,' 'allow,' or 'permit' because it rewards them by letting them get back to work. We are training users to ignore security and rewarding them for it," Krstic explained.

Kind of makes the Mac ad where PC is constantly interrupted by a security "agent" a lot less humorous, doesn't it? Kristic asked "how did we get here", probably in reference to Linux specifically. The answer would be, "By following Microsoft." Instead of doing the hard work of either writing secure code to begin with, or the somewhat more difficult work of setting default behaviors with security in mind, Microsoft shoves the entire burden of system integrity to end users who barely know how to set headers and footers in Word.

I have no expectations that Microsoft market share will erode significantly this decade, but if past performance is an indicator of future behavior, I think it's safe to say that Microsoft will never get it...leaving itself open to marginalization by whomever gets this stuff right. Easy. Inexpensive. Secure. Feature-rich. Powerful. Fast. It simply has to happen.