Kicking and Screaming I am Bloggin

If you have a few mintues and nothing to do (does this ever hapen) try this DIVA APPROVED little quiz for fun, I got 8 out of 10, howd you do?

It seems I hear this all the time from folks and I just don’t where it comes from.

Microsoft communicates us to death, I need a full time person just to read all the partner news coming from Redmond.

Let me help you out, here is your full time partner news filter, his name is Eric Ligman and he has a blog full of non-fluff, important, relivant, timely information. He doesn’t charge for this service, it won’t up your workmans comp bill, so once a week or so hop on over there and read it, or better yet subscribe to it’s rss feed at http://blogs.msdn.com/mssmallbiz/rss.xml

Here is a great example, this announcement just today about the new Vista Managed NewsGroup.

Well Sir, What Can I Say?

Did you miss the title of the blog?

I have only two blogging mentors, first the Diva herself who beat me into submission  to enter the blog world itself, and secondly you sir, my this is how you create a blog mentor ( btw thankx for hosting it). Neither of you said I was supposed to do something to expose it, nor have either of you mentioned what it is I need to do. I just assumed (ya I know) that it was an automatic blog thing. So I guess I will have to suffer along in anonymity until someone shares that great cosmic secrect.

So here I am minding my own business after having just approved a slug of patch Tuesday updates, when low and behold I notice a message pop into Outlook.

Alert on 1NEKTON at 2/14/2008 6:13:15 PM

The following disk is low on free disk space. Low levels of free disk space can cause performance problems and prevent users from saving files on the disk.

Drive Letter: L:

Free Disk Space: 201.000000. MB

% Free Disk Space: 0.670089.%

You can disable this alert or change its threshold by using the Change Alert Notifications task in the Server Management Monitoring and Reporting taskpad.

I guess I better take a look and see what is up, I know that is a 32 Gb partition. All it holds is some software install shares and the WSUS updates.

Well back when I originally installed WSUS 2.0 on this server it said something about making sure you had 5 or 6 Gb of free space, so I figured 4x that would be safe. Well along came WSUS 3.o and then SP1 and more things WSUS watches and now with these current updates we see

Now of course that server is on the other side of North Carolina.

But wait, I have ShadowProtectServer installed on it, so I find some available space on one of the Online Backup Drives, Stop the Internal Database SSEE## that WSUS runs on and grab an image of the L drive.

Next I stop the Server Service (I have a number of shares on the L Drive) and then blow away the L Partition, Create a new bigger L Partition, Restore the ShadowProtect Image, Change the drive letter to L, Start the Server Service and the other services that stopped. And finally reboot the server.

Time from the E-mail warning until the reboot 1 Hour and 20 minutes, less time than I would have spent driving one way!

So Thank You StorageCraft for the wonderful Valentines Day Gift, you gave me back my evening to spend with my lovley wife!

Well it is now 7:49 and the afore mentioned lovely wife is calling me for din din,

So Long and Have a Wonderful Evening, I know I will Now :>)

I have been using Vista for quite a while now, and it is finally starting to grow on me, hopefully not like a mold or fungus :>)

One of the things that still drives me nuts is the way it thinks it knows better than me what is in my folders, and not only does it get confused, but it passes that confusion on to other folders. Well someone figured out how to fix it, hop on over to THIS POST ON MY DIGITAL LIFE

And btw, Thankx to the SBS Diva for pointing me to this post.

Now if I could just stop the directory tree from jumping around, scrolling left and right by itself and auto-expanding. I know where I want to go today, and I am getting seasick trying to focus on the directory tree in file open/save dialogue boxes trying to get there.

Update, more info on tweaking folder setting HERE

This afternoon I got a link to see a Video on EBS taken at IT Forum.

I was excited to take a look as I have been invloved with the beta for quite some time now.

But when you go to the link to watch the video, you are forced to install the SilverLight plug-in just to watch it. Well that wouldn’t be too bad except it DOESN’T WORK, if anyone is out there listening, please make sure this CR@P works before you force it on us! What was wrong with good MS old media player, you know you click on the link and it plays the video, what a concept!

Silverlight error message
ErrorCode: 4001
Error Type: MediaError
Message: AG_E_NETWORK_ERROR

Hope you luck is better than mine, let me know how the video is if you can get it to play.

Well if you didn’t attend one of Eric Ligman’s live-meetings (like I suggested you should) on the new subscription licensing model, you missed yet another Big Announcement that could make you a bunch of money. I don’t know why he is giving you another chance at both of them, but hop on over to THIS POST and read about it before he changes his mind :>)

This morning I saw a post from Vlad that there was a SIMPLE Security Update to WordPress(the engine under this blog), so I figured why not. I read the simple instructions which said make sure to backup both the content and the database before proceeding. So of course I went to do that, well the content was no problem, I just ftp’d the entire blog to my local hard drive. However then the moron in me kicked in and I could not for the life of me figure out how to backup the database. After an hour or so of clicking links and reading articles, I decided to throw caution to the wind and just do the update.

The update went fine and only took a few minutes, but now I will be up all night realizing I am not smart enough to backup a database that would most likely fit on a floppy disk.

If you would like to see me sleep again some day and you know how to backup a mySQL database from a wordpress blog admin page, I would love to hear.

Happy New Year,

HA

Shhhh, don’t tell anyone, Vlad already thinks I am chipping away too much at his bad boy image, but I just heard he gave the SBS Diva and the Community at large  an early present.

I am just wondering who Susan was so mad at when this pic was snapped?

Is there a SQL guru out there that can help her now, where is hubby anyways?

I may be the only one in the world currently with this Chicken Little view of our industry

but at the risk of incurring the wrath of Mark Crall and Amy Luby, let me point out something that seems blatantly obvious to me.

I have been involved with this industry for a very long time and have seen it go through many changes. But the current stampede to Managed Services has me very concerned that my fellow service providers are helping the big guys push them right out of the market place. Sure right now it sounds great and they are showing you how you can make so much more money by jumping on this bandwagon, but once you have all your business neatly packaged up and automated, it will not take much for the big guys to undercut you dramatically enough for you to lose the majority if not all of your client base.

All I ask is that while you listen to the sales pitches from these companies wanting to sell you the backend services, to enable you to become the MSP raking in all that dough, remember the old adage, if it sounds too good to be true, it probably is too good to be true. Just stop and look down the road a few years at the very real possibly that the model will no longer require your participation.

Right now you are in the enviable position of trusted provider, and believe me they are full of envy, and looking for ways to replace you.  The first thing they need is you putting them into the trusted position, something much easier for you to do for them, then it is for them to for themselves. Maybe that’s why they are showing you the big carrot? There is nothing like greed to motivate folks.

I am not telling you to ignore the MSP model altogether, just have your exit strategy planned out ahead of time. Which one of the big guys do you want to end up working for, Dell, HP, Intel, Microsoft, Google or maybe McDonald’s, cause all they are going to need you for, is geeksquad / firedog kind of hands on labor. It will only be these big guys left in a few years after they gobble up the Level Platform’s and Autotask’s of today along with your client base.

The sky may not be falling yet, but I am keeping my hard hat close by!