Category General

YES! Here on the Eve of the New Year, I am bring this super cool module to you!

Just a recap of the last Dashboard snapshot, the portion we’ll be addressing is Visualizations!

Once you click that little gem of a link you’ll be brought to a page which looks like this:

As usual I censored out the Filer name, Serial # and other things, but I did leave in some nice details.   Note:   based on latest loaded AutoSupport: 2008/12/27 06:00:00 PM -06:00

The reason I mention that is, you can run one Visualization report for say, December, and then pull one for November and then compare them for whatever reasons you need.

That single benefit alone makes it even more super cool ;)

At this point, click one of the objects in there (System, Disks, Raid, QTrees or Storage)

It will render the data and make it available to you: You can also export it to PDF of XLS

Time for a view of the System Tab:

This is the top portion of the System Tab.  Notice how it breaks things down as if it were an actual system, giving you details.  Something which you may not notice unless you hover are these cool popups (Popups do not function in Chrome)

System Options

Services

VIF3

And so on and so forth! You can hover over any object (Interfaces, Shelves, Loops) and it will provide you information which you’d normally spend your time scouring through sysconfig’s in order to find.  That little bit right there is pretty damn sweet if you ask me!

Now when you go over to Disks you get a similar picture:

And hovering over one of our disks gives us information like this:

Details of a Disk 

Now taking this journey along, we visit the Raid View of the Disks:

This one is fairly straight forward, same type of pop-up data – Very useful, but not really super exciting, unless you are looking forward to this specific data (I do at times, but at the moment, It feels anti-climactic with what is coming ahead! :))

Here is where it gets really cool (Part1) with Volume Logical Layout: QTrees and LUNS:

This is the first of the coolness! Below I’ve included something with LUN’s in it so you get that perspective as well.  

And last but definitely not least Capacity View! *Cheer!* Err.. :

While there are so many things I can hover over and get details on (When you hover it will ofcourse tell you information about the volume, settings, etc) I want to make a special focus on the one with the yellow border!)

Notice the “See Recommendations” That is amazingly cool, if you ask me ;)

A little click on that and suddenly you see:

Remember as I’ve mentioned this before, this is a suggestion of discussing your state and that you ought to look at it.  If it is part of your design to run something where you get a notice, that’s just fine! If you weren’t aware of it on a volume though, definitely worth investigating!

And that brings us to the end of the NetApp Premium AutoSupport Visualizations segment.   I’d like to note the export to PDF and XLS are very cool, however you do not retain that same level of ‘interactive popups’ in PDF format that you do accessing it via WebGui.   So, this is a pure case of What you See is What you Get – once you export out to PDF.  And when you export to XLS You don’t get any pretty pictures, but you do get all of the raw data that you would see in the Popups, so they’re very complimentary to each other, and your ability to present and manipulate the data!

Hopefully you’ve enjoyed this segment, I’ll be working on Configurations next so look forward to my next post!

What is the @girlkawasaki effect? How does this work, and how can it work for you?

Let me first off by telling you that @girlkawasaki is a very real person who has a very real blog.  They’re a very good friend of mine and are fortunate to have been an influence of the first draft of this (Originally it could have been the @cxi effect, but that’d be lame and the fruits of my labors resulted in the direct effect to apply to @girlkawasaki :))

So, WTF is this?!? – Alright, I’ll tell you!

While studying the way Twitter works, and more importantly how other people on Twitter work, I began to analyze some trends and patterns of likely events.  I personally love conversation on all topics, so I would follow people of all backgrounds on twitter.  When someone re-tweets someone else on something interesting, I follow them as well, continuously spreading the love of knowledge whether me sharing or simply learning from others experiences.

I noticed that when you add some people, you may get an immediate follow-back, and more often than not an Auto-DM (Direct Message).  A lot of people find these Auto-DM’s to be a bit annoying.  I simply find them to be rather insincere and only a little annoying. ;) I do like them because Auto-DM’s typically give rise to the fact that you’re using a 3rd party service like SocialToo or others which auto-sends that, and often Auto-follows on your behalf :)

So if you have a boatload of followers like I do (Hey I’m no @guykawasaki) But I do have a fair number of followers, many of which happen to reside in my own industrie(s) You’ll tend to find that by following a lot of people, a lot of people will often follow you back.

So in that first test, @girlkawasaki wanted followers for the same reasons I do (People to learn and share with) so she followed a bunch of the people I (@cxi) happen to have been following and a number of them ~half followed her back.  And this trend would carry on for some time, of people following her either directly (a response to being followed) or randomly based upon tweets, comments and interaction.

So the next phase of this, once @girlkawasaki was seen to have a comfortable following of stable tweets, I then tried to follow everyone (minus spammers and locked accounts) that happened to be *Following* her ~650 people were following @girlkawasaki which were then followed.

This is where it gets interesting.  You might think “I’ll get a mass of followers instantly!”  But that isn’t true and isn’t the case, because people use different services which have large databases with different scrubbing and updating routines.   The result turns out to be that after the first hour of following ~650 people,  ~130 twitter accounts followed back.

This is after the first hour ofcourse, and after several hours we’ll see how the numbers reflect.    I’m not saying you’re guaranteed to get hundreds of followers if you follow everyone who is following @girlkawasaki, however after one full day I’ll update this to include what the final number looks like.    The account I used in this test is indeed an actual real twitter account so these are real live and valid numbers to be working with. :)

This is not a test of a Denial of Service, more of an interest of parties out there (like me) who want to follow more people and want more followers so we can continue our conversation in life, in Tweetdom and most importantly with ourselves :)

This is no disrespect to anyone who follows @girlkawasaki and are interesting in what she tweets (both actual tweets and her wonderful blog posts :)) Just think how many followers you get by consequence when you don’t fall into that small criteria of auto-followers :)

Thanks, and don’t hesitate to ask any questions or leave any comments on your success! :)

Control Group: 373 followers in 17hrs, for 56% followback!

When that’s out of 650 that’s pretty amazing!

Let me first off tell you how excited I am to be able to share this with you!

I think “OMFG” can easily classify the type of excitement I have for this tool, the simplicity it will introduce into your life, and more.    I can honestly tell you, that without this tool a lot of the things I do on a regular basis would take a lot longer, so if you know anything about me, it is that I like simplicity with reason, efficiency and getting the most out of my resources.

For those of who you think “You can’t get excited over a tool, especially one involving storage” Well wait and see, because you’ll be drooling along with me! ;)

This is part 1 of an almost endless series because there will be more things coming out of this, that and I don’t want to create one massive difficult to read posting on Premium AutoSupport.

So, let’s get started!

All things begin with the NOW Page – So go ahead and login to now.netapp.com

Once you’ve logged in, you will see a section titled:

“My Netapp Products”

Within that section “My AutoSupport” it’s easy to see with the yellow “NEW!” – Go ahead and click on that and you will be ready to start taking advantage of Premium AutoSupport!

Here it is zoomed up a bit so you can see what I’m talking about!

Alright, we’ve clicked in (Yes, this is very basic tutorial for now, I’ll get into the guts soon!)

Alright, you’ve gotten this far! Wow, there are some cool things on this page, which are often overlooked.   I’d like to point those out, just so I’ve done my civic duty!

Okay, here is the disclaimer text.   Browser Support lists IE 6,7 –  Firefox 1, 2, 3 (With SVG) And it cites that Apple Safari is not supported.   For the purposes of all of my screenshots I AM actually using Internet Explorer, however I exclusively use Chrome 99% of the time.   I’ll mention what works and doesn’t work across browsers, the IE and FF experience are absolutely great but you won’t be crippled if you’re not using them – You just won’t get as Rich of an experience.   And the facts behind that are, sometimes you won’t want the rich experience when doing some specific nitty gritty things.   So don’t fret over browsers there is much support!

Another cool thing, which is a great supplement to this, is the WebEx Tutorials and Flash Demos!  Oh, and the iPod contest it mentions, which takes you to a Tech On Tap article from May of 2008.   If you’re seeing this post and not that one, it’s because it’s honestly hard to find anything from those, it’s a great article though by Jay Mistry! (FYI: The screenshots in the TOT Article do not reflect the way Premium AutoSupport looks today. :))

A brief quote from that article:

Now, Premium AutoSupport’s Upgrade Advisor tool does all the hard work for me, saving me four to five hours of work per storage system and providing an upgrade plan that’s complete and easy to follow. The tool works for both standalone systems and clusters and supports all Data ONTAP releases since 6.3. Among the things that it checks for are:

• Known upgrade issues
• Required firmware revisions
• Applicable field alerts
• Software license issues
• Version compatibility of dependent  software products (SnapDrive®, etc.)

Another advantage of the Upgrade Advisor is that it gives us a complete plan to back out each upgrade should a problem arise. We’ve never had to use such a plan, but new regulations in the finance industry are starting to mandate this capability, so it’s nice to have it covered.

I mention this now, because I didn’t even plan to tap on Upgrade Advisor until much later ;) But nonetheless, we’re almost there! It’s time to click the “Premium Autosupport” link!

And this is the part where I stop, and take you directly to the dashboard of one of my demo systems!   You likely will be presented with a list of systems you manage, so select one and you’re ready to rock and roll!

Certain sections have been blocked out, in order to protect my still having a job! ;)

However I’ll go into depth of each of these sections which are hard to read, how they can benefit you and a number of other cool things… In the next post :)

At the high level, the key sections I’d like to mention here which I’ll go into depth are:

• Health Summary and Detailed Healthcheck
• Visualizations
• Configurations
• Raw AutoSupport Data
• Performance
• Upgrade Advisor
• Customize Notifications
• EMS Log Viewer

…and more as I can :)

I did try to order them in the order I intend to deliver them, so if they don’t come out in that order, we’ll deal with that.   Nonetheless, this is the end of this high-level overview, hopefully you’ve learned a bit more about the Premium AutoSupport from this alone (Like its existence) and you’ll be on your way to ensuring a more simplified storage management experience.

I know once you start using these things you’ll be saying “OMFG” too. :)

Psst, see the Performance section? There’s a lot more in there as well, soooo super cool! I’ll try to get these other ones out there as soon as possible so you can benefit the same way I personally do with the magical mysterious things I do! :)

Raise your hand if you use Tweetdeck! Yes I know you do, we all do.

You ever sit there and wonder what that little   is up in the control section? A click on it will reveal much excitement to be had!

Simply clicking that little 12 will bring up this prompt: Asking you for your 12seconds.tv creds!

Then, get ready for it, because all of a sudden you have access to Video in Tweetdeck!

OMFG What is going on here? Why are there videos in Tweet Deck? This is actually kind of cool!

Hovering over it will prompt you to Play the clip, or click the arrow and Whoa! Wait a minute you can RT from here as well?!

RT cxi: 12seconds – http://12seconds.tv/channel/cxi/64782

#Playing in TweetDeck

It’ll grey out your background while it displays video! 

Okay, this all seems a bit weird.  I thought we could only interact with each other in 140 character segments (Less in a reply) but now we can suddenly interact in 12 second segments?    Sure, you might think 12 seconds doesn’t seem like a lot, You say I want more, I want 12 times 12 seconds to get my point across! But seriously, that’s Gross But seriously, you can say a lot in 12 seconds and this gets to that point.  The first time you’ll realize just how long of a time 12 seconds indeed is :)

*I won’t even mention the iPhone Application they announced on the 18th! ;*

How cool can this possibly be? Think about it.  It’s been integrated into Tweetdeck for how long now? And we’ve never even noticed it?  I think it’s time we take notice (Especially with the TweetDeck Holiday update coming Dec 24th! hooray! :))

As always you can find me on twitter at @cxi but you can also find me on 12seconds @cxi!

So get out there, give it a try, add me in my shaven and unshaven form and lets celebrate the 12 seconds of christmas together!

Bought any Picture Frames recently? They might be hacked! (Or vulnerable) If you’ve purchased the SPF-85H (From Amazon) or in general, you should be aware of this!  By the looks of it, “some” of the media have been delivered with the W32.Sality.AE worm on the install media! WTF?

Get your removal on if you’re affected!

Greetings from Amazon.com.
We have recently learned that Samsung has issued an alert affecting its SPF-85H 8-Inch Digital Photo Frame. Our records indicate that you have purchased one of the digital photo frames through the Amazon.com website and are therefore affected by this alert.
The alert involves the SPF-85H 8-Inch Digital Photo Frames w/1GB Internal Memory, designed to work with Windows-based PCs via a USB connector. They were sold between October and December 2008 for about $150.
The alert concerns discovery of the W32.Sality.AE worm on the installation disc SAMSUNG FRAME MANAGER XP VERSION 1.08, which is needed for using the SPF-85H as a USB monitor. If you are using Vista or a different version of Frame Manager, this issue does not affect you.
If your anti-virus software displays a Virus Alert after you have installed Samsung Frame Manger 1.08 using the installation CD, please perform the following procedure:
1. Quarantine or delete the W32.Sality.AE worm.
2. Uninstall the current version of Frame Manager 1.08 you installed from the install CD. (Click Start –> Settings –> ; Control Panel ->; Add or Remove Programs. Find and then click Frame Manager in the Add or Remove Programs dialog, and then click Remove.)
3. Download and install the updated version of Frame Manager XP 1.082 from the Samsung Download Center
4. After you install Samsung Frame Manager 1.082, reboot your computer to complete the process.
If these steps do not correct the problem, please call Samsung Service Hotline at 1.800.SAMSUNG (800-726-7864).
If you purchased this item as a gift for someone, please notify the recipient immediately and provide them with the information in the Samsung Alert concerning this issue.
We regret the inconvenience this alert has caused you but trust you will understand that the safety of our customers is our highest priority.
Thanks for shopping at Amazon.com.
Sincerely,
Customer Service
Amazon.com
http://www.amazon.com/

Happy Holidays and keep yourself Malware free! Thanks to @silvakreuz for the heads up!