2/21/09

Windows 7 Beta on Tablet PC

A few weeks ago I switched my hard drive back to Vista on my Lenovo X61 Tablet. Over all I think Windows 7 is a huge improvement over Vista. I couldn't get my pen to work the first time but now it appears to be working and the handwriting recognition has gotten even better!

So, back on Windows 7 Beta and I love it!

Update

Windows 7 is available to the public now but I'm still loving Windows 7 Beta on my tablet and everything is working great. Looking to get off the Beta and onto the production x64 version soon. I haven't had any issues with features working but I will document the install better this next time around.

2/20/09

Some Late Nights

I just had some late nights upgrading our switches and Dell SAN. Here's the scoop and a few things that may save you if you have to do the same.

We had to update our Cisco switches at all our Chapel campuses this last week to support our newest endeavor, HD Simulcasting! We are going to be sending HD video of our live service to our other campuses in only a month! We are going to send one feed for a fixed center screen and another for Imag and graphics on the side screens. We are using HaiVision 1020 encoder with a Maco HD card to encode both streams. We are still working out some decoder issues now.

*Note on updating Cisco switches though the web GUI. Even if it says that it has uploaded the .tar file and is rebooting, DO NOT DISCONNECT! If you don't wait until is says, it may not load the HTML files.

While I was in the updating mood I updated our Dell MD3000i SAN to the newest firmware. I hadn't done this before but it was pretty easy. (See Justin Moore's blogpost for details) The part that took the longest was backing up the SAN. It took about 10 hours and the sad part is that it only had about 1TB on it! I need to figure out a better backup method. Backing up to our Buffalo TeraStation Pro II is WAY too slow!

*If you add another NIC to your VMWare Server, make sure to exclude your SAN NIC's from the bridge mode.

*I never did post what I thought about the Buffalo TeraStation we got. My advice, if you want to use this for more that archival purposes, spend a little more and get something much better.

TeraStation Pros
  • Cheap
  • Uh...

TeraStation Cons

  • One GB Ethernet port
  • Slow web GUI
  • Bad firmware updates and NO change log on the updates (unless you can read Chinese)
  • Lots of Mac OS X issues.
  • Did I mention slow?