beinguseless

I’ve ventured out in the past on previous black friday’s fighting the traffic, parking, and crowds and certainly know what it’s like.  Today I didn’t.  Sure I get aggravated from the hassle and waiting in line but I didn’t see anything out there that made me think “wow, thats way too good to pass up”.  From asking people I’ve talked with during the past view days and some input from various websites it doesn’t seem like many people were going out today.  That’s not to say the stores were empty, I’m sure retailers such as BestBuy, CircuitCity, and many others were packed.  I would be willing to guess that the number of people have declined this year.

Some of the retailers limited their deals to “in store only” which isn’t a half bad idea on their part.  The deals themselves seemed a bit average with some short-windowed exceptions. For me it wasn’t enough to venture out. I also heard from someone first hand that needed to work today that a local mall (not a small strip mall but a two floor multi-anchor store type) received about an average weekend kind of traffic.

So what does this boil down to? People shopping more? Less? Getting their shopping done earlier in the year ad planned around the frenzy? Not as many as attractive deals? Increased online shopping?  There could be many things that would influence the answer.  For this blogger it comes down to two things – 1) Deals weren’t there 2) Online shopping is far more up my alley for the type of shopper I am.  Thanks for the various sites that are available I was able to keep close tabs on the various sales without having to venture out.  These are – techbargains, blackfridayhome, and slickdeals.

Something that was brought to my attention last week is a term called ‘Cyber Monday’ for which  online shopping is suppose to be what Black Friday is for local retailers. I’ll be keeping an eye out for this to see what comes of it and more than likely any such deals will be mentioned in one, if not all, of the sites above.

As a parting question to those to visit – if you went shopping (local or online) what would you consider you best ‘Black Friday’ bargain?

During the past month or so, roughly a week before Halloween, I along with countless others began to see Christmas decorations, ornaments, lights, and the general decorations that go with Christmas. pop up a more and more each day in many retail stores and malls. The key problem to this being it was still October. I couldn’t help but notice since then from coworkers, friends, and hearing comments of those in the stores that “it’s too early for Christmas decorations, it’s not even November.”

I for one agree with them and though I haven’t been keeping track from previous years if I were to guess the holiday season is coming sooner each year. There is something odd when on two adjacent shelves/racks that one would be Halloween and the other Christmas. In fact about two weeks ago I saw candy canes in CVS and while I admit to getting a box (they are good) part of me also thinks its taking something away from that “special time of year” if it becomes too common. I am completely for the spirit people speak of during the holidays to be year round but don’t think this is the best way to accomplish that. I also wonder on maybe this is the result of companies wanting to get a leg up on their competitors by being in front of the customer first. I would bet that if this trend continues it will reach a tipping point and more of the public will be heard. I’ll take a bet that it would have to be late September for that to occur, not long after the fall school shopping bonanza is finished. I also recall seeing back to school advertisements in late May early June this past year, but I won’t get into that now.

Final words – leave the holiday and Christmas season where it belongs on the calendar year.

To continue on from an earlier installment, Installing a new keyboard – Part 1, I had time to look into this further and every turn I took it became more and more bleak until I succumbed to what I was ultimately hoping to avoid.

I made a complete backup and formated the laptop with a clean, crisp reinstallation of Windows XP Pro. From the initial screens of going through the setup I was using the keyboard but was waiting until it booted into windows and was still recognized. I was very pleased that it was and upon looking at the driver it decided on I found that it was the generic HID driver that I tried oh so many times before. I left the laptop in the docking station during the whole process and to my surprise detected that find too now, which is great since I have about eight or so usb devices and only had two ports available before on the side of the laptop. It can get tricky syncing an ipod without a mouse but I’m very familiar with keyboard shortcuts so it wasn’t too bad. To even more of my surprise the internal bluetooth card was also detected which is great so I can now setup my phone to be recognized by it.

As to almost anyone I talk with computers with can tell you, I dread formating because of the numerous programs I use and amount of little customizations I like. I think this time around was one of my smoothest formats yet. From time of format to almost a complete reinstallation of applications and setting was about four hours.

This story ends with a happy ending of getting the keyboard to work but not without its heartache. To anyone else out there that may have problems on a Dell Latitude D620 installing a Microsoft Natural Ergonomic Keyboard 4000 keyboard to it and it’s not being detected. If possible save yourself time and frustration and if you can’t get it to work right away keep in mind you very well may need to format. As to why I’m not sure and doubt I’ll look into the root of the problem of this, the docking station, or bluetooth since they’re all now working but if anyone can offer any insight please speak up.

About a year ago I wanted to setup a VMWare ESX 3.0 server to test out their new (at the time) release, unfortunately, I didn’t have the funds needed to setup a true production environment with it. I was able to find a fantastic alternative that is great to learn off of at a much more cost effective price point. It seems that the LSI Logic driver included is compatible with scsi and sata controllers, which is great news for us small folks wanting to check out this virtualization environment.

I won’t get into the details of a step by step setup installation but will jump ahead to the post installation changes needed. I’m probably going to miss or incorrectly state a technical term here or there but if there are any corrections needed or questions let me know.

The hardware (least the parts that matter for this writeup) I ended up using is as follows:
Motherboard: Tyan Transport GX28 (B2881)
Controller: LSI MegaRaid
Hard Drives: Seagate 320GB SATA 2

Keep in mind that the installation of ESX can be on any drive, including IDE, the datastores are what need to be on a supported device such as SAN, iSCSI, etc, or in this case a budget SATA setup. After the initial installation is complete you’ll need to check on and modify a file. It took some rummaging around at the time and after some good old trial and error along with a couple installations I was able to narrow it down to the following steps.

#cat /etc/modules.conf

alias eth0 e100
alias eth1 tg3
alias eth2 tg3
alias scsi_hostadapter megaraid2
alias usb-controller usb-ohci

From the above lines I think I did this to either check that “alias scsi_hostadapter megaraid2″ was there or I added it in.

#lspci | grep LSI

020:0e.0 RAID bus controller: LSI Logic / Symbios Logic: Unknown device 0409 (rev 0a)

This is to find out what the device number is for the controller, in this case it is “0409″.

#cat /etc/vmware/vmware-devices.map | grep LSI

vendor ,0x1000,Symbios,LSI Logic / Symbios Logic
device 0x1000,0x0050,scsi,LSI1064,mptscsi_2xx.o
device 0x1000,0x0054,scsi,LSI1068,mptscsi_2xx.o
device 0x1000,0x0056,scsi,LSI1064E,mptscsi_2xx.o
device 0x1000,0x0058,scsi,LSI1068E,mptscsi_2xx.o
device 0x1000,0x005a,scsi,LSI1066E,mptscsi_2xx.o
device 0x1000,0x005c,scsi,LSI1064A,mptscsi_2xx.o
device 0x1000,0x005e,scsi,LSI1066,mptscsi_2xx.o
device 0x1000,0x0060,scsi,LSI1078,mptscsi_2xx.o
device 0x1000,0x0407,scsi,LSI Logic MegaRAID,megaraid2.o
device 0x1000,0x0408,scsi,LSI Logic MegaRAID,megaraid2.o
device 0x1000,0x0411,scsi,LSI Logic MegaRAID SAS1064R,megaraid_sas.o
device 0x1000,0x1960,scsi,LSI Logic MegaRAID,megaraid2.o
device 0x1000,0x9010,scsi,LSI Logic MegaRAID ,megaraid2.o
device 0x1000,0x9060,scsi,LSI Logic MegaRAID ,megaraid2.o

The spacing in there is exactly how it was returned, without the word wrapping. I’m generally pretty organized with files and code so seeing this I needed to keep myself from fixing it :) Take note of the device line with 0×0408 in it, this will be changed to 0×0409 which we found out from the previous command.

From: device 0x1000,0x0408,scsi,LSI Logic MegaRAID,megaraid2.o
To: device 0x1000,0x0409,scsi,LSI Logic MegaRAID,megaraid2.o


Now that the updated the vmware-devices.map file to see the controller card we’ll need to update ESX and reboot. I’m not fully sure if each of these are needed, I would think that at least the first is, but I have done in before for safe practice to make sure the system is up to date.

#esxcfg-boot -p (reloads PCI data)
#esxcfg-boot -i (reloads initrd information)
#esxcfg-boot -b (sets up boot information)
#reboot

Upon rebooting and logging into the VMware Virtual Infrastructure Client you should be able to access that datastore and begin to create virtual machines. Watch out with keeping snapshots around too long, I talked about this some in a previous post. I now also recall watching the various services starting on boot and that it would begin to fail on a particular one until this was fixed. I didn’t write that down but I’ll try and find out what it is and add it here.