The design concepts underpinning the Supermicro FatTwin are something I would hold up as “game changing.”  The reasons why are explored in a review I wrote for The Register a while back, but the product is so good it’s worth expanding that review a little.  Free from any real editorial constraints, I think it’s time to take a bit of a wander through what this equipment can actually mean to a systems administrator. So what’s a FatTwin anyways?  A FatTwin is a brand name used by SuperMicro to describe their latest in dense-but-powerful server offerings.  Two dual-processor servers per U, 4 U per chassis for a total of 8 2P servers in a 4U enclosure.  There is no shared backplane for networking or other system components.  The only thing shared by the chassis is power.  This drives the cost of the chassis down so that if you are paranoid and want a spare chassis on the shelf you can probably afford it without breaking the bank.    Isn’t a shared power plane a single point of failure? Yep; a shared power plane is a single point of failure.  If you somehow manage to tank the shared power plane in the chassis you will not be able to light up half of the nodes.  One failure and half of the systems go.  The shared power plane is an intermediate step between single-everything as would be found in entirely discrete systems, and shared-many-systems as is found in blade servers.  A typical blade backplane has hundreds of individual traces; a myriad of single points of failure that could go wrong.  When compared to blades, the choice of “shared power only” offers simplicity; it has the bare minimum of traces and just carries power.  The result is that the power backplane on...

Hit the jump to see the Alienware X51 Video Review! Additional Skyrim silliness at 4:10.  Watch me die over and over! The song used for the Skyrim footage is “Redshirt” by Jonathan Coulton.  You can buy it...

Update: Well, it looks like the site is more or less in working order.  There’s a webserver with a domain name.  There’s a WordPress install and a theme.  There’s some content and an “about us” page.  That’s the start of a website, mehinks! Getting comments up and running will take some more time.  Having a website “more or less functional” is a far cry from “ready to compete with the big boys.”  Still, it’s a place to publish reviews that I believe readers want to read; that’s the part that really matters. We’ll tack on chrome as we go. So it looks like We Break Tech is live, ladies and gentlemen!  We Break Tech so you don’t have to; let us begin… Original text: Hey everyone!  We’re just slapping a few things together here to get the site up and running.  Please bear with us during this necessary birthing process.  Thanks for your patience!...

This was originally posted in slightly altered form on trevorpott.com, in response to comments made on The Register for an article written for that publication. A copy of the original article is posted in Tech Blog under the title Internet: Do you speak it? First: let’s admit that there does not exist primary science that conclusively and definitively pegs the exact percentage of our population for whom a social media site has become “the lens through which they view all content on the internet.”  I would go so far as to say that this is A) an impossibility and B) functionally irrelevant.  The percentage will be in constant flux as the habits of individuals (and groups) change. But there are a number of studies that have been conducted so far that hint at this, and the reality of it is considered “common knowledge” amongst a certain brand of IPM nerd. The proof will out when the science is done, but studies to really refine the error bars around the exact percent of users for whom this is true are only now getting underway. One person you could talk to about this is Scott Galloway, professor at NYU School of Business. He is considered one of the more notable digital strategy experts. Consider also the numerous studies being done showing how little email is being used by young people, with Facebook rapidly slotting into the role that email once filled. (Many argue that Twitter is slotting into the role that Google once filled.) Dr. Michael Fenichel – amongst many, many others – has done a great deal of hard, primary research into Facebook/Social Media/Internet usage.  Indeed, their research has convinced them that Facebook/Internet Addiction Disorder is a very real phenomenon, and should be added to...

Get searchable, get on Facebook – or lose your customers This article was first published by The Register on February 24, 2012. The original can be found here. Today I wanted to buy a metal business card case I could carry around in my pocket. I asked Google Maps politely if it knew where in Edmonton I could find such a widget, preferably on the way home. Google didn’t have the faintest clue where I could get such a thing, no matter how delicately I phrased the request. I eventually switched to Google proper, asked Bing and even tried twitter. I only ever really came up with three viable results, all of which were at least 15 km in the wrong direction, and I had no intention of wasting two hours (and $20 of gas) trekking across the bridge in rush hour to pick up a few $10 cases. In a city of one million people, less than a handful of companies spoke enough internet to have relevant search results on Google, and none of them have figured out how to integrate with Google Maps. Local businesses desperately need a lesson in Internet Presence Management (IPM). IPM encompasses the totality of a company (or individual’s) online presence. Far more than simple Search Engine Optimization (SEO), it covers the existence (or lack thereof) of an online catalogue of goods and services, social media usage, and various flavours of astroturfing. While it is traditional for IT types to deride and disparage all aspects of IPM, it has become absolutely essential to the survival of the modern business. Gaming Google isn’t enough; its influence is all too often overstated. IT types like to make jokes about people who believe that the internet is a little blue “e”,...

This article was originally written by Josh Folland in April 2012 on www.egeek.ca. One of my passions is eSports. As an eSports fanatic, my journey has taken me to the world of commentary . One of the skills that is incredibly useful to have in the world of eSports commentary is a working knowledge of how to run a live stream. This was even more important in 2010 when I began, because the tools were primitive and the ability to use them was a rare commodity. Originally, the way to do things was to use a combination the free-to-use Flash Media Live Encoder (FMLE) to broadcast the stream, the tools inside VH Multi Camera Studio to efficiently and effectively capture what was on your screen, and finally irfanview to add screen overlays such as sponsor logos. These tools are free to use and at the time, they were good enough. Being able to run a live stream of whatever gaming content you wanted from your own home without the need of a $30,000+ telecaster setup was a very new idea; however it was one that entirely redefined the way the 18-34 male demographic consumes gaming-related media. This interested several companies. The creators of VH Multi Camera Studio, Split Media Labs set out to take their product one step further and create an easy-to-use, all-in-one solution for live streaming calledXsplit. Xsplit was free during its initial beta stages but has moved on to a subscription model now that they have released version 1.0. XSplit’s main competition is Wirecast by Telestream, which comes with a much heftier price tag. Each one has some pros and cons outside of the price tag. Wirecast’s interface is absolutely brilliant: built on layers, you can manipulate each scene with maximum...

This post was originally published in a slightly altered version on www.trevorpott.com, October 1, 2012.   Microsoft’s licensing is a problem. For a company that makes its bread and butter on the midmarket, they sure can seem hostile to those of us who live and work in this arena.  Indeed, Microsoft’s licensing compares more accurately to other enterprise players.  Oracle licensing is byzantine and overtly a profit-maximization approach, but they don’t have anywhere near as many SKUs in play as Microsoft. IBM is a good comparison; they have a similar number of SKUs, and no incentive to make their licensing comprehensible to normal people. Contrast VMware to Microsoft as a “complete experience.”  Microsoft’s offerings are incredibly powerful.  As this review clearly shows, the joined-up nature of the System Center suite can enable a “total package” that overwhelms anything VMware can bring to bear.   That said, VMware licensing is simple. Truly understanding Microsoft’s licensing – enough to make sure you aren’t paying a dollar more than you have to – is a career that requires the full time efforts of an intelligent, educated individual. VMware’s products are comparative child’s play to install and administer.  It took me three weeks of concerted effort to install a test lab with enough software to test System Center Suite 2012 against its two immediate predecessors. To contrast, it took less than an hour to do the same with VMware. Interaction with Microsoft’s licensing department always leaves me with the impression that I’ve been had; there’s a scam afoot and I’m not the one running it. I can’t speak to how Microsoft treats their customers with over 1000 seats. My customers are all between 1 and 1000 seats. Most are between 50 and 250 seats. What I can say is that in...

This was originally published on trevorpott.com, August 29, 2010. “Simple” is a relative term; this how-to is intended for readers with a reasonable working knowledge of Linux.   I can’t afford a really pricy third-party spam filtering option.  GFI, Symantec, even Microsoft offer up some pretty robust solutions.  They are pricy though, and I don’t see why I should bother fighting that particular funding war when there are some easy solutions available for free.  In my particular environment, I run an Exchange 2010 server front-ended by a CentOS box running Sendmail, SpamAssassin, ClamAV and a few others. The first and most important thing is to of course go get the latest and greatest CentOS.  As of the time of this write-up that would be CentOS 5.5.  Toss it in a virtual machine and install it with nothing but the bare bones.  In my case, I gave it two interfaces; one directly externally accessible, and the other on my local LAN.  (I trust iptables to keep the baddies out as much as I do any other firewall, so I see little reason to hide the spam server behind a separate firewall and port forward.)  Let’s get to the build. 0) Set up your IP addressing according to your own internal schema.  Pointing the spamserver at your internal DNS (probably your domain controller) saves you having to build extensive hosts files on the spam server.  (It will be talking to your active directory, so using your AD’s DNS is a good plan.) 1) Enable the RPMforge repo.  (https://rpmrepo.org/RPMforge/Using) I use this for the simple reason that they have a tendency to keep ClamAV significantly more up-to-date than RedHat (and thus CentOS) do.  If you don’t use RPMforge, eventually ClamAV will get so out of date it...

This post was originally published in a longer form on trevorpott.com on April 7,2012.   I have recently been involved in an interesting debate focused on the concept of “bring your own device” computing (BYOD).  I argue that no company will go out of business implementing BYOD, while others argue strenuously against the entire concept except under very narrowly limited circumstances. Previous iterations of the argument focused on the costs of BYOD (is it cheaper?), the security (isn’t BYOD a security threat?), demand from end users,  and possible  resistance from IT. I make the argument in the latter case that there are enough unemployed IT guys out there right now that resistance from IT is functionally irrelevant.  IT operations staff are functionally disposable; there are so many of us that for every one you fire a dozen more are willing to step into the position.  That varies by region, but I feel that on a global scale this is largely accurate. IT staffing deficiencies are largely in development, Big Data, niche virtualisation deployments, Metal as a Service (MaaS) or in specialisations such as CCIEs, high-end storage and so forth.  Sysadmins are a dime a dozen, and this is a fundamental premise to be borne in mind when reading the below. BYOD policy MAY be more expensive, but this is not guaranteed.  There are many high profile examples of successful deployments.  (Intel and Google spring to mind.)  Thus when the business side of the company comes to IT and says “make it happen,” they know it’s possible.  The question is “do your extant IT staff have the skill to pull it off properly?” If they don’t, you fire them and you get new IT staff. Think Small Most businesses are small and medium enterprises.  They...

If you run a business, your website represents you online in the same way that your bricks-and-mortar store represents you in the physical world. This is true whether or not you actually use your website to sell things. (Imagine that someone walks into your business. Even if they are just browsing or asking for a quote, everything that they see and hear while they are in your building contributes to their overall impression of you.) So why is it that anybody who spends even a little bit of time shopping online has run into numerous websites that completely ignore the impression that they are making on customers? I can only guess. Maybe it has to do with the fact that building a website is often a collaborative project, which creates challenges. There could potentially be a whole team of specialists working on the website; programmer, graphic designer, copywriter, and photographer, to name a few. The question that needs to be asked is: has anyone been assigned to take a more general view and figure out if the finished project is doing its job?  Judging by some of the websites I’ve used recently, the answer could be “no.” Let me share a web design horror story. Names have been withheld, to protect the guilty, but I assure you that this site exists.   You’re doing it wrong An international pizza joint with an outlet near my house has had a sexy website upgrade. It has mouth-watering photography and cool interactive menus. It is also now nearly impossible to order pizza. Here is what happens when you try: 1) On arriving at the site’s main page, you are asked for your postal code. This is presumably so the site can customize the menus you see based...