Hello World! Joel from Skynet Solutions here. This is my first ever blog post, so I thought I’d use the opportunity and discuss my thoughts on purchasing the newly released iPhone 5. Unless you spend most of your time in the unexplored regions of the rainforest, you already know about the release of Apple’s new iPhone 5. And just like me, there are probably a lot of iPhone fans wondering if they should go for it and upgrade now.
My current phone is an iPhone 4, which doesn’t have some of the features of the “4S” like iCloud integration or being able to ask Siri the meaning of life. But my “4” is a great product that continues to serve me well, and since I seem to be immune to hype, I didn’t upgrade when the “4S” came out.
Now, I love playing with new gadgets, but I am also very aware of the realities of new product launches. I haven’t installed iOS 6 on my current phone yet for the same reason that when buying a car (new or used), I never buy the first model year after a fresh redesign. There are ALWAYS bugs to work out of a new product. This is especially true in the world of mobile phones where the pressure to be first with the latest innovations is tremendous. So when a new iOS comes out, I always wait a while before updating.
Exhibit “A”: Steve Jobs’ replacement Tim Cook just put out an apology for the problems with the new Maps app. As you’ve probably already heard, the Google-based Maps has been replaced by a homegrown app developed by Apple. There have been complaints about numerous mapping mistakes and misinformation about locations (much like when Google began their map project a few years ago). Apple is playing catch up, so it will take time to perfect it. If they can deal with the problems, this new version provides turn-by-turn directions with big, easy-to-read onscreen graphics, it re-directs you to alternate routes based on traffic, works when the screen is locked, and supports Siri, so it should be a real asset in your car.
About the problems, Cook also surprisingly said: “While we’re improving Maps, you can try alternatives by downloading map apps from the App Store like Bing, MapQuest and Waze, or use Google or Nokia maps by going to their websites and creating an icon on your home screen to their web app.” I bet that was a tough pill to swallow for a guy attempting to follow a predecessor like Steve Jobs. The new Maps app was obviously released too soon. Strike one. According to Cook, they are already working “non-stop” to fix the issues. And I’m sure they will. They can’t afford to squander their biggest asset, the loyal hoards of Apple fans.
Does this mean the iPhone 5 is no longer a consideration for me? Of course not. There have been similar iPhone problems in the past, such as dropping calls if you touch the wrong spot on an iPhone 4. Oh wait, isn’t that the phone I have now that I like so much?! In other words, this Maps problem too shall pass.
So for now, I am going to postpone the decision to buy. And in the meantime, I will look in-depth at some of the new features. But that’s a blog for another day.
Finally, the update I’ve been waiting for comes! Although it’s quite unfortunate it has come right after I’e now got my sights set on Jelly Bean, and now that Ice Cream Sandwich is yesterday’s news. Hopefully Samsung and other manufacturers will pick up the pace in releasing Android updates.
I used Samsung Kies to do the upgrade. I do not think this was an over-the-air upgrade; I just decided to check Kies, and it had an update.
Previously, Kies would say the firmware upgrade was not supported on this device. I upgraded Kies, and it instantly said there was a firmware upgrade for my phone.
Unfortunately, my phone was only at 30% battery. The software will not let you upgrade unless the phone is 100% charged. Use your A/C charger; it takes FOREVER to charge via USB 2.0.
A few of them are actually already available via the Samsung device and software. I guess Google decided having some of these features (ie. quick responses for incoming calls, the home, back, and current apps buttons) always available was a great idea. It is still pretty cool that those buttons are on the phone at the bottom already, not wasting screen space – so no real upgrade there. For other model phones, I imagine this is a HUGE upgrade.
Here is a list of things I noticed right away:
1. The phone is CRAZY FASTER. I mean WOW, I thought it was quick and fluid before. This is insane. It is like I added ram and a faster processor. Maybe it will change overtime, but so far I’m impressed!
2. Several apps instantly downloaded updates.
3. The default widgets like Google Search, Facebook, and AccuWeather were all added back to my home screen.
4. The widget on the home page that lets you turn off Wi-Fi, Bluetooth, etc. is no longer a single row with the button letting you see the rest; it is two rows, now letting you see it all.
5. The display of available widgets you can add is much cleaner looking. A+ job on this – seems planned versus thrown together like before.
6. The layout of the settings section is completely different. Again, this is laid out like there was thought put behind it instead of just a list of everything. Excellent upgrade! Wi-Fi is right at the top, and you can change what you are connected to with one touch instead of two touches into the menu. Battery status is also another one right there instead of having to go to About Phone then Battery Usage. Instead of having to do three steps to change your background wallpaper, you simply touch Display, and then the options you really want are right there. No more digging into settings to change the simple stuff.
7. There is now a nice security section. You can use Face Lock to let facial recognition unlock your phone. Also you can encrypt the entire phone or just the SD card.
8. Big changes to the Camera interface. It has tons more settings. You can tap and hold and then pick from 16 settings from shooting mode, timer, GPS tag, to white balance. You can also modify what four you see right away without tapping and holding on the initial screen.
9. Last but not least, Samsung Voice Talk. It is basic voice functionality like text messaging, calling, navigation, searching, etc., and it seems to work really well. I’ve set up my search button hold event to load this and auto listen.
All in all, I’m much happier with this update than I expected. All the new tweaks to the interface and the performance increase are excellent. I cannot wait to get my hands on a Jelly Bean interface!
Windows Secure Web Patch is a nasty new piece of malicious malware. Once your machine is infected, it locks you out of your anti-virus, internet, and task manager, even in safe mode. It also claims to show you tons of infections on your computer and offers to clean them for a price. Under no circumstance should you buy this rogue security software.
After looking around the web, I found a great article providing information on how to remove this from your machine. There is an additional minor step required. I’ll post below how you can remove this from your machine within 15-30 minutes, depending on the speed of your computer.
Step 1: Go to Command Prompt – From the desktop, click the start button, and then in the run field – type command
Step 2: Kill the Secure Web Patch Process Type: taskkill/IMprotector-scxb.exe /F
In my current position I am responsible for the support and management of all aspects of my employer’s IT infrastructure. This ranges from firewalls and network switches to servers and printers to phones and desktops. While my employer is a not-for-profit agency we have been able to implement an enterprise-class infrastructure thanks in part to several grants and donations we have received. It is my hope to make these enterprise-class methods & best-practices available to small-businesses and educational institutions at a fraction of the cost through the use of user-friendly open-source software.
At the core of these best-practices is the use of virtualization technology which has numerous benefits such as:
consolidate under-utilized physical servers to reduce hardware, electricity, and cooling cost
isolate applications to individual virtual machinesto prevent incompatibility issues
run multiple operating systems utilizing a single hardware platform
If you have only one virtual machine host server then local storage is sufficient however if you have several servers working in conjunction with each other then you need some sort of centralized storage to utilize those servers to their fullest potential. Centralized storage usually consists of a SAN or NAS that makes disk space available to the servers using the NFS, iSCSI, or Fiber-Channel protocols.
I have not yet had the opportunity to work with Fiber-Channel due to the costs associated but for the past few years I have having been using the NFS & iSCSI protocols in virtual infrastructures. There are numerous discussions on the Internet stating that one is better than the other but few have gone into the details as to why.
Recently I have been involved in several discussions with some of my peers regarding the different filesystems (EXT3, EXT4, UFS, ZFS) available in today’s mainstream Linux distributions. Each has its own set of requirements, benefits, and drawbacks. As a result of these discussions I decided that I wanted to see for myself which protocol and filesystem provided the best centralized storage performance for virtualization host servers.
For hardware, my test environment consists of a Supermicro Xeon 3450 based server with 16GB ram and a 500GB hard drive connected via cross-over cable to an HP Proliant N40L Microserver with 8GB ram, a 250Gb hard-drive, and two 1.5TB Western Digital Black hard-drives. For software, the Supermicro server is running VMWare vSphere 5.0 and the HP server will serve as the centralized storage running FreeNAS, CentOS, Ubuntu, & OpenFiler. The servers are connected via dedicated network cards and a cross-over cable to eliminate the possibility of a network switch’s backplane bandwidth affecting performance.
After a bit of research I came up with four procedures/applications that I wanted to use that would consistently test each of the protocols and filesystems on the different distributions. The applications are installed in a Windows XP virtual machine hosted on the Supermicro’s local datastore but ran on a secondary thin-provisioned 80GB virtual hard-disk that is hosted on the HP’s datastore.
Use the vSphere client to copy a 3.05GB ISO file from the Supermicro’s local datastore to the HP’s datastore (and vice-versa) and time how long it takes.
Run ATTO Disk Benchmark v2.47 inside the virtual machine with all of the default settings. This program transfers data ranging from .5KB to 8MB both to (write) and from (read) the secondary virtual disk and measures the transfer rate.
Run Intel NAS Performance Test v1.7.1 inside the virtual machine with all of the default settings. This program is capable of running around 12 different benchmark tests on the secondary virtual disk.
HD Video Playback, 2x HD Playback, 4x HD Playback
HD Video Record
HD Playback & Record
Content Creation
Office Productivity
File copy to/from NAS
Dir copy to/from NAS
Photo Album
4. Run Iometer v inside the virtual machine using the procedure and config file provided on http://technodrone.blogspot.com/2010/06/benchmarking-your-disk-io.html. Iometer creates a 50GB file on the secondary virtual disk and the following tests are ran for 5 minutes each with a 2 minute lead up in an attempt to produce more “real world†scenarios.
4K; 100% Read; 0% random (Regular NTFS Workload 1)
4K; 75% Read; 0% random (Regular NTFS Workload 2)
4K; 50% Read; 0% random (Regular NTFS Workload 3)
4K; 25% Read; 0% random (Regular NTFS Workload 4)
4K; 0% Read; 0% random (Regular NTFS Workload 5)
8K; 100% Read; 0% random (Exchange Workload 1)
8K; 75% Read; 0% random (Exchange Workload 2)
8K; 50% Read; 0% random (Exchange Workload 3)
8K; 25% Read; 0% random (Exchange Workload 4)
8K; 0% Read; 0% random (Exchange Workload 5)
8K; 50% Read; 50% random (Exchange Workload 6)
64K; 100% Read; 100% sequential (SQL Workload 1)
64K; 100% Write: 100% sequential (SQL Workload 2)
64K; 100% Read; 100% Random (SQL Workload 3)
64K; 100% Write: 100% Random (SQL Workload 4)
256K; 100% Read; 100% sequential (Backup)
256K; 100% Write100% sequential (Restore)
Ideally each of the above tests would be ran a minimum of three times and the results averaged to get the final results for each test for each OS, filesystem, & protocol. However doing so would have taken way longer than I can spare for this project so each test was ran just one time.
I’m not going to go into considerable detail about each of the operating systems I’m testing as each could be a full article in itself. Instead I’m going to just cover the basic setup of each and focus more on the results.
Part 2 FreeNAS 8
FreeNAS 8.0.4 x64 ZFS NFS
The first operating system tested was FreeNAS 8.0.4 x64. I installed the operating system to the 250GB hard-drive and created a ZFS mirror of the two 1.5TB hard-drives. A secondary subnet IP address is assigned to a dedicated NIC that can be accessed from the storage NIC on the ESXi host and a NFS share is created on the ZFS mirror. The NFS share is mounted inside of ESXi and the first set of tests are began.
Copying the 3.05GB ISO file to the NFS datastore took 16m 35s for a throughput of 3.04 MB/s. Copying the ISO from the NFS datastore took 2m 16s for a throughput of 22.71 MB/s.
Screen capture of the ATTO benchmark results:
3. Screen capture of the Intel NASPT benchmark results:
4. Summary of the Iometer results after taking approximately 4 hours to create the 50GB test file:
It would appear that the overall results show good read performance but slow write performance for FreeNAS 8 running NFS via a ZFS mirror.
FreeNAS 8.0.4 x64 ZFS iSCSI
Next the NFS share is removed from ESXi and FreeNAS and replaced with an iSCSI extent. Unfortunately FreeNAS 8 doesn’t support device extents on a ZFS mirror so a file extent had to be used. A file extent is simply a single file that is shared and looks like a single disk to the ESXi host. This is not recommended in production environments because if something happens to that file all of the virtual machines could be lost. All other settings remain the same as the first test.
Copying the 3.05GB ISO file to the iSCSI datastore took 49s for a throughput of 61.63 MB/s. Copying the ISO from the NFS datastore took 2m 10s for a throughput of 23.23 MB/s.
Screen capture of the ATTO benchmark results:
3. Screen capture of the Intel NASPT benchmark results:
4. Summary of the Iometer results after taking approximately 30 min to create the 50GB test file:
It would appear that the overall results show a slight drop in read performance but considerable improvement in write performance for FreeNAS 8 running iSCSI via a ZFS mirror.
FreeNAS 8.0.4 x64 UFS NFS
Next the iSCSI file extent and the ZFS mirror are deleted and replaced with a UFS mirror and NFS share.
Copying the 3.05GB ISO file to the NFS datastore took 58m 28s for a throughput of .86 MB/s. Copying the ISO from the NFS datastore took 3m 4s for a throughput of 16.41 MB/s.
Screen capture of the ATTO benchmark results:
3. Screen capture of the Intel NASPT benchmark results:
4. Summary of the Iometer results after taking over 24 hours and crashing FreeNAS to create only 30GB of the 50GB test file:
FreeNAS 8.0.4 x64 UFS iSCSI
Next the NFS share is removed from ESXi and FreeNAS and replaced with an iSCSI extent. Again, since FreeNAS 8 doesn’t support device extents on a ZFS mirror a file extent had to be used.
Copying the 3.05GB ISO file to the iSCSI datastore took 1m 26s for a throughput of 35.12 MB/s. Copying the ISO from the NFS datastore took 2m 14s for a throughput of 22.54 MB/s.
Screen capture of the ATTO benchmark results:
3. Screen capture of the Intel NASPT benchmark results:
4. Summary of the Iometer results after taking approximately 30 min to create the 50GB test file:
FreeNAS 8 Summary of results
In order to get a better look at each of the test results I put them all into LibreOffice Calc so that I could see each test side by side and bolden/underline the top performer of each:
Summary of the copy ISO test for each filesystem and protocol:
2. Summary of the ATTO test for each filesystem and protocol:
3. Summary of the Intel NASPT test for each filesystem and protocol:
4. Summary of the Iometer test for each filesystem and protocol:
Based upon each of these summaries it would appear that ZFS is definitely the winner between the two filesysems. It is interesting to note that if the need for a datastore with faster reads is greater then NFS is the way to go but if faster writes are needed then iSCSI is the way to go. However in a production environment I can not recommend the use of iSCSI in FreeNAS unless a hardware raid solution is used for the ZFS drivespace so that file extents are not used.
Here at Skynet, we use a lovely little date picker script written by monkeyphysics (no real name on his site that I could find). You can find the original script including a donate link for the author and licensing here: MONKEYPHYSICS MOOTOOLS DATEPICKER
All of the sudden, the modern browsers decided to create an issue that caused picking dates in the past to be very glitchy. DJ described it by saying It really is like one of those whack-a-mole games.
Honestly, I think the so-called glitch should have been a problem from day one. The script renders two different divs at the same time, and it simply just hides the inactive one. I added a z-index so that the visible one would be on top. Without this, it was hit or miss how the click event would bubble.
It was a very easy fix. I added the following lines of code on line 299, pushing what was on line 299 below the added code.
Adobe has released its newest versions of its industry standard software, CS6. To everyone’s disappointment, or at least mine, Adobe Edge is still not a finalized product included in their Creative Suite. Although they have released a great solution called Creative Cloud, a subscription service offering access to all CS6 applications as well as other cloud services. This facilitates the integration of desktop Adobe software with the company’s growing staple of tablet and smartphone applications.Creative Cloud is priced at $49.99 per month for an annual membership, or $74.99 per month on a month-to-month basis. The service is also being offered at a special introductory rate of $29.99 per month for current users of Adobe’s CS3, CS4, CS5, and CS5.5 software. This service can save you a lot of money and time if you use these programs on a daily basis. An annual membership over the span of three years will have paid for an entire Adobe Creative Suite, and we all know it stinks to buy a $3500 program that is upgraded within a year. Having access to all Adobe programs across multiple platforms, and getting automatic updates for all of your Adobe programs as they come out is a win-win situation for me. http://www.adobe.com/products/creativesuite.html http://www.adobe.com/aboutadobe/pressroom/pressreleases/201204/042312AdobeCreativeCloud.html
