Posted by Don Kruse on Dec 20, 2011 in iPad, Mobile, Tech | 0 comments
Stumbling around the various IT sites in search of news and ideas I found a piece at IT Solutions Journal (ITSJ) which was actually from CIO.com. This is the way of so called “news” and “white papers” created for one site but distributed throughout the web to draw traffic and generate clicks for ads. The article had an title that particularly interests me:
Tablets in the Enterprise: Risks and Rewards
Tablets like the iPad can set your workforce free, but with benefits come risks and tradeoffs, from securing and supporting tablets to budgeting for them.
So…I am at a point where I am actively researching, testing, and budgeting the idea of migrating my legal team away from laptops to a powerful desktop teamed up with a well app-ed iPad.
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Posted by Don Kruse on Dec 20, 2011 in Android, Apps, iOS, iPad, iPhone, Mobile | 0 comments
Gigaom has short piece about which type of developers are making money for their apps: Android or iOS? So far it seems to be iOS developers but the Android marketplace is finding a way to monetize at the same level too.
http://gigaom.com/2011/12/20/androids-app-revenue-gap-and-how-developers-cope/
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Posted by Don Kruse on Nov 15, 2011 in Apps, iOS, iPad | 0 comments
My father-in-law asked me, shortly after he started using his first iPhone, what were my favorite Apps. I began showing him my network and server monitoring Apps but after a while he started to look at me like I was crazy. He said that none of the Apps I had shown him looked like fun. I like Apps that help me sleep at night and that is what I told him.
“You mean you don’t have any games?” my father-in-law said.
I am an IT administrator, also known as a sysadmin, so I use Apps to monitor nearly every piece of equipment on the firm’s network. Apps such as Lithium which monitors everything possible on the firm’s networks, an app for network scanning called Ping Lite, one for calculating subnets simply named aSubnet, and so on (you probably don’t know what a subnet is but every network has at least one).
To use an App like Lithium I had to set up a server to capture all the data as well as make changes to all the firm’s networked equipment. This took some time but it was worth the effort.
Then the iPhone and iPad Apps display the data for me with great detail. This graph is showing how fast the firm’s mail server is writing data to its hard drives. Having data like this literally at my finger tips helps me answer questions and make decisions.
The remarkable thing is that this data gets to my devices in real time.
Why did I tell you about an I.T. App? I find Apps for the things that interest me professionally. You will seek out Apps for the things you do or want to do. My father-in-law likes games but he is also interested in financial news. So I began to tell him about an App called Flipboard.
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Posted by Don Kruse on Jun 9, 2011 in Commentary, Tech | 0 comments
I was invited down to the Xerox campus by my copier rep to get a overview of Color Cube technology.
On the left of the green sign is the packaging for the color cube ink and the maintenance cartridge over 4 years to the right of the green sign is the equivalent packaging and waste for a color laser print. Enough said.
Storage space is a premium in an office. In the IT Dept. we generate a lot of waste and recycling plus we have a need to store a lot of products both expendable and durable. A printer that can reduce the burden of this storage usage and the resulting waste that is generated is a good thing.
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Posted by Don Kruse on Apr 28, 2011 in server, Troubleshooting | 0 comments
The firm I support has a problem with email; Like some people have a problem with alcohol or shoes. The users I support either think they need multiple copies of every email messages that is related to every client or they are required to receive and save copy after copy until their mail folders are over-flowing with redundant messages. To add insult to injury the process works like this: The legal assistants get copied on EVERY message that comes into the attorneys they support. So long story short this causes a problem for the mail server because it has trouble keeping up with indexing so many folders that are near or over 10,000 messages (items). And yes I have argued with the shareholders and legal assistants that there are better ways to do this but they just aren’t ready to make any big changes.
Based on my experience with various servers, file systems, 32-bit vs. 64-bit, and available RAM every server is going to have some upward limit on how many individual items it can reasonably index in a given amount of time. The result of having numerous mail user’s folders that have crept up to 10,000 or beyond means that the Kerio Connect system can fall behind simply because it hasn’t finished indexing. If it can’t index it can’t add new messages to that user’s folder and so on (somewhat similar to a cascade failure).
We are running Kerio Connect on a fast Intel Xserve with a RAID 5 with 7,200 RPM SATA drives. Now we could change the drives to a RAID 0 to speed things up a bit but that’s not an option right now (actually I am giving serious thought to putting in a flash-based boot drive for the OS and Kerio Connect and have the data on the RAID) or we could find some other method of speeding up disk access but I feel these mostly are workarounds. The server just isn’t that slow.
The one thing that must happen is that each user’s mail folders must be kept under 10,000 messages and so I established a policy with a 5,000 message limit (this gives us some cushion). After the break are the details of how I am using a shell script, Lingon, and Splunk to help us efficiently keep track of each user’s mail folder contents.
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