ChipPC goes home

Our demo of ChipPC has concluded, and oviously if we are returning the hardware there were more cons than pros.

Pros:

• The device is just really cool.  A thin client that can fit in the palm of your hand.
• POE (Power Over Eithernet) is a really nice feature.
• The ChipPC demo pack was loaded with goodies:
  • ChipPC, Wall Plate, POE injector, POE tester, an assortment of needed cables and connectors.
• Not much if any heat output and low power consumption.

Cons:

• We were very unimpressed with the level of followup we received from the company.  It was like pulling teeth to get answers as to what the product included, how to configure it and if add-ons were avaliable.
• We asked several times and we still don’t know if you can configure the ChipPC to boot into a RPD or Citrix session.
• Excalabur is a managment tool they provide, but no one really wanted to talk much with us about it and how much it would cost or if it was the right tool for our application.
• The device runs WindowsCE

Overall it is a nice product but more expensive than the other thin clients we are evaluating and not the best solution for our installation.  Thanks ChipPC for a good demo.

Thin Client Demos continue

We are still working thru evaluating the ChipPC, but we have also added Wyse V10L to our demos.

After talking with the technical engineers at Wyse we are armed with a little more knowledge.  Where as the ChipPC runs on Windows CE the V10L runs on the Wyse proprietary OS.  We are working thru the configuration but as I understand it you put a configuration file on a internal FTP server and via DHCP you point the devices on boot to the FTP server where it pulls your configuration.  We are told then the RDP session can start and all is well.  We will be evaluating this process, but if it works as expected this appears to be a more cost effective and simple approach to the ChipPC… granted not nearly as much of a cool factor but a better configuration.

Here is how Wyse describes the little box:

“The Wyse Thin OS powered Wyse V10L thin client is the most optimized solution for Citrix ICA (Presentation Server, Desktop Server, and Access Essentials), Microsoft RDP (Terminal Services), and VMware VDI environments. This ultra-thin operating system boots in seconds, automatically updates itself, and delivers the administrative simplicity that IT needs. And, with an unpublished API, Wyse Thin OS is one of the most secure operating systems on the market. The Wyse V10L thin client provides additional expansion opportunities with parallel and PS/2 ports. A DVI-I connector allow for the connection of digital or analog monitors, or both via an optional splitter cable. The Wyse V10L ships with a keyboard and mouse so all you have to provide is the monitor, external power and a network connection.”

Less than 4 weeks until our deadline for our registration computers to be online.. more info to come as we learn more about the ‘right’ thin client for our application.

And another demo – ChipPC

We have really been getting into demoing hardware as of late.  I have been enlightened by our recent purchases that most of our vendors are willing to let us try out their hardware, its just simply asking.

We are starting a new project in our atrium to build a hospitality center… it should be a really nice place for new people to get information or ask questions… the cool part specifically for IT is the fact that it will give us some more room for our public Kiosks. We have been working over the past few months to bring online registration among other items to our public website.  Along with that push, we want to do away with the paper process in the building of registering someone for something…. thus the need for Kiosks. 

Simple enough, pick up a few workstations and let Jermie and Jim do some magic… or not.  We decided this might be best served with a Thin Client rather than a traditional workstation… and we really started thinking about it when we came across ChipPC’s JackPC.

ChipPC is a thin client that is about the size of your fist. 

It mounts in the wall in a single gang wall box.  It can be powered PoE or externally powered.  It runs a Citrix client or RDP client for terminal services and runs on WindowsCE.  It has two versions VGA or DVI and has 4 USB ports in addition to audio out and mic inputs.

We are currently demoing their VGA flavor, but they also have a DVI dual monitor flavor too.

While we are still working out the costs, this seems like a very good solution for a Kiosk that won’t move around.

Anyone have any experience with Thin Clients in this application and have some pros and cons?  Some items we need to address is how to configure the RDP session so a user can’t ‘get’ out of the session or disconnect from the server.  And how to manage multiple devices around the building… more to come…

Windows Mobile/Exchange Heartburn

We have been working to get our Exchange 2003 SP2 server to provide content to our mobile devices but we haven’t been able to get it to work with SSL enabled.  After about an hour on the phone with Microsoft we found that one simple check box was breaking everything. 

Since we have only one server functioning as our Front and Back-end Exchange servers we had already applied the SSL & FBA work around by creating a new virtual directory in IIS on the Exchange server.  For more information about this see Microsoft KB article 817379.  But the over the air sync didn’t work unless we connected over port 80 and didn’t use port 443.  So needless to say, rolling out Windows Mobile sync wasn’t ok without SSL…

So we first checked our SSL certificates, the wild-card certificate is supported under Windows Mobile 6.  The catch was to import the root, intermediate and wild-card certificates not just our public certificate. But this didn’t solve the problems so a call to MS.

So here are our case notes from calling Microsoft Support:

Resolution

=======

1. We found that KB 817379 had been followed and created a new virtual directory called ExMobile in IIS
2. On the ExMobile virtual directory we found that Require SSL option checked.
3. Since Microsoft-Server-Active-Sync virtual directory communicates with the ExMobile directory on TCP port 80 only by design, so forcing SSL on the ExMobile virtual directory will break the communication and therefore ActiveSync does not work
4. We therefore disabled the Require SSL option on the ExMobile virtual directory
5. Found that on the ExMobile virtual directory it was configured to “Accept client certificates”
6. So we changed that to the default setting “Ignore Client Certificates”.
7. Ran IISRESET command
8. Now we tried to sync the mobile device and found that it was able to successfully synchronize with the Exchange Server wirelessly without any issues.

So maybe someone can learn from our heart burn…

HTC Touch Review

The big brown truck arrived at 6pm to deliver my new SmartPhone, I had almost given up hope that it would get delivered.

First impressions count right, well it doesn’t help when the UPS guy smokes like a chimney and your little box smells like smoke.  But after that I cut the box open and was happy to see the smell hadn’t infaltrated the product packageing.

The packaging of the HTC touch is quite nice, the box slides out of the outer shell to reveil a black mat box with a magnetic lid.  Opening the lid there is the great little device.  Inside the box multiple USB attachments, stili, headphones and the power adapters.

Booting the phone up after installing the battery is simple and clean.  The phone has already been activated and I imediatly make a test call, very clear and good quatlity.  The data provisioning failed, so a quick call to Sprint support and after provisioning the data we are on our way.

Installing ActiveSync was easy and quick, and my contacts and tasks were uploaded from my laptop to my phone.  This quickly reviels a new task of going thru my contact list and cleaning up old contacts and catagories in Outlook.

The applications the a came with the phone include: SprintTV, Office Mobile and several other basic applications.  After syncronizing to my laptop OneNote mobile was installed and works very well.

My initial thoughts on the on-screen keyboard weren’t great but after several days of working with the phone it is easy to get aquainted to.  The T9 is very very good and makes entering text a breeze. 

Battery life is good, learning your new handset causes the backlight to be on more than normal and I haven’t yet run the battery down.  One additional nice feature is the charging over USB even from the laptop.

Call quality is quite amazing for a PDA, I have had 4-5 other PDA devices in the past and call quality wasn’t always great.  The Touch has great clarity, good volume and good pickup of your side of the call with limited background noice.

One of the best features of this phone is the size, granted no hardware keyboard allows this to happen but it makes carrying this phone like a non-pda candybar style phone.

Dislikes so far are only the location of the camera button which is frequently getting pressed when on a call. 

FatPipe or Radware Round 2

Our demo of the FatPipe and Radware continues,both vendors have extended our 30 day trial a few more weeks.  The primary reason for the extension is the delay in Insight - now Comcast getting our static addresses assigned.  The demo day from Radware was good except we had to ’steal’ several DHCP addresses from Comcast since they haven’t assigned us addresses yet.  This worked on one of the boxes, but we didn’t yet test the redundant box because we couldn’t keep the number of needed addresses from changing.  The lag in getting the IPs is because of the Comcast/Insight switch over.  A little frustration is setting in since Comcast has had 20 days to resolve this and they haven’t.  Our contact has communicated they are working up the chain at Comcast, but really how long should 5 Static addresses take…. I digress back to the review.

In the process, Jeremie and I concluded on the 15th of January that we were going to proceed with Radware not FatPipe and we contacted our sales rep and let him know.  He was heading out of town so we reconnected this Monday.  Quickly after we let them know we wanted to send their boxes back the the executives at FatPipe frequented my blog and read our round 1 reviews of the demos.  Our rep called on Monday and asked that we continue the eval of the FatPipe and said we need to do what ever possible to see if we could make the sale… I said I wouldn’t guarantee anything, but we would be willing to continue the demo… he agreed so Jeremie unpacked the Fatpipe.

So we continued our testing with the FatPipe.  The units are easy to configure and Jeremie got them working fairly quickly.  We have added our old SOHO2 Sonicwall firewall and VLaned this connection to a couple test workstations. 

Test One  is focused around a web-stream we receive.  One of our ministries have requested a continuous 1.2mb web-stream, which obviously was just choking our T1.  I have to say, wow a web-stream at that bit rate when you have the bandwidth is quite nice. To simulate a normal user load and the stream we started testing by pulling in the web-stream on three machines at the same time while i downloaded several 100mb files from several sites.  We quickly notice issues, the Fatpipe was routing all the connections out Wan3.  A quick call to FatPipe support and we corrected the routing issue from our configuration.

Thoughts from Test One:there are only 3 choices for routing options on the FatPipe Hardware including Round-Robin, Fail-over.  These options resulted in our testingWan3 to be over loaded with just a little on Wan2.  Granted in a larger deployment you would have more than 3 computers accessing the Internet, but in our scenario the Round-Robin isn’t performing as we would like.  We will test this on the Radware box to compare.

We have learned that QOS (Quality of Service) on the FatPipe is an add on.  Radware includes this out of the box.  From the start of our demos we have told both companies QOS is a must have to help balance the video stream and the other inbound services across the multiple ISPs. Fatpipe is checking into this for us.. we test QOS with radware tomorrow.

More to come… We are working on a matrix of our evaluations and I’ll post those results.

MasterFlex is Online

Our IT staff had another work night on Monday night; as I have mentioned about before, we have regularly scheduled work nights that allow us to take our servers and services offline while we perform mantiance.  Well Monday night was one of those nights.  During this night we were able to put “MasterFlex” our new Intel Flexbox blade system into production.  We moved our ACS terminal server to FlexHost-01, one of the blades in the chassis.  As with our other servers our host boxes FlexHost-01 is also running VMware Server so this migration was as smiple as copying the virtual server over to the new host.

Well lets just say almost simple…We learned a few things in the process… Once again VMware’s tech support was very professional and knowlegable to suppport us. 

After brining the terminal server online it was locking up and the screen would freeze.  After uploading the log files to support we idnetified the problem was with the VMware tools.  We had moved this guest server from a 32bit host, and moved it to a 64bit host… and didn’t think to reinstall the tools.  So after reinstalling the new VMware tools things were better…

But then Tusday morning trouble struck again…the terminal server froze again sometime overnight.  Jeremie came into the office in the morning and saw the server was locked up…. He was able to fairly quickly identify the machine was locking up during the search of the CD hardware. The problem, there was a CD drive mapped incorrectly on the guest which was causing the machine to hang while it tried to poll the CD drive.  He removed the CD drive from the guest’s config and all was well.  Great work Jeremie! 

Several users have noted that their termial sessions are now as quick as working locally.  We haven’t run our benchmark testing yet, but I am expecting a significiant improvement… we’ll post the results soon.

FatPipe or Radware progress… sort of.

Progress or lack there of…

Well our Demos of FatPipe and Radware arrived.. both companies did a great job getting the hardware here quickly… one interesting note the Radware box shipped straight from Jerusalem where their factory is.. that was interesting getting a box with Hebrew writing on it.

Well both vendors have matched each others price, so the playing field is pretty much the same.  Each have supplied two devices for redundancy.  For both the second box was less than 25% of the first box, so it seems logical to run the devices in a pair… Seeing one major reason for this device is to provide fault tolerance in our ISP connections in addition to load balancing.

So the reason for the lack of progress is our Cable provider just finished installing  the cable run from the road for our new service.  First the thawing snow made the ground to soft, then they delayed because it was too cold, then this week the soil was frozen, now late this week it was just right… I’ll just call Insight/Comcast the 3 bears. 

I must say Radware continues to impress me, our Sales rep called and asked which days he could come down from Chicago and help us configure and install the LinkProof hardware.  He said he would like to spend an afternoon and morning with us getting everything setup.  Granted, this doesn’t mean their product is better, but I was really pleased to hear they would travel 6 hours round trip to help us get it configured to have a ’successful’ demo.  This is currently more than I can say for FatPipe, they just sent the boxes and said to call them with questions.

So yesterday Jeremie installed the FatPipe hardware (photos soon) and the boxes look very clean in the rack… but several initial concerns:

• Since we elected to request the 1U version of the FatPipe, there are only 4 ports on the hardware.  We were expecting a device expandable to 12 ports.  Our FatPipe rep said that he made a mistake…”I made a mistake & thought the 1 U boxes could handle 12 ports. Sorry.” Its ok I suppose, but that is on minor disappointment.  One note if you want the expandable version, you are going to have to coincide over 8u’s of rack space to the FatPipe hardware… ouch.
• The FatPipe rack rails that shipped with the hardware are way too small for a normal rack.  Even when we expanded them as far as possible the rack rails don’t reach the back of the mounting brackets.  Now I will note, you can expand them far enough if you adjust the front of the rails, but then the front of the FatPipe hardware sits 5 inches back into the front of the rack.. not exactly normal rack mounting.
• FatPipe tech support is now saying we will need a second firewall for the hardware to live behind…

So will that that said, we are running the FatPipe thru the tests… And Radware staff is on-site Friday to get their gear configured… more info to come.

New DataCenter Photos

Well now that Intel is ‘offically selling’ our FlexBox Blade Server we can now talk about our new blade server.  Here are some new photos of the chassis before it was installed in our DataCenter and after we installed it in the rack.

We are populating two blades with dual processors and 16 gb of memory per blade. The HardDrive pool is from 14 SAS drives.

and here are some photos of the DataCenter Online.  We have been online for just over a week in the new DataCenter and all is working well.