seawolf

p.s. Just for another interesting trivia about a couple of the open source tools. Munki (what Symbian is based on) was developed by Disney Animation. The same Disney that Steve Jobs sold Pixar to for tons of money and a company he sat on the board of for years. http://www.disneyanimation.com/technology/opensource.html Disney Animation also developed Reposardo, which is an open source version of Apple's Software Update Server.

It pays to do your research... Google built their own enterprise management system for the Macs called Simian - https://code.google.com/p/simian/ that was based on the open source Munki system. Simian is Munki on steroids built on top of Google Apps engine. They didn't build it from scratch (that would be an insult to the developers who've worked on Munki). Why did Google do that when there were numerous available 3rd-party enterprise management tools available for the Mac (Casper Suite, Absolute Manage, SCCM w/plugins, Munki, Altiris, FileWave, Puppet, etc.). Just why would Google spend all of that effort on Simian? Was it because "Apple never supports us"? No, it was because one of the biggest software development companies in the world didn't want to pay huge sums of money for software licensing for a system it was capable of building itself and fully controlling and customising to their whim. Apple doesn't provide Enterprise-level management tools (at this scale) and doesn't pretend to do so. They let other companies do this and make a good living doing it. Apple killing off their server and storage products a few years ago might have been a pretty good clue on this one. Actually, Google decided to move from Windows to a Linux backend and Mac on the desktop AFTER the 2009 China hack, which apparently targeted Windows vulnerabilities. But, keep on believing that Google just has the "shiny, shiny syndrome" if you are so inclined. http://www.theregister.co.uk/2010/06/01/google_snubs_windows_report/

You didn't say whether you were using an MDM system or not. If you are, then you could make the change to the iPads by either creating a new configuration profile with the new WiFi settings including the password for the new SSID. Then once this has applied to the target systems (most MDM systems show whether the command has completed), then and only then actually change the password on the WiFi system for the original SSID, or disable it so devices can't connect to it anymore. You can do the same thing and actually keep using the same SSID, but you have to be sure to change the WiFi password AFTER you have applied the new config profile with the updated WiFi password. The iPads will temporarily lose their network connection, but should pick it back up straight away after the change. At worst, you might have to manually select the WiFi SSID and they should automatically connect with no password prompt. The Apple TVs are a harder nut to crack, but if you are using Configurator, you can now configure the Apple TVs using Configurator. Otherwise, you'll be walking around and using either the Remote app to change the password or the remote to do it (slowest option). Of course, if you aren't using MDM then you will either need to use Configurator (and manual handling) for the iPads too or you've got a lot of work manually punching in the WiFi details.

Yes, you are wasting your time if the argument was meant to be using Mac servers in a large datacentre. I think I've been pretty clear that you don't need a Mac on the backend to manage Macs and iPads. You can use Casper Suite, Absolute Manage, Meraki, SCCM with Parellels agent/plugin, etc. that can all run on Linux or Windows VMs. The consumer is doing a pretty good job of defining the "PC", not big business or we would have never seen the existence of Metro, Windows 8, or the Surface in the first place. You seem to be agreeing with my point at least in a way. BYOD isn't just a web client or all about the cloud though. Great, I hope that goes well for them. I wonder how well they've thought that out though considering all contingencies. Schools are using hosted email? Yes, of course this is where it makes sense along with hosting of publicly accessible web severs off-site. We do this too. Will their be a mass migration for businesses and schools to host their core infrastructure off-site (AD, File Servers, databases, and all backups) all in the cloud? No, not in THIS decade anyway.

This is actually not that hard to do. Create a second domain within your existing Google Apps system. This domain doesn't need to be any way related to the old domain. You can then migrate your users accounts to the new domain and set their existing email address as an alias in the new domain. Their logins will also change. The caveat to this method is that to "migrate" users to the new domain, you have to change the username for every user. This can be done easily using GADS, which is how we did it. We first changed the email address for users in AD (bulk change) then GADS synced the change and the users were automatically moved into the new domain and given the alias of their old email address. If you aren't using GADS already, I strongly recommend it. p.s. Using this method all data is preserved. No emails are lost, Google drive data is still intact along with all share settings, etc.

Frontmotion packages up Adobe Flash now as well, which is good. Haven't had any issues with it although like I said we don't use roaming profiles. Chrome gave us all sorts of fits in early 2013 though and I was having the same feelings towards it that you're having for Firefox right now.

Firefox works better than Chrome in a locked down, managed environment. The Chrome autoupdate feature is a nightmare in a managed environment both for Windows 7 and Macs. We use the Frontmotion community edition of Firefox (with the icon changed to look like the normal Firefox browser). We had lots of issues with Chrome early last year, none at all with Frontmotion since making the switch. We don't use roaming profiles, so can't comment on what it does there.

I assume you are referring to Blu Ray disks (ala Facebook's method of archival)? I agree that I don't see it as a a great backup media solution for that reason, but it is obviously viable. I can't see any of these on my supplier's inventory lists, but they do appear to be on their way based on the media announcements. I expect they are going to be expensive though and tape libraries are still better for large archival jobs. LTO-7 is also expected to land this year with 6.4TB raw backup capacity, 16TB compressed and data rates of 315Mb/s and 788Mb/s respectively. Whether disk-based or cloud-based, I just can't see a more cost-effective archival medium than Tape. Disk-based is not portable and cloud-based is expensive and slow for backing up 20TB+ of data.

I'm very strongly against using RAID 5 (as others on here can attest) except for secondary backup storage where a failure doesn't have much of an impact. RAID10 is best where maximum performance and reliability are needed (e.g. VDI / Core Infrastructure). If more cost-effective storage is required over RAID10, then Use RAIDZ3 or RAIDZ2 or RAID6, in that order of preference. ZFS takes care of the write penalty for parity writes BTW.

The numbers show that Firefox still has 26.9% of the worldwide browser market as of January 2104 and 17.68% of the worldwide market share on Windows computers. As Chrome has a 16.84% market share on Windows, it is beaten by Firefox on Windows. So, who indeed. Browser Statistics IE10 Falls Below IE9, Firefox Down, Chrome Up

Explain "doing your job properly" and what backup solution you have in place that can protect you adequately without tape. If someone has a new and better way that solves all of the problems off-line tape backups solve my ears are open.

Are you speaking from experience with tape restores or are you perhaps referring to the non-existent Gartner statistic that 71% of tape restores fail? The statistic that Gartner was quoted by Microsoft in pushing its DPM solution, but never provided the actual source (because it didn't exist, so I can't even say it was a mis-quote. Someone just full on made it up). http://www.backupcentral.com/mr-backup-blog-mainmenu-47/13-mr-backup-blog/395-gartner-never-said-71-of-tape-restores-fail.html Cloud-based backup achieves the off-site requirement, but not the off-line requirement unless you are manually connecting or rotating your cloud backup target each time. Another weakness of cloud backup is backup and restore speed. Have you ever restored from a cloud-based backup? LTO-6 runs at 160Mb/s and most people don't have a connection that is as fast or faster than that. Cloud restores could take days or weeks in some cases. Now, 160Mb/s isn't lightning fast compared to 1Gb transfer rates from disk, but tape is meant to be a secondary offline/archival backup. So, backup to disk then back that up to tape, rotate the tape media and store off-site.

LTO-6 holds 2.5TB uncompressed or 6.25TB compressed. The maximum compression won't be achievable except in rare cases, but two LTO-6 tapes could easily hold 6TB of data. As the largest HDD available is 4TB, a backup to disk would have to span two HDDs as well.

This will probably be a somewhat contentious post, but so be it. Tape should still be a part of EVERY backup routine. There, I've said it. And it's true. I know there are many of you who think that disk-based backups are superior in every way, including speed, cost, reliability, and expandability. Some of you may think that tape backups are not just second-rate, but entirely useless in 2014 with virtualisation, failover clusters, SAN replication and Veeam backups. But...you would be wrong. Even Google and Amazon still use tape backups for archiving, and it has saved their bacon more than once. Official Gmail Blog: Gmail back soon for everyone Why the Google Incident Proves Relevance of Tape Storage | B&L As stated in the blog articles, one of the big life savers of tape is that by its nature it is off-line and can easily be store off-site. Failover clusters, replication, and automated real-time backups won't save you if all copies of files are deleted, corrupted, or otherwise destroyed. But, I have multiple disk-based backups you say and then there are all of those inferiorities of tape you say. Well, some of those inferiorities are myth and disk-based backups aren't so portable when you are backing up TBs of data. Go over 4TB and you need a large and heavy RAID or JBOD array. Those aren't so portable. A bunch of LTO6 tapes - much more so. http://www.storage-switzerland.com/Articles/Entries/2011/1/27_Breaking_The_Top_Four_Myths_Of_Tape_vs._Disk_Backup.html And, it is likely that tape storage backup sizes will begin to increase rapidly in the near future with LTO8, LTO9 and beyond. Not only that, but tape loaders / libraries are dropping dramatically in price making such technology within the reach of SMEs and Education. Disk-pushers, get reel: Even GOOGLE relies on tape And, if you still aren't convinced of the value of tape, then there may be a Blu Ray backup solution in your future. Facebook uses 10,000 Blu-ray discs to store 'cold' data | PCWorld Regardless, it is critically important to keep at least two copies of your backups and at least one of them must be off-line and hopefully off-site.

It's a bit disappointing they used Flash, but at least it's been well-written and not slapped together like so many FLEX or Flash-based web apps.

SSD write caches have been a part of ZFS storage pools for many years, and yes I have used them. ZFS uses three types of caches for reading and writing synchronous and asynchronous data. ARC (RAM) and L2ARC (large SSDs) for reads and Logzillas (very fast SSDs designed for massive amount of write operations). Using Logzillas and L2ARC SSDs in Hybrid storage pools provides a combination of outstanding performance with large storage capacity using either SAS drives for maximum performance or large SATA drives for maximum storage space. Bothe L2ARC and Logzillas are always used in pairs to provide redundancy, further showing that SSDs are not "indestructible" and should not be trusted as superior to good RAID. http://constantin.glez.de/blog/2010/04/ten-ways-easily-improve-oracle-solaris-zfs-filesystem-performance Our 7320 using Hybrid storage pools with two 73GB ZeusIOPS SSD write caches and 96GB of ARC can provide a sustained 50,000 IOPS under load. Not bad for 20 x 10,000RPM SAS drives and a couple of Logzillas.

Mozilla pulls the plug on 'Metro' mode Firefox browser for Windows 8 | The Verge Mozilla has announced that they will not be proceeding with the release of a Metro version of Firefox. There stats show very low use of Metro resulting in great difficulties in adequately testing a Metro version of Firefox. This and the cries for a return of the traditional Windows start menu and desktop mode make me think the Metro interface may not be long for this world unless MS can really turn it around in Wimdows 9. If Windows 9 removed Metro though and we were left with all of the improvements 8.1 has over 7, I imagine Windows 9 would be wildly successful on the desktop. Thoughts?

That's interesting since if you are a Google employee you now have to make your case to have something OTHER than a Mac on your desk. Google does own a datacentre or two around the place and pretty much all of their thousands of employees use Macs. Google currently manages over 40,000 Macs. Looks like mentioning the word "Apple" at a tier 1 datacentre might just get you a job at Google... http://bgr.com/2013/11/28/mac-chromebook-google-employees/ I'm not sure what this has to do with BYOD or the increase in non-windows OS on the desktop, but VMWare have also made the vSphere web UI in vSphere 5.5 fully Mac compatible and in order to access all of the features in vSphere 5.5 you have to use the web UI, as they aren't available in the Windows client. That's quite a change from the past. Sure, the very large businesses will likely go that way, but the numerous SMEs of the western world employee far more workers in the economy than the large companies. SMEs are not going to go all Cloud and SaaS UNLESS widespread Gigabit internet becomes a reality. Again, easy for the large companies to achieve, (they can afford to have it built) not so the company that has 50 employees and can't afford 200k for the fibre build and a 10k/month Fibre bill. I just don't see the evidence for widespread use of thin client technology yet. Again, in verybig businesses and government it may, but not your average SME. Unless every SME gets swallowed whole by big business and all we have are a bunch of Buy-N-Large oligopolies or monopolies, that's not going to happen. These systems take big iron and networking in the backend as well as a level of expertise many SMEs don't have. I have worked with many of them in the past as my clients and can attest to that. Even many larger companies have IT expertise and practices that aren't anywhere near what you would expect.

Well, nothing integrates with Microsoft like Microsoft anyway that's for sure. Mac OS is actually very configurable and controllable with the right tools though (Casper Suite, Absolute Manage, Profile Manager + ARD, etc) in the hands of a tech as knowledgeable about Macs as the average Windows tech is about Windows and SCCM, GPP, etc.. In the hands of an inexperienced tech or without the right systems, of course it won't be. I don't think this is going to be the reality for the average 13 year old student of 2014. Perhaps their older siblings, but in 5 years time BYOD is likely to have a strong presence in many businesses and may be the expectation in most SMBs. BYOD has already made significant in-roads into business and education and this trend is very likely to continue as employees insist on using tools they are familiar and productive with, and businesses look to reduce costs and provide a work environment geared for Gen Y and beyond. The real reality is that corporate IT had better be prepared to deal with the BYOD movement and have systems that can cope with a myriad of user devices be they Windows, Mac, Linux. Chromebooks, etc.. Harder for IT? No doubt. Will the CEO care - hardly. The CEO will see it as a competitive advantage for recruiting, cost savings, and productivity. My point exactly.

We so use an Ubuntu live disc for some of the really hard to ferret out stuff and then use ClamAV and some other tools to try to clean a system if it hasn't been backed up and is important (usually a teacher's laptop or home computer). But, I was more taking "the best offense is a a good defence" approach. The best solution to a malware problem is to never have one and Linux, iOS, and OSX in that order are the best defence on that front at the moment.

1. Linux 2. OSX and iOS 3. For Windows - Avast!

You would need to do this with either ARD or something like Casper Suite, which can push out policies containing edited plist files with the custom settings. You can't do this with Profile Manager (unless I have really missed something in using it over the past two years!)

They are an ideal candidate for an SL150 Tape Library. They start out at 30 slots (LTO6) and can go up to 300 slots as they are modular. Don't let the fact it is Oracle scare you off. I just priced one recently and it was only about 3k more than a single tape drive from HP. I've been told Oracle are trying to take market share and are pricing these things at a fraction of their previous cost. http://www.oracle.com/us/products/servers-storage/storage/tape-storage/sl150-modular-tape-library/overview/index.html

That depends on the speed of your network and if you have USB 3.0 on your server. If you only have a 100Mb network then a USB 2.0 drive would work ok, but I would be more inclined to use a decent NAS with RAID (1, 6, or 10 depending on number of drives) than a USB for primary storage, servers can drop USB devices from time to time and unless you get at least a 2 bay USB drive you are only one drive failure from a restore.

A bad manager has no understanding or care of what difficulties may lie ahead, and will insist on trying to get blood from a stone. A good manager knows about the potential problems, but will insist on pushing through them because the goal is achievable and they will provide the resources to achieve it. Sometimes the resources necessary aren't what the tech thinks they are, sometimes they are. It's a good managers job to know the difference. However telling your manager how hard or impossible something is out of your ignorance (if a tech doesn't understand how to do something, it is ignorance isn't it? As ignorance means a lack of knowledge) then you wont' get very far. Telling them, "look, I need some time and a training course would be very good as this is the first time I/We have done this, and if we want to do it right..." is the correct answer rather than "No" or "It won't work" or "It's too hard". I do know of a school who fired ALL of their Techs because they stubbornly and absolutely refused to move in the direction the school wanted to go (introduce iPads). After nearly 12 months of complete resistance, they dumped their 3 techs and got different ones who said "Yes, we can do that" - and they did "do that". As well as doing a lot of other things the previous techs said couldn't be done. Most importantly, they achieved what the school wanted to achieve. If the Principal walked in today and told me that we were going to dump all of the iPads and roll out Surface Pros, I would certainly have some long and reasoned discussions with him about the reasons for this. However, if this is what the Principal and the school wanted, I'd best comply and do it as good as can be done or go find another job.