ITIL, Airports, LinuxWorld and a new lab "server" laptop

I have spent the last week in ITIL foundation training. It was/is the three day course BMC offers to everyone. It is named ITIL Foundation, and it included a cool BMC original learning tool called “Airport Simulation – BSM International”. The course I attended was taught by the always excellent Atwell Williams, who I have worked with in the past in IT, and who is now in the BMC CTO office. I knew from experience that Atwell is a great teacher and speaker, and he did not disappoint.

Despite all the seeming buzz, and dare I say it, seeming hype around ITIL, BSM, and the value of the AirSim version of the Foundation course, I was not prepared for how good the course would be. I guess I have a bit of a cynic in me about such things. It was utterly amazing how much the Airport Simulation added to the course learning. In all my days of going to professional classes (and I am no spring chicken) I have to say this was the best group participation exercise I have ever been involved in. Way better than those group trust, falling backwards and hoping they catch you things!

As is my habit when I take classes, I asked a lot of questions and generally was disruptive in the class, so I apologize to Atwell for that. He deserved better. But BMC was silly enough to give him to me, and I was not going to lose the chance to learn as much as I could from someone who really gets this.

As a Linux guy, I was curious how this experience would inform not just my day job as an R&D Support lab manager, but my secret life as a Linux maven. Clearly BSM and ITIL has a great deal of intersection with my day job: I won't belabor the value of them here. Plenty of places to read about that here at talkbmc. Suffice it to say that I get it, and I am a believer.

However, in the larger context of BSM and ITIL and CMDB's it was a little weird to know that Linux would in some sense be a CI in the CMDB, related to a larger abstract concept of a 'service'. Nuts: it turns out Linux is not the goal or an end in and off itself. It is just a way to achieve the business goal in a recoverable, serviceable, and reliable way.

I would feel smaller, except that there is no value statement implied there. If anything, being a CI is a positive value statement: You would not be in the service catalog if your service was not valued by the business. Why track stuff that, at the end of the day, you just don't care about?

If none of that made any sense, then take the class! Really. I'm not just babbling here.

LinuxWorld / IT360 in Toronto

I am doing another LinuxWorld! Yea! And in Toronto, one of my favorite cities. On May 1st I'll be presenting an updated version of the lab I have been doing about using a Linux Desktop in MS Windows infrastructure.

I gave the HP NX5000 I have been using as a server for this lab to a member of my team a while back. I had no lab presentations on the horizon, and it made no sense to let a nice laptop like that sit when there was need on the team. Just not a good use of BMC assets. My manager hat said it had to be re-deployed.

Ever since the death of my eMachines 5312, I have been watching the prices and features of the laptop market. My wife needed back her Toshiba M45 laptop for some dark purpose of hers. Doorprop I think. My IBM X30 is a spiffy Linux computer despite having started life as 4 or 5 X30s. But with a 1.2 Ghz processor and 512 MB RAM, it just is not stout enough to run VMWare and large MS Windows guests that the lab needs. My Macbook is stout enough, but the lab is not about OS.X and MS Windows, although I will work some of that in to the new version too. the T41 has been dragged all over the country for years, has been the center of the lab all that time, and still works for that. But I am an IT person. I don't like single points of failure, and the T41 is clearly that.

My point is: I needed a new laptop for the lab.

I stashed some money a while back for this, on the general hope that I would be doing the lab again. Not much money: I hoped that right before MS Windows Vista came out there would be an MS Windows XP laptop firesale someplace. I don't need uber-spiffy graphics cards and all the other stuff required to make MS Vista a happy camper. I need a moderately fast CPU, and a fair amount of memory. 2 GB RAM best case, but 1.5 GB would work: that is what I have been using on the IBM T41 in the lab for years.

No firesale was ever found. If anything the computer stores around here appeared to just stop stocking new computers after the US holidays, or hid the low cost laptops that could run MS Vista and did backroom MS Vista installs. Or I missed the sale. Something. All I could find were high dollar, heavy, huge laptops. Things I do *not* want to pull around with me on planes.

My budget for this was not big, and I could afford to wait. Until I had a new lab to give someplace, I had no need. The Mac and the X30 were all that I needed personally.

Enter the Acer

Now I had a lab to do, so last Monday I went back out into the big bad world on a new quest: Find a laptop for Linuxworld. The massive crowds around the computers departments from the MS Vista launch were gone, so I could take my time, siddle up to units on display (or which there were now many) and play with MS Vista for the first time.

After about an hour of fiddling, comparing, pricing, thinking I settled on an Acer 5610 that was on sale. It was rather confusingly marked as having a Pentium Dual Core, but it is a T2060 Core Duo. I was confused because I thought the Pentium brand name was being dropped, but clearly not yet if they are. Maybe only the Apple drops that? Doesn't really matter: it was the processorI wanted more or less. It came with 1GB of RAM, which is less than I wanted, but I can upgrade that, to 4GB! Way more than I need at the moment. So I upgraded it to 2GB.

I liked the system because it used the Intel 802.11 wireless card that is so well supported under Linux. Props to Intel for making that happen. The other, less expensive, Acer Aspire I was looking at had a also-well-supported-by-Linux Atheros 802.11 card, so either way I was looking forward to a painless experience during system setup.

ITIL Classes by day, ITIL study by night, plus Valentines day. Not much time to evaluate the Acer. I decided to take the path of least resistance, sorted through my piles of Linux disks, and rolled down Ubuntu 6.10 (I had left my Mint 2.1 disk at the office...). I considered Fedora Core 6 for a while, and I may still do that before LinuxWorld, but I just wanted a quick validation of the Acer as a Linux platform. I have never owned or even touched and Acer, so I was not sure I did not have something bad lurking in the wings. If Linux would not work well, it was going back to the store. I expect an HP or and IBM to be Linux compatible these days, and the eMachines was too. But you never know.

Ubuntu 6.10 gets the "first at bat"

Ubuntu rolled in in less than 20 minutes. The CPU fan never came on. I squished Vista Premium up into a small partition with the Ubuntu disk partitioner: there were no issues, and while I have never booted Vista (update: I have now, both before and after the 1Gb to 2GB RAM configs, but that is another story), I assume that it will boot. No big deal if it doesn't. The Acer appears to keep a restore copy in a partition should I ever really want it. If not, I'll just re-format the while disk to get the extra 6 GB back.

Ubuntu booted, and updated about 150 items via the update manager, including a kernel revision. Via the wireless card. Another boot to activate the new kernel, and started checking out the system.

I could not get out of 1024x768 graphics mode, even though xorg.conf clearly had 1280x800 specified. Google Earth had the planet looking like an egg. I was puzzled for a bit, until I googled (Google as a verb. Language drift in action) and found I needed to grab another package with Synaptic called 915resolution. Intel video cards need a bios hack. Ubuntu's installer didn't have it as a dependency. Not sure why: the hardware manager clearly knows I have an Intel video card in there.

That was it. Install. Exit X. Hit Cntrl-Alt-Backspace for good measure. Log in. Fixed. Easy.

With my video resolution under control, in went VMware player via the Synaptic GUI installer. Nifty that I can do that rather than needing to download it from VMware. I had previously copied the lab VMs virtual disks from the Macbook to an HFS+ formatted USB attached external disk. I installed Macutils and HFS+ support on Linux via Synaptic, mounted the disk, and copied them back to the Acer internal hard drive.

I love that Linux can read HFS+. I wish it could write to it. Safely anyway: Do a quick “dmesg” after pluggin in the HFS+ formatted disks, and there is a messages that says you can force write at your own risk. I am not willing to risk torching the LinuxWorld lab though. By the time the real lab rolls around, I'll have copies of all the VM's on an EXT3 formatted USB drive or two. Call me crazy.

You can stop now.

VMware booted, ran the lab test machine, and everything looked peachy there. In 1Gb it was great. After the 2GB upgrade is was almost as fast as my (also) 2GB Mac running Parallels, subjectively speaking. And the Mac is a slightly faster CPU.

Inside the new Linuxworld lab "Server" is....

So far, only one thing is not working. The Acer has a memory card reader on the side of it. The internal chipset for this reader is an ENE Technologies 512. In fact, what the heck: here is an lspci of the machine, in case anyone is thinking about using a machine like this for something Linuxy.

The previous ENE model chipset, the 510, is reported as working under Linux, but the new 512 isn't yet. Bummer. I also decided that I was going to be able to live without Bluetooth or Firewire. I can always use a bluetooth USB fob if need be. Firewire was the harder choice, since most of my computer fleet is Mac.

Speaking of Apple...

My wife gave me an iPod shuffle for Valentines day. This is funny because that is what I gave her. Mine is blue and hers is pink though, so we can tell them apart. :)

I jacked the new shuffle into the Acer USB port to charge it up. Linux in concert with Gnome launched Rhythmbox , and loaded up the content of the iPod. I was not going for that at all: I just wanted the 5 volts from the USB port (the Mac was off in another part of the house busy on another mission), but that is pretty cool. It was not that long ago I had to install all the parts to make that happen, but Ubuntu was ready to go!

Servers is now in place. Time to start working on the lab updates.