Sony VAIO sucks – Part two
After all the 'positive' feedback here, I decided to post some additional notes on the VAIO VGN-TX770P. After using the laptop for about 6 months the following issues came up:
1) The left side of the VAIO keyboard started to get stuck (near the left CTRL & SHIFT buttons). No drinks were spilled on it & no accidental drops.
2) I started seeing the image of the keyboard on the LCD (mirror). This one particularly because of the bad design of the laptop - the soft pads on the sides are not thick enough to prevent the keyboard from touching the screen. I did not clean the monitor so that Sony could actually see the keyboard buttons on the LCD.
VmWare P2V
I've deployed VmWare Server at work and moved some of the existing physical machines into a virtual environment. Not having tools such as P2V assistant for an easier conversion was a pain, but I learned a lot during the process (such as copying devices and HAL info from a physical machine registry & file system into the virtual one). Acronis TrueImage Server was not much of a help because the darn Universal Restore function never worked right. So I ended up moving pretty much everything myself. I was even able to migrate some Linux servers to VmWare! Everything has been working quite well and I'm extremely happy with the results. So happy that I put VmWare Infrastructure for my next year's budget :)
Quicktime Fixed!
Amazing, isn't it? :) Seems like Apple got a hit and decided to do it right this time...
Apple bundles Quicktime with iTunes
I got my Micro$oft Windoze reinstalled today. One of the components of my system that I use every once in a while is Apple Quicktime. I wanted to get it installed and went here to get it. Guess what? Apple is now bundling Quicktime with iTunes! Although I own an iPod, I still hate iTunes and everything related to it. It pissed me off so bad, that I started looking for a stand alone version of quicktime immediately. A little bit of googling helped me to find what I was looking for :) Download it from here. Btw, you won't be able to find this link on Apple's Quicktime page anywhere.
Sony VAIO sucks!
Oh my God! It's my fifth time reinstalling Windows XP on a Sony VAIO that just got released (VGN-TX770P). When I received the laptop it had so much crap on it (such as AOL, various Sony utilities & trial versions of Norton, MS Office, Anti-spyware, etc) that I decided to wipe out the system and install clean Windows XP Pro. Guess what...wireless drivers including cingular adapter for this stupid laptop were not present on Sony's support website. I called Sony and they told me that I had to run a restore procedure from their restore DVD, which by the way, doesn't even come with the laptop. So, I ended up purchasing their restore DVD for twenty something bucks including shipping. I received the DVD in about a week, booted up from it and let it reimage the machine to the factory default. Took me about an hour to uninstall all the Sony's crap and I thought everything was back to normal. As soon as I rebooted the machine, Cingular wireless stopped working! I went to Sony's support site again to see if there were any driver updates and everything is now available for download! Aghhh...
Oh well, I thought, screw Sony with their support and started downloading the drivers from the website. Reinstalled Windows XP, went through all drivers just like it was instructed on their support page, step by step. Everything seemed to be OK, except when I rebooted the machine all of a sudden it started freezing. CTRL+ALT+DEL -> Task Manager showed "smartwifi.exe" eating up 99% CPU time. Reinstalled all of the drivers from scratch, reboot - same thing. OK, I thought, maybe I screwed up a step during driver installation and did something wrong. Reinstalled OS again, installed drivers and damn it! The same darn thing - the process was eating up 99% of CPU. Called Sony support. As usual, an idiot technician picks up. Makes me change the process priority (duh)...tries a couple of different things and puts me on hold. After about 30 minutes of making me listen to stupid music on hold, picks up and tells me that my configuration is not supported by Sony because it's not Sony's image. I got mad and simply hung up.
After all unsuccessful customizations I decided to go back to Sony's image. I had to wait for three goddamn hours for the imaging to complete on it. And guess what - right after the imaging was done I got another error from Sony's connection utility. I'm extremely mad and frustrated about this laptop right now and I'm ready to send it back. Sony sucks, their software sucks, their hardware sucks. It's almost like in the old days when I hated Microsoft for their Windows 95, I hate Sony for their VAIO laptops.
Read Part 2 here
Jabber and Active Directory (OpenFire/WildFire)
I have been looking for corporate chat solutions for the last couple of days. There are many good solutions out there, but most of them are commercial and I didn't feel like paying for a chat server. During the IP4IT conference, I had a chance to meet Peter Saint-Andre and we spent some time talking about the future of voice communications and Jabber.
I decided to give Jabber a try and see what it can do for inter-office and remote communication. I selected Wildfire to be the Jabber server, since it had more features and easier administration than others. The installation was painless - I installed with RPM and it placed everything in /opt/wildfire. Not a preferable location for me, but what a heck, I was just testing. The next step was reading the LDAP Guide to make Wildfire work with the Active Directory. The web administration is too simple and does not yet allow specifying LDAP settings, so I had to manually modify the configuration file. This was the most painful process. The documentation for Wildfire does not include specific instructions for AD and I had to do my own research to find out what needed to be done. Gladly the wildfire community is quite large and I was able to find answers to my questions fairly quickly.
The Jabber server is up and running now. The AD integration is working great and I'm even able to create employee roster lists via AD Groups! This means that everyone who installs the Jabber client will automatically see all employees in their buddy list without having to add anyone, one by one.
I selected NeOS as the Jabber client because it has more features than Gaim for Jabber. With NeOS we are now able to share whiteboards and initiate video/audio conferencing (although I'm not sure if we'll ever need those). Have been testing the software for a day now and we're pretty happy with it. Not a bad result, having spent just a couple of hours on installation :)
A lot of users asked me to post my working configuration - here it is :) It looks a little different than my version because I stripped out all the comments and removed the sensitive information such as passwords, etc. Most important things to remember:
1) Make sure that the AD server name can be resolved by your jabber server.
2) Modify baseDN entry to match your full domain name. If the domain is 'internal.crap.net', baseDN should be: "dc=internal,dc=crap,dc=net".
3) Make sure that the "adminDN" line is correct in your AD structure. In my config the AD admin account is "Wildfire Administrator" and the account is in "Administrators" group.
3) You should have a Global Security Group called "Corporate List" with all the users you want to see in Jabber. This group is under "Users" in your AD structure. If it's in a different location, make sure to modify the "searchfilter" and "groupsearchfilter" lines.
