Useless Conversation

[Paelos]

Hahahaha Windows 3.0? I'm shocked you could find a computer that still had access to 5.25 floppys that would install it.

[ghost]

The restaurant I ate at last night appeared to have an old PC Jr. sitting in the corner for some strange reason. 

[Hammond]

We have some very old manufacturing equipment which you can only program though a very old program that will only work on windows 3.0....   The laptop they had that was specifically for programming that machine died. Thankfully at some point they got 3.5 inch floppies of the windows 3.0 so it wasn't TO bad to do.  

I also have a box of 8 inch floppies that we are going to shred sitting in front of desk from a old IBM mainframe.    Nothing like seen manufacturing date of 8/15/89 sitting in front of me.  Sigh.


Edit. 

I missed the comment about windows xp.  Thankfully 99% of our machines are running windows 7 at this point.  All of these issues I mentioned are special cases and are not necessarily my responsibility.  I like taking on challenges so while I complain I was the one that volunteered for them.  In the windows 3.0 case it was a special manufacturing machine that you could not just replace and it had the potential of costing the company alot of money.  After the machine dying they decided to design a replacement which takes awhile to build.

[Ingmar]

It's good to know there are places where my skills won't look woefully out of date.

[Merusk]

Is there some reason they can't run it on a virtual machine emulating windows 3.0 instead?

[Ingmar]

I bet it has a hardware dongle or something to enable the license, we had a couple machines like that lingering around until recently.

[Chimpy]

Well, the win98 is actually running in virtual pc and goes straight to a dos prompt. The VMware is soley to have a shared XP vm because they need a machine that can run the software but that they can remotely log into for remote assistance/troubleshooting.

At least we are lucky in that all of our systems are happy talking to computers through a USB to RS232 adapter.

We do have a system that has been legacy for about a year running on OpenVMS that they keep on because they know that as soon as they turn it off someone will ask for something off of it. They doubt it will power back on if it goes down as the server it is on is an Alpha box that predates Compaq buying out DEC.

[Yegolev]

I don't know where someone would even find DOS now.  I have some 3.5" floppies with, I think, DOS 6.  I suppose USB floppy drives exist.

So, related: I recently was exposed to VMware, specifically Player.  Had to set up a pair of Suse boxes for a training course, and I was given two ISO (SLES and SLED 11) and a couple VMware definitions.  It was surprisingly easy to start up, so now I'm wondering what else I can do with it... without buying a expensive license, that is, since I R BROKE.  Since I work with virtualized servers all the time, it was very interesting to see similar tech run on Windows.

Wish I had time to look into it.

[Trippy]

FreeDOS is still out there. If you've got some bootable CDs/DVDs bundled with some PC hardware, good chance they are using FreeDOS.

Edit: plural

[Ingmar]

I don't know where someone would even find DOS now.  I have some 3.5" floppies with, I think, DOS 6.  I suppose USB floppy drives exist.

So, related: I recently was exposed to VMware, specifically Player.  Had to set up a pair of Suse boxes for a training course, and I was given two ISO (SLES and SLED 11) and a couple VMware definitions.  It was surprisingly easy to start up, so now I'm wondering what else I can do with it... without buying a expensive license, that is, since I R BROKE.  Since I work with virtualized servers all the time, it was very interesting to see similar tech run on Windows.

Wish I had time to look into it.

There is actually quite a lot you can do with VMWare for free.

http://www.vmware.com/products/vsphere-hypervisor/overview.html

[Yegolev]

/chinstroke

[Chimpy]

Being able to actually download the free versions takes navigating their Byzantine website structure though.

And if you are like me, VSphere client will lock up your computer every 5 minutes when trying to manage a vm. But I am not bitter.

And I may be annoyed with VMware but it doesn't nearly compare with the nexus of suck that was last Friday: getting the Adobe PDF maker plugin to play nice with AutoCAD.

[Yegolev]

Is it a VMware problem or a host OS problem?  VMware is used underneath all of the hundreds of Windows servers in my workplace, and Vmotion is being used by those guys to migrate to other datacenters.  I thought they were running these things on linux, but I get from the web pamphlet that you can load the VMware hypervisor without an OS?  Anyway, I would think if it was unstable then it wouldn't be used in a srs bzns enterprise.  Of course, that's not a real rule.

[Chimpy]

Oh, VSphere client is the management application. I was using esXi which is their "free" bare-metal hypervisor. But to actually manage the box you need to download VSphere on your computer. There is literally no interface to manage VMs on the hypervisor machine itself. The client kept crashing like mad and I couldn't get the frickin thing to actually boot off the DVD drive even though it said it saw it.

I am sure your guys are probably running whichever flavor of their bare-metal offerings suit their needs/license structure best.

[Minvaren]

From playing with it recently - ESXi 5.x removes the management interface on the host, 4.x should still have it.  In either case, ESX appears to just be a custom DSL distro or something close.

Few problems playing with vSphere Client on XP SP3, but it definitely isn't as smooth/slick as Player is, which confuses me.

[Hammond]

hardware dongle which in this case was off of a custom port (looked like a bastardized parallel port. )

Thankfully we do not have any sun boxes here.  My last job we had some ancient ones that I migrated off of as soon as I became a manager/sysadmin.

[Ingmar]

Nailed it. 

[Merusk]

Had one of those awesome/ awkward penguin moments last night.  Wife won tickets to a movie premiere on Thursday, but the movie is "Here Comes the Boom" with Kevin James.

[Sky]

I've got to maintain a 98 box to run some old microfilm readers. I've been trying to fix that situation for 12 years now. Had to rebuild the box about three years ago, it was an adventure trying to remember where things were.

My VMWare gripe - Fusion won't run OSX clients prior to 10.7. I REALLY want to ditch a few old computers, but I'm stuck with this one to run all my PPC/Rosetta apps. It's a weird time to be a mac admin, similar to the OS9/OSX sunsetting era but with a hardware twist.

[Paelos]

Had one of those awesome/ awkward penguin moments last night.  Wife won tickets to a movie premiere on Thursday, but the movie is "Here Comes the Boom" with Kevin James.

It can't be that bad. You should post a review. 

[RhyssaFireheart]

So tired and bored this morning.  Ugh.

[Chimpy]

Figured my VMware problem....a lock file in the shared vm folder. Deleted that and it loaded the copied vm like buttah.

[Yegolev]

I'm learning a lot in this thread, which is likely against the rules.  I have Vsphere access via my Citrix account so I can get to the console of some RHEL boxes if they won't boot.  It's starting to make sense!

[Chimpy]

I get to spend 3 days at SCCM training later this month.

[Minvaren]

SCCM appears to be a hot tech item lately, will look good on the resume. 

...and help with enterprise-wide rollouts of the weekly Flash security patches...   

[Chimpy]

It has some really nice features, that is certain.

[Yegolev]

Everyone is pushing that sort of thing.  It helps with security, which is hot, and you can stick the term "cloud" to it as well.  Already had an overview of IBM's product, and HP has one as well.  Of course, EDS had one for a long time but we aren't able to use it on this account due to so we get to sign in to 700 AIX boxes individually to do things, like cavemen.

[Signe]

I get to spend 3 days at SCCM training later this month.

Bring us back some souvenirs, like a mug or some microsofts. 

[Chimpy]

Everyone is pushing that sort of thing.  It helps with security, which is hot, and you can stick the term "cloud" to it as well.  Already had an overview of IBM's product, and HP has one as well.  Of course, EDS had one for a long time but we aren't able to use it on this account due to so we get to sign in to 700 AIX boxes individually to do things, like cavemen.

There are still 700 machines in the world left running AIX ?

[murdoc]

I get to spend 3 days at SCCM training later this month.

I'm doing the same thing and taking some Lync training even though I've just deployed it out to 500 people 

[Ironwood]

What the hell would you need Lync training for anyway ?  It's not the most complicated bit of kit in the world.

[Rasix]

Everyone is pushing that sort of thing.  It helps with security, which is hot, and you can stick the term "cloud" to it as well.  Already had an overview of IBM's product, and HP has one as well.  Of course, EDS had one for a long time but we aren't able to use it on this account due to so we get to sign in to 700 AIX boxes individually to do things, like cavemen.

There are still 700 machines in the world left running AIX ?

There's likely more than 700 sitting in the same building as me. 

[Signe]

What the hell would you need Lync training for anyway ?  It's not the most complicated bit of kit in the world.

If your company wants to send you for training in underwater basket weaving, I say go.  They'll give you a stupid piece of paper with a stamp on it and you shove it in your CV and next time you're looking for work your salary goes up a notch.  The skin only comes off their nose.  Or something.

[murdoc]

What the hell would you need Lync training for anyway ?  It's not the most complicated bit of kit in the world.

If your company wants to send you for training in underwater basket weaving, I say go.  They'll give you a stupid piece of paper with a stamp on it and you shove it in your CV and next time you're looking for work your salary goes up a notch.  The skin only comes off their nose.  Or something.

This. Exactly this.

Lync is HUGE right now, pretty much all the oil and gas companies are just putting it in now and not enough people are "certified" in it.

[Yegolev]

Are we thinking of the same Lync?