Here’s an example – the UK Truprint site clashes with the legacy Costco printing – so Rachael had problems uploading.

I’ll be testing this side-by-side against Firefox 3.

SLES 10 SP1 –> SP2 for both x86 and x64

How-to: http://www.novell.com/support/viewContent.do?externalId=7000387

Local update: http://www.novell.com/support/documentLink.do?externalID=3065146

Release notes: http://www.novell.com/documentation/sles10/release-notes_sp2/release-notes_sp2.html

Updates from the openSUSE build system. Thanks guys.

My Active Directory DC and primary Kerberos box needed updating from Windows 2003 SP1 to Windows 2003 SP2.

The update had been on the list for a while, but because of the importance of it for authentication for all workstations and PAM/Kerberos on the Linux systems it never found a window.

I started the work while at home taking calls today – and for some reason SP2 just didn’t want to install. Multiple errors complaining about INF file validity and internal errors.

In the end I had to remove SP1 and install SP2 onto the rolled back server. I’m going to be testing everything this evening to make sure nothing drastic changed.

What was planned to be a 30 minute outage with a rollback of ‘uninstall the SP2’ turned into a more complex change. Uninstall SP1; rollback to re-install SP1. Install SP2. Rollback to uninstall SP2. Final recovery – restore from backup.

The moral – even with good change control the unexpected happens.

http://www.novell.com/news/press/archive/2003/08/pr03051.html

I clearly remember heading to the Ximian offices at the back of Fenway Park in Boston a few weeks after the acquisition; my task was to meet with the Red Carpet Enterprise team and work on integration plans with ZENworks.

I arrived at the offices at around 8.30am – and waited until around 9.15 before someone turned up. The RCE team started heading in at around lunch time. I quickly learned that they worked like me Work late, up late.

So started one of the most rewarding and exciting times of my time at Novell. The Red Carpet Enterprise team were an incredible team – I don’t think any of us are left at Novell.

RCE evolved into ZENworks Linux Management and then became the underpinning technology for ZENworks Configuration Management.

I passed the ITIL v3 Managers Bridge – it was an 80% pass score and I got 95%

I’m just waiting for the certificate to arrive in the post – but this means I am an ‘ITIL Expert’

This week I needed to move one of my previously hosted sites to another host – and I couldn’t find the pesky virtual hard disk. Eventually I found it lurking on a backup server.

Sigh.

I’ve been digging into the mapping between ITIL v3 and the new Microsoft Operations Framework v4.

There are a lot of white papers from Microsoft: http://technet.microsoft.com/en-us/library/cc506049.aspx

There is also a good MOF v4 overview from Rob van den Burg here.

Download from http://wordpress.org/download/

Main highlights:

• post differencing
• support for Google Gears

There’s an offical blog post about it here: http://wordpress.org/development/2008/07/wordpress-26-tyner/ - with a great video overview.

The Curriculum

• the curriculum is available from APM Group here
• I didn’t see any surprises in the exam - i.e. everything in the exam was described in the curriculum
• the focus of the exam is the differences from the ITIL v2 Managers exam.

Differences … but..

• the bridge does assume that you understand the ITIL v2 space pretty well - i.e. your managers is still fresh!
• you should read the five ITIL v3 books; there is a lot of contextual information that you really do need to understand.

After four days of cramming in Brisbane I ended up with five annoted ITIL books; five ‘books of notes’; each based on one of the phase books; a book of sample questions and exam-style questions; and finally a book of mind maps from The Art of Service.

For my own learning style the cross-referencing between the ‘bridge notes’ from The Art of Service and back to the books was really useful. It let me refer quickly from a concept - such as Portfolio Management, back to the relevent sections in the books.

Also useful is cross-referencing where the different roles and processes intersect. There is a lot of emphasis on the holistic lifecycle; also on the relationships between phases in the lifecycle. It’s not enough to try and map the v2 linear world onto the v3 map; I found it invaluable working with others to really understand the lifecycle and how it all fits.

Exam is done. Fingers crossed. Results in a week or so.

Firefox 3.0.1 is in beta.

Looks like the main changes are security fixes – but it’s all working ok so far.

Now I’ve got an evening to relax in Brisbane; the guys from The Art of Service have given me some pointers.

It’s the middle of the Queensland winter – so it’s about 18′C right now; the patio heaters are on and it’s dark at 5 pm.

Right now I’m settled with a glass of Western Australian Cabernet, listening to classic reggae in a bistro on James St. Lovely.

I called several providers who were claiming to offer training; when I probed on the name of the instructor, references, success rates – there was very little or in several cases no evidential data the course would deliver.

My aims for training seemed quite simple – to learn; to network; to pass the exam.

In the end I selected The Art of Service  - based in Brisbane, Queensland, Australia. Why? Three reasons:

- they proudly show their passrate on the front page:

- recommendation

- awareness and reputation from The Art of Service “Service Management Podcasts”

So how is the course so far? Simply excellent.

Ivanka Menken is the trainer – she is a co-owner of the company and has been at the ‘coalface’ of Service Management delivery since ITIL v1 days. Good knowledge, personable, real world experience – and a good mix of training styles.

I’m hoping this all adds up to a ‘pass’ – the exam is Friday; results a few weeks later.

One day left- then the exam.

I must say – the workload and effort for this course is a lot more than for the ITIL v2 Managers cert; there is a lot more reading, homework, mock-exam question taking and general research needed. Also piling on is the ‘body of knowledge’ that is assumed from the v2 Manager exam.

Phew. I’m tired. Just like the training for the v2 Managers Certificate last year (here, the exam here and results just before new year.)

The training and exam are for the ITIL v3 Managers Certificate. That gives me the ‘ITIL Expert’

The ‘ITIL Expert’ is the new description for the ITIL v3 Diploma; also an update on the Intermediate modules for the direct route – they are slowly being rolled out later this year and into 2009. I wouldn’t expect to see the Managing across Lifecycle until maybe March 2009.

The other interesting point is that the ‘Advanced Level’ in the diagram doesn’t exist yet.

It’s now Sunday morning and I’m sitting in the domestic terminal in Sydney waiting for my flight to Brisbane.

That’s the worst part of the travel west and crossing the dateline – there’s a day lost from my life.

Upgrade worked well; no major issues so far.

One point to note – publishing via XML-RPC (i.e using a blogging client such as Windows Live Writer) is disabled by default. You have to turn it on.

If you don’t then WLW throws an error:

Server Error –32601 Occurred server error. requested method blogger.getUsersBlogs does not exist

On another green note – composting starts today in my building. All of the cups, plates etc are moving to compostable paper from polystyrene. Good news.

I’m getting pestered with recruiters leaving me voicemail spam.

It looks evident that a ‘date for ship’ was set; product out of the door regardless of quality, feature completeness or usability.

I’ve been logging issues in the forum; issues include high CPU and RAM utilisation; corrupted profiles; IE errors – and lots and lots of half-finished usability features.

More concerning is that the username and password for the Topo web service are stored in clear text in an xml doc in the local profile. This user name and password are tied to the users email address, contact details and most importantly credits and purchase history for the Topo Super Quad maps. Very poor.

I’m in the same position now as when blogging at Novell – which blog gets the updates…

I’m probably going to post work specific at the TechNet site and bring an extract into this blog. Any thoughts on that?

I’ve still got a lot of blogs in the hopper. Here’s the top of the list so far:

• building a single server Configuration Manager box for demo and developer test

• specifically the SP1 install on 2008 Server

• Configuration Manager SDK
• Operations Manager Management Packs
• OS Deployment integration
• Powershell is king!

That will probably keep me busy in the next six weeks!

The wind was blowing the trees around the house a lot; the neighbours continue to be worried about the risk of a tree coming down and damaging the house.

Saturday we had four or five very short power outages – ranging between power dips to about 30 seconds without power. The UPS systems coped really well with the load. Now the Vonage and DSL are all under the UPS coverage we didn’t lose a single system.

I also added the Tivo and Media Center server in the home theatre to the UPS coverage with a smaller, non-rackable unit.

I had to choose between MSDN or TechNet for the hosting; as my focus isn’t the developer audience (Phew!) I chose TechNet, which is targeting the IT Professional.

I’m still using Windows Live Writer to post – that does make offline creation of content a lot easier. It’s also good having the blogging environment setup, hosted and managed by someone else.

Sad – they could have been kept for reference rather than being swept down the memory hole. I also noticed that several of the other ex-Novell Cool Bloggers – Reverend Ted for example – have also been purged.

Most of my posts are still here on this blog. Look for the coolblogs tag.

Next step – install the power monitoring software, set up power outage alerts (3 AM SMS  telling me the power cycled..) and the shutdown policies for extended outages.