I’m excited to have been given the opportunity to present at the December meeting of the Central Texas Systems Management User Group (CTSMUG)! I’ll try to post some more details on the topic here within the next week.
The meeting starts at 10:00am and includes lunch. For details (including directions and a full agenda) and to register to attend, see the Event Details. There are lots of other interesting topics on the agenda, so do try to attend if you’re in the Austin area!
I have a couple of upcoming presentations on the BrightTALK web site. The presentations are free to attend are available online (registration is required). Also, feel free to take a look at my previous BrightTALK presentations.
August 8th, 2013 at 11:00am Pacific
Many of the technical aspects of cloud-based solutions are a natural progression for those environments that want to expand upon their virtualization deployments. This webinar will provide technical details and best practices for deploying new features in the Windows Server 2012 and Hyper-V 3.0 platforms. Topics will include reducing storage costs, implementing high-availability and disaster recovery, and improving automation to reduce data center costs and increase efficiency.
October 8th, 2013 at 3:00pm Pacific
While few would call the use of cloud-based technologies a “quiet revolution”, Microsoft’s Windows Azure platform has expanded into a wide range of different services that can be leveraged to reduce costs and increase IT efficiency. The challenge for IT professionals is to arrange the pieces of the puzzle into an optimal arrangement for many different types of workloads. This presentation will focus on practical advice for using SaaS, IaaS, and PaaS approaches to building private, public, and hybrid clouds. It will include examples of applications and workloads that could benefit from the use of cloud technology, and the benefits and drawbacks each approach.
Note: To access the recording of this session (and all of my past BrightTALK webinars), please search using https://www.brighttalk.com/search?q=Anil+Desai.
Austin has long been known as a high-tech city, and it’s one of the many reasons I have loved living here for over 20 years. Earlier this week, the technology news just got better: Google Fiber is coming to Austin! We’ll soon be joining Kansas City with access to 1Gbps symmetric bandwidth. For customers that don’t need that level of performance, they can opt for paying a one-time (or one-year) installation cost for free Internet access from there on.
If you live in Austin, you can visit the Google Fiber Austin page to sign up for more information (when it’s available). Now, comes the hard part: The wait until the service is available in my area (in Central Austin). Estimates so far indicate that it will be at least another year before that happens. Still, it’s good to know that this kind of connectivity is on its way!
Migrating to a new operating system can be tricky, with some special “gotchas” for various applications. While Microsoft has done a great job in minimizing driver changes that can impact application and hardware compatibility, there are always some exceptions. One particularly problematic piece of software for me has always been Cisco’s AnyConnect VPN client. I rely on it for connecting to my clients’ networks and, for the most part, it works well on Windows 7.
While testing the Windows 8 Consumer Preview, though, I ran into some problems. While the standard x64 installer for the client seemed to work properly, the client would automatically disconnect after authenticating with the VPN server. I’d receive the following error message:
Secure VPN Connection terminated locally by the Client.
Reason 442: failed to enable Virtual Adapter
Thanks to some really helpful posts online (references below), I found that the solution was to make a minor change to the Registry. First, using RegEdit, find the following Registry path:
KEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SYSTEM\CurrentControlSet\Services\CVirtA
You should see a key called “DisplayName”. Simply change its value by removing the unnecessary characters at the beginning of the name. In my case, I was left with “Cisco Systems VPN Adapter for 64-bit Windows”, and everything worked fine when I tried to connect again. It’s a strange bug (and one that I wish was better documented), but I have been up and running after this change on three different computers.
If you’re unfamiliar with editing the Registry (and the inherent dangers therein), the below links will provide more details).
The above Registry path on my most recent installation seems to have changed; on my primary computer, the correct path is:
KEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SYSTEM\CurrentControlSet\Services\vpnva
Fortunately, the DisplayName key change worked fine for me.
The Cisco AnyConnect VPN client seems to be aging, and support is difficult to come by unless you have a Cisco support account. Fortunately, there are other third-party commercial and freeware alternatives. It has been a while since I’ve used any of them, but one that I see mentioned often is the VPN Client for Windows from Shrew.net. Feel free to post a comment if you’ve had any experiences (good or bad) with VPN alternatives.
Over the last year, I have been frequently asked write and speak about storage and cloud-based service offerings. Remote storage is a compelling technology for consumers and IT departments, and it’s a good starting point for those that might be interested in dipping their toes (or heads) into the more-ethereal-than-Ethernet “cloud”.
Several years ago, I wrote a blog post about the virtues and benefits of online backups (see Online Backup Options). Since then, I have recommended cloud-based storage (and, Mozy, in particular) to a rather large number of IT professionals, friends, and family. The idea itself is compelling: Online backups have the potential of simplifying the backup process for most users, while providing secure remote storage. But what happens when something goes wrong? Or if you just have a technical question?
I don’t often highlight specific companies for poor customer service – it’s almost to be expected from many organizations these days – but a recent interaction I had with Mozy’s Customer Support has ended in my completely giving up on trying to resolve what should have been a very simple issue. Without getting into the technical specifics, I have been trying to perform backups of Encrypting File System (EFS)-encrypted local files to the cloud. From the latest information I could find, Mozy supports both local and online backups of EFS encrypted files. That wasn’t my experience, though – I received cryptic error messages and overall backup failures. So, I decided to contact Mozy’s Customer Support, creating a case that included my log files and a detailed description of the problem.
In summary: It has been over two weeks now, and after three escalations, I’m no closer to resolving the problem. Just about every response I have sent to Mozy (along with requests for escalation) have been ignored. In fact, a US Escalations Customer Support Manager has barely managed to feign any interest in my issue at all. An hour-long phone call with a Level 2 Customer Support technician resulted in his disabling of several necessary services on my primary Windows 7 workstation (I had to keep records of this so I could reverse the changes myself), and poring through log files that provided little useful information. The response to my most recent request for support has been a request for me to (again) restate the original problem (it’s thoroughly documented in their support system – I just can’t get anyone to read it). I do plan to escalate this issue to the Director- or VP-level at Mozy as I somehow hopeful that someone at the organization will care.
One of the most promising aspects of cloud-based service offerings is a reduction in complexity. Rather that relying on complicated application deployments (the story goes), we can leave all of the details to services that are provided off-site. But what about support and compatibility issues? What happens when two or more cloud services vendors decide that their services are incompatible? My case with Mozy might be that type of issue, though it doesn’t seem like there’s any official documentation or support boundaries related to which products can peacefully co-exist on the same system with it and which options are supported. And what if the vendor decides that features and functionality I require aren’t important to them? Sure, I could run into the same problems with local applications, but workarounds are far easier to find when I control both communication endpoints.
I understand that I’m hardly the first person to suffer from poor technical support, but this experience has made me reconsider the risks of cloud-based services in general. I’m hardly an important customer for Mozy, but I am paying for their service and I really do rely on the sanctity of my backups. My typical response to organizations that doubt the cloud is to first compare the reliability of their own datacenter infrastructure against that of an online service provider’s. However, in this case, I’m completely stuck – I either need to reduce security at my file system level, discontinue the use of Mozy (and transfer 25 GB of data to a competing service), or revert to local backups.
As the entire world moves to a greater reliance on Internet connections and online services, it becomes harder to create fall-back plans and alternatives. It’s simply not practical or cost-effective to expect your service providers to fail you. What’s the point in online backups if I need to have a backup plan for my online backup provider?
That makes me curious: Who else has had a recent experience that has questioned their value in hosted services? Was it downtime, client application issues, availability, poor customer support, or all of the above? And how safe do you feel when your mission-critical IT infrastructure is resting on clouds?
Network Computing is hosting an online, virtual event that focuses on next-generation networking technologies. Here’s a brief blurb from the event web site:
This Next Generation Networks virtual event will bring you up to speed on networking state of the art by discussing the technologies that are going to drive network design and implementations today and in the future. You will learn from peers, analysts, and vendors about where the technologies are today and how you can prepare for a network overhaul.
Attendee Benefits:
- Download informative research, white papers, and other resources straight to your Virtual Briefcase.
- Access insightful webcasts featuring industry experts, Network Computing editors, and analysts.
- Interact with our guest speakers, other attendees, and exhibitors through real-time chat tools.
- Visit vendor booths and browse through products and solutions in our unique, interactive and entertaining environment.
Use the Event Registration page to sign up to attend. In addition to the virtual conference booths, you can view a list of presentations on the Distinguished Speakers page. I’ll be attending and will try to answer as many technical questions as possible in the Microsoft booth.
