The experiences of an SMB IT technician
Archive for the ‘Fillers’ Category.
The Microsoft Performance team published a new great article about the Vista eventviewer and saved logs.
With Windows Server 2008 at the door, this is interesting. I would also strongly suggest to read all other articles in the Askperf blog - while updates are rather sparse, the content is extremely interesting and well written.
Last saturday, i’ve purchased a new toy. Don’t have much time to write something interesting right now, sorry!
Lenovo is selling a new screen, that can be rotated, and finally solves the cabling problem that comes with the rotating capability.
Due to health reasons, i won’t be working or blogging for this and the next week.
Of course you’ll want to read interesting content, so i’d recommend these links:
I’ve been using ImgBurn for the past few months to burn CD’s. It works well. It doesn’t have many features. But it does it’s job, isn’t complicated to use and free as in beer.
(Sorry, nothing interesting happened today).
I think i have already said enough.
Layer One still has massive power outages, one after the other. The last one wasn’t even two weeks ago. As unprofessional as it can get.
Update: 13.08.2007, 06:41
Just after writing the above post, at 12.08.2007 around ~2210, die power went down again at ~2215. When i first tried to contact the Layer One 24/7 service, i reached just a voicemail box. About an hour later, i was able to contact a technician which was enroute to the housing center, but didn’t know more than that there was total power failure.
At around 00:00, the problem still wasn’t solved, so i decided to go to bed. According to Nagios logs, the systems came back up at around 02:30, but only half of them, the second power circuit was still down.
After waking today at 06:00, i called Layer One 24/7 service again, and told them that our second power circuit was still down. The situation was soon rectified, so as of 06:41, all our machines are back up. The problem appears to be still the same as the one that cased all the other power failures - a broken UPS that has not been replaced since the first incident, despite promises indicating that this would be the case.
Currently, the servers are connected directly to the power line. Assuming the professionality of the rest of this orginization, a bypass was probably not employed, so switching back to UPS power would require a shutdown of all machines.
IT certifications usually serve two purposes: A point on your resume or partner programs. HP has a partner program, so they have certifications.
As such, it didn’t take to long until i had to deal with HP certifications. While there are many useful resources on the web regarding Microsoft’s certifications, this isn’t really true for HP certifications.
HP’s certification program offers much more sales certifications than Microsoft - IBM does this too. It’s important to know that the steps to your first exams are radically different from Microsoft’s approach.
The first step is to register for your own HP Student ID. You will need this to register with Prometric.
Now, HP offers two types of exams: Web based (Prefix HP2-) and normal test center based ones (Prefix HP0-). Web based exams are only available for unimportant err sales certifications and some device service certifications.
The list of available certifications is long, and in my opinion pretty irritating. There’s a “HP Certified Systems Engineer”, which is a HP-UX certification, and “HP Accredited Systems Engineer” which is a Systems Integration (read: Windows and Red Hat Linux) certification.
It’s important to know that if you want to go down the Systems Integration path, most of your already earned Microsoft credentials can apply to your HP certification path. This PDF contains all the information you need. The HP AIS certification requires a single HP exam (HP0-055, about which i’ll write tomorrow). HP’s exams are a bit less expensive than Microsoft’s exams, but they usually contain far more questions than Microsoft’s (HP: ~80, Microsoft: ~50).
Another important thing are web based exams. These are very inexpensive (25 US$), and can be done 24/7. They’re usually for sales and service certifications, contain about 50 questions and you have around 1.5 hours of time. The sales certification questions are unbelievably stupid, but not necessarely easy. You can of course use the internet to answer to questions (yes, that’s allowed). But it’s much funnier trying to get such an exam done in less than 20 minutes (which is easily possible).
In general, HP’s certifications aren’t bad - i like that most of your Microsoft certificates already apply, that the sales certifications can be done online (IBM does not offer that and Microsoft doesn’t offer sales certifications), but their web interface is awfully slow. I didn’t like their exams as much as Microsoft’s, but more about that tomorrow.
Layer One had another power outage this night, at around ~03:00.
Again, i have no idea why, and there is no information from Layer One available yet, but we can rest assured that they will state some nonsense again. As things are right now, i can only recommend against choosing Layer One for your colocation needs. They’re obviously unable to ensure even basic things like power delivery, which is a lot worse at Layer One than it is here, at home, without an UPS, directly on the power grid.
Today is Swiss National Day, and as such i’m not working today.
You might’ve noticed that i’ve added a suggestion form. So if you think i should write about a topic, just submit it there. I’m pretty much out of ideas, and not every day brings something interesting.
I’ll be enjoying my holidays next week. Don’t expect any postings.
If you still want to read some nifty technical blogs, i’d suggest these (they’re also listed in my blogroll):
