Monday. Opening day. I had trouble getting to sleep last night due to a poor choice of bed-time reading (don't read action, don't read action, don't read action). And had to get up at 6am body time in order to get breakfast before the morning keynote. There be zombies.
Breakfast was uninspired. As per usual, the hashbrowns had cooled to a gellid mass before I found everything and got a seat.
The Monday keynotes are always the CxO talks about strategy and where we're going. Today a mess of press releases from Novell give a good idea what the talks were about. Hovsepian was first, of course, and was actually funny. He gave some interesting tid-bits of knowledge.
Another thing he mentioned several times in association with Fossa and agility, is mergers and acquisitions. This is not something us Higher Ed types ever have to deal with, but it is an area in .COM land that requires a certain amount of IT agility to accommodate successfully. He mentioned this several times, which suggests that this strategy is aimed squarely at for-profit industry.
Also, SAP has apparently selected SLES as their primary platform for the SMB products.
Pat Hume from SAP also spoke. But as we're on Banner, and it'll take a sub-megaton nuclear strike to get us off of it, I didn't pay attention and used the time to send some emails.
Oh, and Honeywell? They're here because they have hardware that works with IDM. That way the same ID you use for your desktop login can be tied to the RFID card in your pocket that gets you into the datacenter. Spiffy.
ATT375 Advanced Tips & Tricks for Troubleshooting eDir 8.8
A nice session. Hard to summarize. That said, they needed more time as the Laptops with VMWare weren't fast enough for us to get through many of the exercises. They also showed us some nifty iMonitor tricks. And where the high-yield shoot-your-foot-off weapons are kept.
BUS202 Migrating a NetWare Cluster to OES2
Not a good session. The presenter had a short slide deck, and didn't really present anything new to me other than areas where other people have made major mistakes. And to PLAN on having one of the linux migrations go all lost-data on you. He recommended SAN snapshots. It shortly digressed into "Migrating a NetWare Cluster to Linux HA", which is a different session all together. So I left.
TUT215 Integrating Macintosh with Novell
A very good session. The CIO of Novell Canada was presenting it, and he is a skilled speaker. Apparently Novell has written a new AFP stack from scratch for OES2 Sp1, since NETATALK is comparatively dog slow. And, it seems, the AFP stack is currently out performing the NCP stack on OES2 SP1. Whoa! Also, the Banzai GroupWise client for Mac is apparently gorgeous. He also spent quite a long time (18 minutes) on the Kanaka client from Condrey Consulting. The guy who wrote that client was in the back of the room and answered some questions.
Breakfast was uninspired. As per usual, the hashbrowns had cooled to a gellid mass before I found everything and got a seat.
The Monday keynotes are always the CxO talks about strategy and where we're going. Today a mess of press releases from Novell give a good idea what the talks were about. Hovsepian was first, of course, and was actually funny. He gave some interesting tid-bits of knowledge.
- Novell's group of partners is growing, adding a couple hundred new ones since last year. This shows the Novell 'ecosystem' is strong.
- 8700 new customers last year
- Novell press mentions are now only 5% negative.
- High Capacity Computing
- Policy Engines
- Orchestration
- Convergence
- Mobility
Another thing he mentioned several times in association with Fossa and agility, is mergers and acquisitions. This is not something us Higher Ed types ever have to deal with, but it is an area in .COM land that requires a certain amount of IT agility to accommodate successfully. He mentioned this several times, which suggests that this strategy is aimed squarely at for-profit industry.
Also, SAP has apparently selected SLES as their primary platform for the SMB products.
Pat Hume from SAP also spoke. But as we're on Banner, and it'll take a sub-megaton nuclear strike to get us off of it, I didn't pay attention and used the time to send some emails.
Oh, and Honeywell? They're here because they have hardware that works with IDM. That way the same ID you use for your desktop login can be tied to the RFID card in your pocket that gets you into the datacenter. Spiffy.
ATT375 Advanced Tips & Tricks for Troubleshooting eDir 8.8
A nice session. Hard to summarize. That said, they needed more time as the Laptops with VMWare weren't fast enough for us to get through many of the exercises. They also showed us some nifty iMonitor tricks. And where the high-yield shoot-your-foot-off weapons are kept.
BUS202 Migrating a NetWare Cluster to OES2
Not a good session. The presenter had a short slide deck, and didn't really present anything new to me other than areas where other people have made major mistakes. And to PLAN on having one of the linux migrations go all lost-data on you. He recommended SAN snapshots. It shortly digressed into "Migrating a NetWare Cluster to Linux HA", which is a different session all together. So I left.
TUT215 Integrating Macintosh with Novell
A very good session. The CIO of Novell Canada was presenting it, and he is a skilled speaker. Apparently Novell has written a new AFP stack from scratch for OES2 Sp1, since NETATALK is comparatively dog slow. And, it seems, the AFP stack is currently out performing the NCP stack on OES2 SP1. Whoa! Also, the Banzai GroupWise client for Mac is apparently gorgeous. He also spent quite a long time (18 minutes) on the Kanaka client from Condrey Consulting. The guy who wrote that client was in the back of the room and answered some questions.