Link Aggregation/iSCSI on OpenSolaris

Setting up iSCSI on a 2008.11 OpenSolaris box. Link aggregation doesn’t play well with NWAM, so NWAM has to be disabled (svcadm disable nwam). Make sure to `svcadm enable network:physical`after NWAM is disabled, so you still have networking!

Helpful Links:

• http://www.tjhsst.edu/admin/livedoc/index.php/ISCSI – general iSCSI setup
• http://wikis.sun.com/display/OpenSolarisInfo/How+to+Change+From+Automatic+to+Manual+Network+Configuration – automatic to manual networking

Helpful Commands

• tail –f /var/adm/messages (for debugging)
• devfsadm –Cv – clean up the /dev/[r]dsk directory to correctly reflect all connected disks

AP Literature (Green): Third Quarter Calendar

Important dates coming up soon:

19 February – Hamlet, Act III due
23 February – copy-ready poems for Poetry Seminar due, poetry timed writing
24 February – Hamlet, Act IV due

Edit, 5 April 2012 - I've taken down the link for the calendar since that doesn't exist here anymore.

Taylor Swift Contest

A few days ago, a contest to get a Taylor Swift concert at your high school was announced, and the contest is already quite skewed. The rules of the contest allow for web voting and for texting from Verizon phones (Verizon is the sponsor of the contest, so obviously they’re not going to allow texting from phones other than theirs).  Shortly after the contest started, the web voting crashed and even legitimate votes haven’t been counted. A student I know emailed one of the administrators of the contest, who said that the web voting would probably be back up sometime tomorrow or Tuesday. This is unfair to the public schools, as the students attending them are probably in a lower financial bracket than those going to private schools (of which the top three schools in this contest are), and thus are less likely to have unlimited texting to win the contest.

Texting prices are a whole different story. There are plenty of complaints elsewhere on the Internet, so I will not touch on them today.

Windows Live Writer for Drupal Blogs

So I guess I decided to post again. I got Windows Live Writer set up for Drupal, and it was a fairly (very) simple process. Directions on how to set it up are available here: Windows Live Writer and Drupal 6: Client Configuration. Windows Live Writer seems to be a fairly extensible program, with plenty of options for inserting media, saving, adding in tables (oh yes, I always want to add in tables), and so forth. I figure I’ll try this out for a bit (and who knows, it might cause me to start blogging) and report how it works out a month or two down the road.

I originally discovered this software a few months back when I poked around home.live.com for the things they had around there. For Microsoft in the online world, it’s a start, but they have a while to go to get people to switch to it. One neat feature is the SkyDrive, though it lacks a “drive” feature in Windows which would make it actually useable. There’s no way I’m going to upload individual files or folders to the web interface to back them up…just no…

January Biotech Calendar Posted

January Biotech calendar posted; attached

2009 Presidential Inauguration

8:09AM - Sheesh! This is definitely going to make a new day in Internet history, too. According to Akamai, internet traffic is already 20% above normal, and the actual Inauguration doesn't start for another 4 hours. Will it be able to top the Election?

8:06AM - Interesting article: http://www.nytimes.com/2009/01/20/us/politics/20move.html. That pretty much /is/ magic in the logistical sense.

7:56AM - The Metro stations are full! And by full, I mean full with lines of people waiting. It'll be fun to look back on these past few days to see how the Metro system has handled the crowds. it was never designed for anything of this magnitude.

I'm not surprised the Mall is almost filled already, this is a historic day for the country. The actual inauguration doesn't even start until 12PM, though, so these people have quite a while to wait. One thing that's interesting is that he's using Lincoln's bible as what he's swearing in on.

2009 Educause Conference

Just got back from the 2009 Educause conference in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania on Thursday evening. I went up with Mr. Washer to present about TJ's implementation of Sun Rays in the school. The trip overall was pretty amazing. We left TJ at around 10:00am EST on Wednesday, and drove through rain the whole way. The traffic wasn't that bad for the majority of the trip, except for the west side of 495 around DC that we were on.

We got there around 1 (3 hour car drive, not bad), went to check in and get the goodies (including a Mini Maglite as a gift for presenting) and got settled in the hotel rooms (which were pretty nice - check out my pics in the Gallery). Went to lunch at By George's restaurant in the Reading Terminal Market (a short walk from the Loews Hotel where the conference was). Had a Sausage, roasted peppers & caramelized onions Calzone. It was pretty good, actually. The ironic thing about eating there was that the wifi at the Market was free (~$11/day at the hotel).

The only session I was able to attend (besides our own of course) was the one presented by Derek Kan (IT Project Manager) of George Mason about designing and implementing an IT Project Management System. I couldn't relate to it much since we haven't anything like this at TJ since we're so small, but it was interesting nonetheless.

One of the projects that we were going to try to accomplish before the presentation was to get one of the Tadpole laptops to connect to the TJ IPSec VPN to demo what the laptops could do, and also what TJ had deployed for students and faculty. After the GMU session we met with the Sun and Tadpole people to try and get the VPN working on the Tadpole laptop (unsuccessful in the end), then went to the Sun-sponsored reception. Some of the food they had there was unknown to me, but then again it's just a reception not a full dinner. After talking with Mr. Washer and Lisa (our Sun K-12 rep) for about 45 minutes, some (at that time unknown) guy came up to us and introduced himself - he owns his own media company - and we got talking about why we were there, about our presentation, etc. He and Washer got talking after he mentioned he used to be a speechwriter for president Clinton.

The reception finished and we went out to dinner at Jones (kindly paid for by Sun). I personally had fried chicken (pics in the Gallery), but I'm not sure what anyone else had (looked good though). After this, went back to the hotel and went to bed in a nice, comfortable bed :)

I don't quite feel like finishing this post since I'm not a true 'blogger', but feel free to poke me and I might.

Session Summary: The Need for Collaboration: Mobile and Secure Ubiquitous Access in Heterogeneous Environments