Blogging

I’m not yet convinced of the value of Twitter, but I’ve signed up for an account and I’ll be posting updates during VMworld 2008. My Twitter username is scott_lowe, so feel free to follow me via Twitter if you’d like.

I’ll be posting Twitter updates (tweets?) from my iPhone using TwitterFon and from my laptop using Syrinx.

I am excited and honored to announce that my site has been added to Virtual Strategy Magazine’s VSM Blogger Network and included in their list of “Best of the Virtualization Bloggers”. Thanks for the additional exposure!

If you’re a fan of NetApp, this should be good news to you. Vaughn Stewart of NetApp has started his own blog, The Virtual Storage Guy. Vaughn’s a super-sharp guy who knows his stuff, and I’m hoping to see some really good material emerge on his site.

I recently had the honor of participating in an e-mail interview with OdinJobs regarding virtualization and how to “break into” the virtualization industry. My fellow cohorts in this e-mail interview were Bob Plankers and Martin MacLeod. The interview questions focused on things like the best way for a sysadmin to get started with virtualization, what skills may be vendor-specific or not, and where virtualization may be headed. It was pretty interesting to participate, and it’s even more interesting to see how Bob and Martin responded to the questions.

You can read the full interview here at OdinJobs.

Major changes have taken place! The site has been upgraded to WordPress 2.6 and a new theme has been installed. I’m still in the process of tweaking the styles and the layout, and a few plugins still need to be replaced and/or upgraded, but for the most part everything should be functional. If you run into anything that’s not working as expected, please let me know.

Feedback is welcome!

This post by Mike Laverick is, as I believe they say, spot on (did I get my British English right?). Blog aggregation is one thing; many bloggers do it, including myself in my Virtualization Short Takes. VMware does it with Planet V12n. It’s not that uncommon. In my opinion, as long as the original blogger and the original blogger’s website are properly and clearly attributed, it’s not really a big deal.

The site that Mike pointed out, however, is—in my opinion—taking blog aggregation too far. There’s no clear attribution of the original author nor a clear link back to the author’s original site. I recognize content there from RTFM Education and Yellow Bricks for sure, and I suspect that some of the other sites in the Blogroll are also being rolled in. At no point anywhere in any of the aggregated articles do I see a link back the original author, the original author’s site, not even so much as mention of the original author’s name. There is only a small byline that says “By: Other Website”, but that’s it.

If you want to aggregate content, feel free. Just be sure to give credit where credit is due, and don’t rip off other people’s content.

I stumbled across this post by Duncan over at Yellow Bricks about his inclusion in a recent Top 10 list by Eric Siebert over at VMware-land. The new Top 10 list is “Top 10 blogs that VMware administrators must read.” This list is a regular “Who’s Who” list of well-known bloggers like Mike Laverick, Eric Sloof, Christofer Hoff, and others. Lo and behold, I find out that I’m on the list as well! And at #2, no less!

Thanks to all my readers and to everyone who has helped me along the way. It’s been a tremendous pleasure writing this blog and I’m looking forward to many more posts in the future!

I suppose it was bound to happen at some point.

I’ve been confused for the other Scott Lowe. Yes, that’s right; there’s more than one.

The other Scott Lowe writes for TechRepublic.com, and currently works for either Elmira College or Westminster College; I’m not sure which. (I’ve seen both; I think it’s Westminster.) He’s published a couple of books, including one on Exchange Server 2007 that was published by Microsoft Press, and owns the slowe.com domain.

Normally, being mistaken for the other Scott Lowe wouldn’t be a problem; he seems like a smart, well-respected, knowledgeable guy. In this case, though, it was some business contacts at NetApp that picked up this article in which Scott Lowe purchased an EMC storage array. Clearly you can see where that would cause some confusion.

So, just to set the record straight: I didn’t purchase an EMC storage array. Nor did I purchase a Dell M1000e blade chassis. I also don’t know anything about open source IP telephony. Sorry. Not that there’s anything necessarily wrong with any of these products; it just wasn’t me. I do have a copy of the aforementioned Exchange Server 2007 book; but it’s not my name on the front cover, unfortunately.

I hope this helps to clear things up. However, if you’ve accidentally mistaken me for him, and you’d rather read his stuff, this TechRepublic.com search should help you out.

Now, back to looking at my Toshiba CIX1200 phone system. Oh, wait—that wasn’t me, either…

It appears that some of my articles from a couple of years ago are being republished on another site without any attribution or link back to the original. That’s one of the bad things about the Internet as it stands today…it’s far too easy to “copy and paste” another person’s material onto your own site.

If you’re interested in republishing my content, just drop me a line. I’m sure we can work something out. Just don’t shamelessly steal my writing.

Here’s a quick list of a few of the articles that I currently have in progress:

• I’ve been looking at the recently-announced products from Altor Networks and have their VNSA (Virtual Network Security Analyzer) running in the lab right now. Look for a short post on the product and my initial thoughts. (One piece of advice I can offer to Altor right now: use the virtual appliance OVF format and save your customers a lot of trouble.)
• I’m going to have some hands-on time with a Xsigo I/O Director over the next few weeks, so look for an article on that product.
• Prodded to action by Nick’s comment in my article on thin provisioned VMDKs on NFS, I’ll have an article on using SnapRestore to clone VMs on NFS without losing the thin provisioned VMDKs.
• The Active Directory integration articles are getting a bit long in the tooth, so look for updates to both the Linux and Solaris integration instructions. (By the way, speaking of Solaris integration: I came across this article a short while ago.)

If anyone has any other topics they’d be interested in seeing me tackle, feel free to mention them in the comments below. I can’t make any promises, but I’ll certainly consider them!

UPDATE: The article on preserving thin provisioned VMDKs with SnapRestore is now available.