My journey into the Post PC Era: Shutting down the home PC

I figured that the best way to attack the process was to just dive right in. That being said, I shut down my home computer. I did exactly that. I shut it down, unplugged it and moved it into the closet. Then I put the keyboard and mouse right on top of it and shut the door. The first thing that I learned was that My desk felt pretty empty without the Keyboard and mouse there. Also, the 23 inch monitor and fairly decent sound system / speakers were just taking up space. The next thing that I realized was that all my storage was still sitting in my computer, which now lived in the closet. That also made me realize that I used that home computer for iTunes, specifically for managing my music, movies and backups. The final thing that surfaced was when I needed to print something. The USB cable for the printer was just dangling next to the desk, not connected to anything. I found solutions for each one of these things. I'll outline them in separate blogs so that I can concentrate on each one: 1. Monitor / Speakers 2. iTunes 3. Storage 4. Printer

My journey into the Post PC Era: Baseline

I should talk a bit about my home setup. My home computer is a dell optiplex tower with a good video card in the PCIe slot, capable of HDMI, DVI and VGA out. I am pretty sure that there is 512 MB ram on the video card. The computer itself is a single core pentium 4 processor with hyper threading turned on. The OS sees two logical CPU. There is 1GB RAM on the board, and I have a RAID controller plugged into the PCI slot. The controller has two Parallel ATA hard drives connected to it via the ribbon. The two 250GB drives are in a RAID1 (mirrored) configuration. Attached to that computer, I have an H233H Acer monitor, and Logitec 2.1 speakers. I also have an Epson CX 7400 printer / scanner. Typical USB keyboard and Mouse. For my home network I am using a cable modem and I pay for the highest bandwidth available. I use a motorola SB6120 (docsis 3.0) cable modem. Connected to that is a NetGear n900 Router. At the time of this post, it was the top of the line home router that NetGear offered. The router has 4 Gigabit ethernet ports, the connection to the cable modem is also at Gigabit speed. There are two wireless networks, 2 and 5 Ghz. There are also two USB ports on the Router. The technology used is called ReadyShare to make those USB ports usable for storage and a printer. I also have a laptop that is issued by my place of employment. My friends also have a laptop if I need to use it.

My journey into the The Post PC Era: Introduction

In one of his keynote speeches, Mr Steve Jobs was presenting the the iPad. He mentioned a 'Post PC Era' where people would no longer have the need for a personal computer. He said that tablets and mobile devices will take the place of the home computer. I remember when he said this, and it was a VERY powerful statement. I'm the proud owner of the iPad 2 and an iPhone 4 I have been using them increasingly more and more, and I found myself using my home computer less and less. There were some routine tasks that I still ran to the computer for, but for the most part I could leave my home PC turned off. I had a guest at my house recently and I was talking about my struggle to justify upgrading to a more recent PC. They quickly replied with "let me know when you get rid of your old one, I'll take it". This sparked a crazy thought in my head. I thought to myself, I'll just sell my old PC and take it from there. The thought stuck. Days later I shut down my old tower and began the learning experience of what I needed to do to take the plunge into the 'Post PC Era'. The next few blogs will cover this step by step and tell you exactly what I did to accomplish this. It will cover the hurdles and learning experiences along the way. I'll get into as much detail as I possibly can, and even post part numbers if I am able. To sum it up, my goal is to get by using my iPad and iPhone only. No more personal computer for me. Stay Tuned!

All I have to say about my commute home today is: the Stig would be proud. #TopGear

1994 Mustang GT Convertible Upgrade

#Cobra intake and gt40 heads are officially in hand. The 94 #Mustang GT vert is due for an upgrade!

WebSphere Tuning

We are just finishing up an objective which includes tuning the WebSphere JVM GC Algorithm. We have four servers in the cluster. Each zLinux server (guest) has 1 JVM on it. My collegue picked four DIFFERENT GC tuning settings. The first setting was applied to the first guest's JVM. The second was applied to the second guest's JVM and so on. Each of the four guests in the cluster used a unique GC tuning settting. We ran a load test while monitoring the JVMs. We observed that the second guest performed the best. That setting was then applied to all of the guest's JVMs and the test was run again. Performance dramatically improved.

Instead of running four tests to determine which setting was best we only needed to run 1. It saved us a ton of time!

Problem Management

There comes a time in the hosting world when there is an incident in the LIVE environment.  The service desk received some notification - maybe from a client, or from some monitoring threshold that has been breached. There is an incident, and it is the job of the service center to mitigate and restore the service to normal working conditions.  There will be a conference call started by the service desk.  It is their responsibility to get anyone involved that can assist with the incident, and to do it as quickly as possible. 

After some time the incident is resolved. The case for the incident has been closed and everyone goes back to working on whatever they were doing prior to being called into action for the incident.

This should NOT be the end of action.  Some sort of change should be submitted so that the issue does not happen again.

There should be a person who will assume the role of a Problem Manager.  The Problem Manager should own the task of finding the root cause of the incident if the severity / impact is high enough.  Also it is important to get everyone, or at least the majority, to agree on that root cause.  It could be because of a code problem, an infrastructure glitch, a procedure that was not followed, etc...  The problem manager should also look at trends.  It is very likely that multiple incidents can point to a problem.

The problem manager should have the ability to form a group of Subject Matter Experts, sort of a 'swat' team, to assist with uncovering the root cause.  The SME team should consist of members from different parts of the organization (Development, deployment, operations, service desk, monitoring group, networking / infrastructure, etc).

With the help of the SME team, the Problem Manager will be able to determine the root cause and subsequently submit a change order to make sure that the issue does not happen again. 

This process is outlined extensively in the IT Infrastructure Library (ITIL).