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Tomorrow, September 19th, we will be hosting the Dallas Area IT Roundtable here at Watermark.  The event begins at 8:30 am, and we are looking forward to a full day of sharing ideas, building relationships, and having fun.  If you are interested in attending, go to www.texasministrytech.com to signup for the event.  There is no cost for the event.   We will be bringing in lunch, so if you want to chip in a few dollars to help us cover the cost, that would be great (but certainly not required).  Feel free to spread the word to other ministry-minded IT folks in the Dallas-Ft Worth area.  Looking forward to a great day together.

We received our first Latitude E Series today. Since we’ve been so familiar with the D610, 620, and 630s since 2002, the E Series is an entirely new direction for us. Will this laptop be our new standard? We’ll see.

First impressions are that the laptop has a very “Mac” feel to it, and that isn’t a bad thing.  Some people might be confused by what I mean by “Mac” feel.  There just seem to be a few design areas where Dell has taken cues from Apple.  For example, the E series has removed the visible hinges and the backlit keyboard makes me think of the Macbook Pro.   The LED display and backlit keyboard are very nice, and the device is lighter than expected.  Overall though, the general impression is that there isn’t a “wow” factor about the machine.  That’s not surprising, since Dell positions the Latitude line for the business road warrior, not the hipster college kid.

The cover has a bit of a woodgrain looks to it, not sure if that is visible in the photo above.

Overall, it seems like nice new package.  Once we get it on and running, we’ll find out how good it really is.

(UPDATE)  Upon booting the system into Windows XP, the battery indicator is showing almost 8 hours of remaining battery life.  True?  We’ll find out and let you know.

Our VMware transition has been a bit of a headache lately.  Mainly because of all of the other things going on in tandum with trying to move to VMware ESX and our EqualLogic SAN.  To help us get over this hurdle, I asked our local EqualLogic/Dell rep to make a suggestion for a vendor who knows EQL and VMware very well.  What I was specifically looking for was a company who could help us implement best practices and make this solution scream.  What I got was something very, very different.

Now I’m not here to bag a company for just getting it wrong… but so far in the process I have found that I know more about how to implement VMware than they do.  Now that probably isn’t fair.  They are smart guys I’m sure, but with the help of all of the folks at #citrt (Church IT Roundtable IRC Chat) and others, we have a wealth of recent experience at using VMware and EqualLogic. Not just something we learned in training classes 5 releases ago.

Over the weekend, I found that some of the configurations they had recommended are not supported by VMware, and won’t work. (having 4 nics configured for iSCSI when it will only use 1, for you technically minded folks.)  When I pointed it out to them, they made recommendations on how it WOULD work.  Today they sent two people out to set it up their “recommended” way.  After they played for a few minutes on the system, even they realized that what they had “sold” as the solution, really won’t work.  One of the techs even went so far as to blame the sales guy!  So in the process of making the change over something that actually will, they managed to bring one of my ESX servers down and were unable to get it back online.  Now that means tomorrow I will be placing a call to VMware tech support to fix it myself.

I know that eventually we (Watermark) will get this working very, very well.  I have great confidence in what this solution will do for us, however I know now that good help may be harder to find than I would have thought.  If anyone has any options for local Dallas VMware solution provides, please let me know.

For a long time we have struggled with iTunes uncanny desire to place the iTunes library files (and artwork, etc) in the “My Documents/My Music/iTunes Music” folder.  While it was very easy to change the file location for the music files themselves, the library still went to My Documents. 

This was a problem for us because we use offline files to map our My Documents folder to the individual’s network drive.  Not a pretty picture having files in two places.  iTunes would often get confused and lose the library altogether.

I found a little tip today that seems to solve all of this.  Let’s say for example you have moved all of your music to your local hard drive in a folder called “My Music”.  Simply find your iTunes library, which is located in your My Documents/My Music/iTunes music folder and copy the iTunes Music folder to your local music folder.  Once this is done, hold down the <SHIFT> key while you open iTunes and it will ask for the location of your library file.  Just point to the new library location, and voila!  You are done. 

No more network and local confusion.  All of your file are in one folder locally. Of course this isn’t really a problem if you don’t have a network setup or offline files configured, but it is a big deal to us.

Texas Ministry IT Guys, mark your calendar for September 19th for our next roundtable discussion.  We will spend all day together sharing ideas, war stories, tools, etc.  For more information, sign up here and let us know you are going to attend.