Update to Building a SAN Part 1.

I love the SuperMicro case. It is well built, well thought out, has plenty of fans. I had a couple of issues.  The documentation is a little light. For example it came with a fan shroud that the documentation said you shouldn't run without.  Well come to find out that is for the next generation Xeon and isn't required and in fact won't fit with the current Xeon heat sinks!  Took a while to figure that one out.  Second the case doesn't have any provision for mounting a floppy drive or DVDRom.  Well I stopped mounting floppy drives in machines I built about four or five machines back.  However a CDRom/DVD is still pretty much a must for me since I have yet to setup DSI images that would allow me to install from a PXE boot. I debated on whether I would be able to boot from an external DVD and finally decided to just hang one out the top of the case temporarily until Windows 2003 was done installing.  Whoops, come to find out Windows 2003 requires you to load the RAID drivers off a floppy.  A CDRom won't work!  Ended up having to also hang a floppy out of the case temporarily.  Once I got everything setup I pulled the drives and am now good to go.  Waiting on a Gig Ethernet switch and I will be ready to test the SAN out probably in early June once I get off the road.

Tuesday, May 11, 2004 7:55:08 AM (Pacific Standard Time, UTC-08:00)         Comments [0]  

Well today is the kick off for the first Patterns & Practices Summit here in Redmond.  I can't wait for this event to kick off.  Keith and a number of the PAG guys have been working on this thing literally for months.  All of that prep work is now going to come to fruition.  This is the third event I believe that Guided Design has done.  We are changing things up a little bit this time.  We have broadened the speaker list this time around.  We now have folks like Rocky Lhotka, Ted Neward and Billy Hollis speaking on topics they are excited about.  We also have a number of Microsoft speakers including Blake Stone, Gianpaolo Carraro, Mike Kropp, Ron Jacobs, Sandy Khaund and Ward Cunningham.  Second big change we made is that we are staying pretty close to the material that the Patterns & Practices team has released over the last two years.  If you take a look at our session schedule you can pretty much match the material up to their corresponding blocks. There is a wealth of information to be mined in the blocks so I think this is a great approach.

I don't speak until tomorrow but I will be hanging around over the next three days in the back of the room.  Please stop by and let me know what you think about the event.

Tuesday, May 11, 2004 7:32:57 AM (Pacific Standard Time, UTC-08:00)         Comments [0]  

There has been quite a bit of talk about the cabanas at TechEd one thing that I haven't seen mentioned much is that this year they are eliminating the speaker lounge at TechEd. That's right, last I heard they were eliminating it.

This has the interesting side effect of forcing something that I think attendees wish speakers would do on their own, hang out with the attendees.  Sure most speakers will show up at an evening function, take questions after a talk or show up at some party but typically before a session and/or after a session they disappear and sequester themselves in the speaker room.

At any conference this is where you will find the majority of the speakers most of the time. 

This is of course a double edged sword.  Speakers do need private time to prep right before a session to get focused, etc about the topic they are about to present. However many speakers just hang out in the lounge to do email, have lunch, chat with friends, etc.  All of which could be done in the public spaces of the conference.

What do other folks think?  Good idea?  Bad idea?

Tuesday, May 04, 2004 1:18:11 PM (Pacific Standard Time, UTC-08:00)         Comments [1]  

You may remember that I posted about SANMelody enabling a low cost SAN not to long ago.  I decided to put together a box to test it out with and finally have all the parts assembled.  I will hopefully be installing an OS on it this week.  I ended up going with:

• SuperMicro SC933T-R760: This is a 3U case so you don't have to use riser cards for your add in cards.  Includes a 760W 3way redundant power supply, 14 SATA drives trays with backplane and rack rails. $907
• SuperMicro X5DPL-iGM: This is an extended ATX motherboard with dual Xeon support, up to 12GB of memory in 6 x DIMM slots, 1 x 1Gbe, 1 x 100Mbe, 3 x 64bit PCI slots, 3 x 32bit PCI slots. $338
• Intel 2.4 Ghz Xeon: I picked up two of these. 533Mhz front side bus. 2 x $200
• 2 x PC2100 1 GB DIMMs ECC 2 x $150
• 3Ware Escalade 8506-8: 8 channel SATA RAID controller with 64bit PCI interface. $475
• Western Digital 250GB 7200RPM 8MB Cache SATA Drives: To be quite honest I was looking for capacity over ultimate performance here. Normally use Seagate Barracudas but have had quite a few fail lately and the price per megabyte was poor. 8 x 170.

That was it.  $3780 for a machine with 2 terabytes of disk space and decent performance.  I can actually remember paying almost a million dollars in a previous job for 1 terabyte!

I will let you know how turning this into a SAN goes.

Sunday, April 25, 2004 10:41:10 AM (Pacific Standard Time, UTC-08:00)         Comments [2]  

Every once in a while when friends from out of town are visiting Microsoft they ask me for things to do in the Seattle area.  Normally I reply with one or two items off the top of my head and leave it at that.  This time around I asked a friend, Amy Bellamy, for some advice. She was asked for advice for a friend of  a friend who was visiting Seattle with a 12 year old daughter who loves sports and music. She gave me so much great information I felt compelled to post it here so I could refer friends to it in the future.  Here it is:

• Museum of Flight** http://www.museumofflight.org/ : very cool
• Pacific Science Center www.pacsci.org
• Woodland Park Zoo www.zoo.org
• Woodland Park Rose Garden** http://zoo.org/zoo_info/special/rose.htm : just outside the zoo's south gate, free, 2.5 acres with 280 types of roses.
• Seattle Aquarium www.seattleaquarium.org
• Argosy Cruises** www.argosycruises.com

If you want to go to most or all of the above, you might want to buy a City Pass www.citypass.net

Other locations of interest:

• Experience Music Project ** http://www.emplive.com/ : expensive but worth it if you're interested in music history, especially jazz, blues, and early rock & roll. Check for special exhibits which are particularly cool.
• Seattle Art Museum http://www.seattleartmuseum.org/ : boring unless there's a good special exhibit
• Seattle Asian Art Museum http://www.seattleartmuseum.org/visit/visitSAAM.asp : much better than SAM, $3 admission, and in a beautiful park with views from an old water tower,  good bakery nearby called North Hill Bakery, on 15th Ave E and Mercer a few blocks south of Volunteer Park. bakery is closed Sundays.
• Ferry from Downtown to Bainbridge Island http://www.wsdot.wa.gov/ferries/
• Fremont neighborhood** http://www.fremontseattle.com/center_frameset.htm : eclectic neighborhood with cool outdoor art (statue of Lenin from USSR, troll under Aurora bridge, etc), good restaurants, original Red Hook brewery, Adobe software offices
• Fremont Sunday market www.fremontmarket.com/fremont/
• Fremont outdoor cinema http://outdoorcinema.com/seattle/
• Pike Place** http://www.pikeplacemarket.org/ : farmers market, original Starbucks, and some nice boutiques in post alley and along first avenue
• Mariners game at Safeco field** www.mariners.org
• Summer Nights at the Pier concerts** http://www.summernights.org/ : great small outdoor concert venue on seattle waterfront
• Gorge Amphitheatre concerts** http://www.hob.com/venues/concerts/gorge/ : great large outdoor venue, several hours east of Seattle but worth it for the right band
• Zoo tunes** http://www.zoo.org/special_events/zoo_tunes/tunes.htm : outdoor concerts at the zoo, after regular zoo hours
• Seattle Peace Concerts http://www.seapeace.org/ : I've never been to the  concerts, but Gasworks Park is nice and has a great view of the city
• Paramount Theater http://theparamount.com/ : good indoor venue for plays, music, etc. If you're interested in other live music, pick up a Seattle Weekly (free in  coffee shops and in newspaper street boxes, published on thursdays) or check it out online (http://www.seattleweekly.com/) and find listings for music in bars, coffee shops, and other outdoor locations.

Thursday, April 22, 2004 9:51:09 AM (Pacific Standard Time, UTC-08:00)         Comments [3]  

Yep!  It is that time of year again.  Time to start planning for VSLive Orlando.  The current plan is for this show to contain all new content. To do that of course we need existing speakers to submit new content and we need some new speakers.  If you have thought about presenting at an industry conference in the past here is your chance.  Visit http://www.ftponline.com/conferences/vslive/callforpapers/ and put your ideas in. 

Note the deadline is rather short for initial submissions so please don't delay.

Looking forward to seeing all of you in Orlando.

Wednesday, April 21, 2004 7:26:57 AM (Pacific Standard Time, UTC-08:00)         Comments [0]  

I have been playing quite a bit with the Updater Application Block as of late.  I have heard a number of folks complain that it is hard to get working.  Well I finally found one big problem with the Quickstarts.  They use http to download updates in this case off my local IIS 6.0 install.  The download was always failing with a message about a file not being found however if you looked at the directory all the files they were looking for were clearly there.

Well this is the second time in two weeks I have been bit by IIS 6.0 and the fact that if a MIME type isn't defined for an extension IIS 6.0 won't serve the file. It will instead return a 404.  I had to add a mime type for the .PDB files that the manifest they setup attempts to download.  Don't know if this was a step they forgot to tell you about or if their testing was all done on IIS 5.x.  In any case there is your key from the wizard for this week.

Monday, April 19, 2004 8:37:14 PM (Pacific Standard Time, UTC-08:00)         Comments [1]  

I wrote an application recently that installs a Windows Form as an application bar with the Windows shell.  It was working all right until the client asked for some functionality that would minimize it to an icon.  At that point all hell broke loose.  It appeared after doing some tracing in the WndProc that at a certain point in time the window receives a WM_DESTROY and then at some point a WM_CREATE.  This was weird since I wasn't really ever destroying the window.  Took me a good day to figure out that when I was minimizing I was also doing a this.ShowInTaskBar=true;  Then when restoring I was doing a this.ShowInTaskBar=false;  Guess what?  This property essentially changes the WS_EX_APPWINDOW extended window style and to do this it creates and destroys the window!  This was wreaking havoc with my registration with the shell.

A side effect of this is that when it happens OnHandleCreated() and OnHandleDestroyed aren't called!  Seems totally counterintuitive since a handle was just destroyed and recreated.  The only way I could figure to track this was to wait for the WM_CREATE message in the WndProc.

Footnote: Some have asked what an application bar is.  It is something very similar to the windows taskbar yet application specific.

Thursday, April 15, 2004 12:26:01 PM (Pacific Standard Time, UTC-08:00)         Comments [1]  

Wow! I think this is a record.  Three posts in one day.

Robert was talking about the Tablet PC today in a post. I must admit I am one of those that "don't get it."  My wife does.  We picked up a Portege M205 for her and she loves it.  She uses it in her counseling practice and loves it. This amazes me as she has always been a bit computer phobic.

My second data point was my judging of the Imagine Cup on Wednesday.  I was suprised to see that 2 out of the 3 teams were using Tablet PCs!  Again Portege M205s! Students clearly get it.

I suspect I am prejudiced against the devices based on the fact that my main applications that I use are VS.NET, Vault, and Outlook.

Thursday, April 08, 2004 10:22:20 PM (Pacific Standard Time, UTC-08:00)         Comments [2]  

I was on campus in Building 5 today doing a Performance and Scalability web cast with PAG and ran into the channel 9 guys filming stuff.  It appears that Robert Scoble was interviewing Chris Sells which must be part of the MSDN contingent in Building 5.  I waved Hi and went about my way. Time to wait and see if I end up on the editing room floor or if they leave my ugly mug in the video.

Thursday, April 08, 2004 3:01:17 PM (Pacific Standard Time, UTC-08:00)         Comments [1]