I’m still getting caught up on events, so I thought I’d share with you a little about our participation in the 2010 Tech Field Day held in Seattle, WA.  Back in the middle of July, Compellent had an opportunity to participate in Gestalt IT Tech Field Day.  As it says on their website, “This unique event brings together innovative IT product vendors and independent thought leaders, allowing them to get to know one another. It is a forum for engagement, education, hands-on experience, and feedback.” Compellent was thrilled to be part of the experience as one of five sponsors for this event.  Others included F5, NEC, Veeam, and Nimble Storage, who used Tech Field Day as their official launch. The event focused around these different vendors who had the opportunity to present their technologies to an esteemed panel of delegates.  The delegates, which comprised of technologists and bloggers, came from…

I was having a little fun with my new phone, the Samsung Epic 4G and discovered that there is a panoramic mode built into the camera.  I experimented a little and think for a 5MP camera on a phone, that I actually got some pretty good results.  What do you think? Ellie took her first ride on the Giant Slide this year.  The picture above was from Saturday, September 4, which happened to be a record setting day with over 234,000 people visiting the Minnesota State Fair.  You can tell by the amount of people that it was indeed packed.  KISS was the Grandstand act that night.  Need I say more? This panoramic was from Friday, September 3.  The weather was cloudy with chilly temperatures in the upper 50’s.  In addition to the chilly weather, winds were out of the north at about 20 MPH which made it barely tolerable. …

Matter of fact, it’s hard to believe that my last post was April 2.  That’s over four months ago. A lot has happened in those four months.  Ellie is now 16 months old and has turned into this fabulous little girl with quite the personality,  I’ve moved into a different role at Compellent, moved from an iPhone to Android, lost some weight, gained some back, and survived another Minnesota State Fair.  The last two might be linked in some fashion. Nonetheless, I’m going to try to refocus and generate some regular content on my blog.  Apparently no guest bloggers stop by in my absence to maintain things, but it stayed up anyway.  Oh, I did change the theme.  Cause it seems like I needed to do something to make it feel new again.  Surprisingly enough for me, my blog is also a little over four years old now.  It’s fun…

I ran into a scenario last week where we had loaded the Compellent Storage Center Command Set for Windows PowerShell on a server. When we launched the shell shortcut, the window opened but took a long time to get to a PowerShell command prompt. So, what causes slow start-up when loading PowerShell? The most common reason seems to be that machines experiencing this slowness are not connected to the Internet. What? Well, when Since PowerShell is loading the Compellent Command Set DLL externally, .NET has a security feature to check Microsoft’s CRL, or Certificate Revocation List. This process verifies the authenticity and validity of the software publisher’s certificate. If this check can’t reach the Internet, the process will time out after several minutes. Now, this doesn’t prevent anything from loading (which seems odd), but it takes a couple minutes for a process that should take only a couple of seconds.…

I ran into an interesting problem this weekend. I noticed that a lot of email was being returned as non-deliverable from my Exchange 2010 server. Many domains, specifically AOL and some of the major ISPs require that the domains they communicate have mail servers with reverse zone lookups, meaning that their name “mail.domain.com” for example, resolves to a specific IP. Well, my MX record does reverse resolve to the correct IP, however that IP wasn’t the IP address that my server was communicating from. My infrastructure goes through a firewall. It used to be Microsoft ISA Server, but recently I have been trying the new Forefront Threat Management Gateway. One of the nice things is TMG is supported on Windows 2008 and R2, and can be virtualized as well. I built mine on Windows 2008 R2, which appears to be part of my identity problem, at least as far as…