More than 2,500 years ago, Thales, one of the first Greek philosopher-scientists, predicted an solar eclipse.
Without the Internet, with no computers, not even decent pen and paper for a scratch pad he managed to use science to predict what, till then, was deemed to be the work of a god.
The eclipse duly took place as he predicted - probably on the 28th of May 585 BC
Here are some links about Thales and his eclipse.
Well, another reason I'm writing this blog is my studies of Greek. I want to learn Ancient Greek because it interests me and I think as as long as I'm studying the Classics, I may as well be able to read the language. Unfortunately, I seem to have some mental blocks...
So, As I review the stuff I should already know, I'll post it here.
I'll start with the Greek Alphabet.
| Upper Case | Lower case | Letter Name | English equivalent |
| Α | α | Alpha | a |
| Β | β | Beta | b |
| Γ | γ | Gamma | g |
| Δ | δ | Delta | d |
| Ε | ε | Epsilon | e |
| Ζ | ζ | Zeta | z |
| Η | η | Eta | e |
| Θ | θ | Theta | th |
| Ι | ι | Iota | i |
| Κ | κ | Kappa | k |
| Λ | λ | Lambda | l |
| Μ | μ | Mu | m |
| Ν | ν | Nu | n |
| Ξ | ξ | Xi | x / ks |
| Ο | ο | Omicron | o |
| Π | π | Pi | p |
| Ρ | ρ | Rho | r |
| Σ | σ or ς | Sigma | s |
| Τ | τ | Taf | t |
| Υ | υ | Upsilon | u / y |
| Φ | φ | Phi | ph |
| Χ | χ | Chi | ch |
| Ψ | ψ | Psi | ps |
| Ω | ω | Omega | o |
Note : Sigma is written σ in the middle of a word and ς at the end.
SOS would be σος
Obviously, Wikipedia has a big page about this.
It there is some problem and the Greek letters don't appear properly, please send me a note...
PULSE, for those who don't know, was a giant Tivoli conference which took place last week in Orlando, Florida.
Lets start with the crunch : The presentations.
Here's the PULSE Blog.
Here's a new IBM initiative : A Web 2.0 Tivoli Community
The new community space looks interesting. It's still very much a work in progress, but go there and look around.
Yesterday I installed a small ITM PoC (Proof of Concept) at a customer.
I arrived at their office at about 8:45... and waited at the entrance till 9:30 before the guy I was supposed to meet was located. I should have taken this as an omen.
How long should it take to copy a 4 Giga DVD to the customer's server? About 20-25 minutes I guess.
40 minutes after the copying started, I got a corruption-error on the DVD.
Signing dramatically, I sat down to burn a new DVD as the in-house DBAs started installing the database I had requested to be installed the day before. They couldn't even start the installation because the drive was hardened. Aha! Could that explain my copying misery?
They started a conference call with the system guys to remove the hardening.
It was now about 11:30.
I gave the customer my (newly burned) DVD told him to copy it to the server, unzip it and call me.
I fully expected to wait till next week for that call...
However...
At 13:30 I get a call - the DB is installed and the files have been copied.
I go back and what do you know?
Everything went swimmingly from there on...
By 15:30 I have installed the Tivoli Monitoring server and 5 agents are being monitored.
The biggest problem I had with the installation was the lack of an Adobe Acrobat reader so I could show the customer the documentation.
Just goes to show, what starts out as a bad day just might turn out ok :)
Robert
The Phoenix space probe has landed on Mars!
Here are a few links:
The next few weeks will be very interesting...
ITM 6.x is a pretty simple system and day-to-day, I don't feel that it needs too much hand holding.
Of course, we never leave the poor thing alone and we're constantly upgrading the system, adding agents and changing situations :)
So, every now and then a problem appears.
There is an excellent presentation which summarizes basic troubleshooting and where to look for problems.
(Logs, trace levels, debugging, process flow and much much more)
ITM 6.1 Problem Determination Tools and Best Practices
It also has links to a series of scripts in OPAL which will enable you to see what's going on in your ITM environment in a simpler way.
Simpler for tech people of course, don't let managers see these scripts :)
for the scripts, go to the OPAL catalog
Enjoy :)
This application from IBM is really a mouthful!
Pity, because it's (in my opinion) one of the new additions to Tivoli over the last few years.
TADDM is an application which maps out your network, getting full information about each and every element (Application Discovery) and finds out the relationships between each (Application Dependency).
So, for example, TADDM will find out that application A runs on Server B is accessed by Web Servers C and D while application A accesses Database E which is on server F. It also keeps a full history of the parameters and information of each element so you can see what changes have occurred.
TADDM works centrally, no need to install anything on any other server (unless you need to cross firewalls and then you need an SSH server for each section). It works by scanning the network and running Sensors on each device it finds. If it find a computer, it will use a generic sensor to find out what kind it is. It will then use the relevant Windows, UNIX,etc sensor. Once it knows what applications, Databases, etc are on the server, it will use the relevant sensors too.
Those of you familiar with ITIL will realize that TADDM is IBM's system for building the organization's CMDB.
TADDM Links:
Documentation
IBM Support
TADDM Redbook (For a slightly earlier version, but 90%+ is still relevant)
Developerworks Wiki
My TADDM Tips:
Robert
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