Joseph Brower

So we’re helping someone migrate from an old server with a single hard disk to a new server with a full RAID 10 raid array on a hardware raid card.  This server runs Windows Server 2003, so we were trying to find the quickest and most cost effective way to do it.  I had heard about Clonezilla but never had the time to mess with it, but that time has come.  I downloaded the ISO yesterday, burned it to a CD and popped it into the source machine.  This was in a test environment, so that I could mess around with it.  I selected the copy to ram version so that I could remove the disk and place it in the new server.  After it booted up I followed the instructions (which is important) and quickly had it waiting for the destination machine to connect.  We had the server boot up off of the disk and went to the terminal and typed in the commands that the first machine was telling us to do.  It worked immediately.  It even saw the 3ware RAID controller volume and started copying happily.  It appears that all of our test data made it over ok.  It copied pretty quickly too (about 10MB/s on our not so swift network).  We’re going to be full gigabit when we do it for real tonight.  If everything goes as planned, I should be able to copy, repair install, and be done without having to worry about reinstalling any software or fighting with any configuration (outside of drivers).  I’ll be sure to let everyone know how it goes.  If you ever need cloning over the network abilities, you should really try out Clonezilla, it is free, open source, and seems to do an amazing job.

So I ran into an interesting issue today.  A particular machine couldn’t connect to a network share while everyone else could.  The technician could ping and could access the internet.  Something was obviously wrong that wasn’t the standard issues so I was called to go out onsite.   After getting out there, I dug into google some and found the resolution to the problem.

http://support.microsoft.com/kb/946937

I had to edit the registry to get the machine to be able to browse shares.  Something about that just feels wrong.  It isn’t so bad that you have to edit the registry to fix it.  I could live with that, I use linux and have had to find some obscure configuration files to edit with obscure settings.  What upsets me is that the error was a general error (Network Location Cannot Be Reached), the windows troubleshooter didn’t help, and there was nothing in the logs.  In other words, a crippling error existed and was not only lacking information about the problem, but without any information in the logs how is someone to find the answer.  You would expect anything that is important enough to throw a dialog window up to tell you something should be important enough to be logged somewhere.   I haven’t ever run into an error like this in Linux that failed to log what was going on.  I’m sure that certain apps don’t do it, but this is an OS error, not an error with a specific application.  Anyways, the fix worked, so you have to give them credit there.  I guess this is mostly a message to all of the coders out there.  Please log information, especially errors, it makes troubleshooting so much easier.

My company (Nexus) has been working towards moving to an ERP over the last while.  It has been quite a battle, but we’re finally making headway.  The biggest problem that we ran into is that we didn’t really know what we needed.  We were too accustomed to applications telling us what we want rather than the other way around. Since we’ve been going int the direction of systems integration, we’ve realized that we should be the ones in charge of our software and what it does.  That’s where Adempiere comes in.  I could go into the history of Adempiere, but I’ll let you do that.  I’m wanting to talk about how we’re using Adempiere and how we expect it to make a big difference in our businesss operations.

Nexus owns a small chain of computer repiar stores (Computer Medical Center) that provide various services.  We’ve been trying to standardize on the methods we use for repair and such.  It hasn’t been a simple task, but has really been worth it.  We’ve become quite efficient.  Our efficiency only goes so far though.  Without a way to track effectiveness of marketing campaigns and report on projected time used compared to actual time used, we always had issues really gauging how well each location was doing.  Because of those issues, we’ve decided to sponsor a maintanence module for Adempiere.  You will all be seeing some videos of what it is and how you can use it in the next few weeks, but all that I can say is “Wow!”  Working on this project with Fernando has been a great experience.  It has taken longer than we wanted it to, but the wait has been worth it.Training begins this Monday and if all goes well, we’ll be using it fully before the end of the week.  This is really what Adempiere is about:  letting small companies have the power of full ERPs.

I would strongly recommend that any company that is serious about centralizing all of their information and streamlining their business processes to take a look and at least try to learn Adempiere.  It can be difficult to learn, but it is well worth it.  Hopefully the videos I post over the course of the next few months can help more people realize that true ERP isn’t only for  big companies.

As a lot of you know, I really enjoy photography.  After hearing a few times that I should be selling my photos, I’ve decided to do just that.  Right now I’m only offering one size (13 x 19 inches) and haven’t gotten all of my photos up yet.  I’d love to hear any comments that people have.  I’ll be trying to add one or two every few days until I get a sizeable group of photos up, and then I’ll probably rotate out ones that aren’t very popular and try to bring in some other ones.

On a side note, I apologize for being lax on updating the blog this week.  Lots happened and Friday hit me before I even saw it coming.  The release of phpTimeClock that I mentioned earlier is really moving forward nicely.  I hope it can live up to the hype that seems to be growing around it.