Desk Move

I have completed my desk relocation from ITC 007 to ITC 008.
I'll be closer to the staff I supervise, and have more room to spread out.
It will also put future teams closer together for increased interaction.

And beyond needing to clean up pretty bad, I'm pretty happy with the move, the desk, the location and my new office-mates.

I really need to trade-in some of this Cisco gear :)  That alone will get rid of half my stuff.

But I'm not getting rid of the minis.  Ever  :)

Cloud Computing

As many of my Faithful Followers know ... I've been collecting old Mac Mini's for sometime now.

Yesterday I spent almost the entire day attempting to install and manage Ubuntu Enterprise Cloud (UEC).  UEC has a Eucalyptus core for clustering.

So I got the software installed on the minis (3 of them).  One is the cloud controller, the other two are just nodes.
I reconfigured a switch and put them on the right VLAN and built some firewall rules so that everyone can talk to everything.  Progress!

Then I setup a subscription to Landscape to manage them.  And I can manage them, but need to have a non-self-signed CERT to do so :(

I logged directly into the Cloud Controller, and canonical's CERT is messed up with GoDaddy.  After an hour of searching, no one had a solution.

So I jumped over to RightScale.  Management works... but they don't have any Eucalyptus images.  No worky.

So I tried HybridFox.  Same deal.  No images.

I started working with enStratus, but I'm thinking my cloud is a bit "old" for them to really help me, although I actually got two emails from them.

Eucalyptus actually called me too, and we talked, but as I was only doing research, and want to do it on a private cloud, he had little feedback for me.

Overall, I think cloud computing is probably neat in Amazon's EC2 - where it works.
Private clouds?  A joke for the moment.  At least with Eucalyptus.

Some day perhaps.  Until then, my Mini's remain @ my /command.

Firefox 11.0 - fail

I recently upgraded to Firefox 11.0
We have a security appliance on a private network.
It has a self-signed CERT, so I get the "This Connection is Untrusted" page.  That's normal.

I click "Add Exception".  I click "Get Certificate", but the page says "This site provides valid, verified information.  There is no need to add an exception."
So the "Confirm Security Exception" button isn't clickable.
You've locked me out of anything with a self-signed CERT ???

Really?  No one bothered to test something so critical before it was released to the planet?

wow ... No wonder you're losing to Chrome...

Big Project Down! Online Schedule of Classes

Bill handed me a project in December/January that I JUST finished :(
It was a many-term online schedule of classes.  The "live" production one only shows terms that students can actively register for.  This told looks at historical and future data to provide needed info to Deans, etc...

Anyway, with some real help from Soukup, I got it done :)

Faculty WorkLoad

Nathan and I have been digging into WorkLoad for a few weeks now, and yesterday we had our first real 'status' meeting with key players.

We had few (if any) bad assumptions or calculations.  Most of the work will be focused on understanding the Banner forms, their inter-connectivity, and how they access/calculate the data.

A few more weeks of work, and we'll have another status meeting in April.

Cinxi Ranger

So our nFx Ranger died a few weeks ago, and I rebooted it, etc... - to no avail.
Finally opened a support case, and we're gonna rebuild it from scratch.

I have the DVD and just got the password so I'm gonna start the rebuild now.

Scheduling

I have just a few projects left before I can finish scheduling all the campus programming projects.

Faculty Load has taken a lot of time this week, and will consume much of next week as well --