Jun ’07 8
Today is the first day of our vacation at Walt Disney World and we were treated to some early evening fireworks courtesy of NASA. Space Shuttle Atlantis launched this evening at 7:38 pm. A guy was on the phone with someone watching it on TV and gave the word when it cleared the tower. After a few seconds we could see a bright dot heading skyward over Tomorrowland (appropriately enough) with a white trail billowing behind it. An awesome sight even from that far away. Everyone cheered as it faded from view. Very cool.
Update! I’ve posted the photos of the launch in their own album so you don’t have to dig through my Magic Kingdom photos if you don’t want to. Remember, we watched the launch from Disney World, over 60 miles away, so don’t expect to see astronauts waving from the cockpit windows in the photos. Here are a couple of photos, including one photos zoomed in to show the shuttle right after the solid rocket boosters separated.
Technorati Tags: Space Shuttle, Atlantis, STS-117
Jun ’07 8
This is it, the end of TechEd 2007… for me at least. I won’t touch on the bag check mess this morning as I covered that in a previous post. I attended two sessions today, both repeats from earlier days. The sessions were:
- SVR315 Server Core: Running a Minimal Server
- CLI311R Building the Perfect Master Image: A Universal Image Strategy
Server Core is a welcome addition to Windows Server. I have a few servers back home that are perfect candidates. For systems such as domain controllers, DNs servers, etc., I think you’re going to see Server Core become the de facto way to implement these boxes. The lower resource requirements as well as an improved security posture are two factors for this.
p. According to the speaker, most third-party agents such as backup agents work in Server Core today in their shipping versions. I’ll be interested to test that out for the agents we’re using.
The Universal Image session was recommended to me by an individual I ran into from the University, and it was dead-on. With all of the BDD2007 sessions I attended, this was the last component needed to be able to go back and really implement this in our environment. Originally I had put much more emphasis on scripting application installs on top of a few base images, but it is so easy to fall into the trap of building monolithic images, that we wound up doing more of this than we probably should have. Recently I had reduced our image count somewhat and used scripting for installing hardware specific items. But I think it is time to swing the pendulum back even more and see if this will help simplify and streamline how we deploy systems. I have a feeling that some of the glitches we run into are related to building images on top of images as we’ve been doing.
Now I’m off to lunch, and then my vacation begins. I’m relocating over to Disney’s Wilderness Lodge. Kristin will fly in later this afternoon and then we begin six days at Walt Disney World! After a week of TechEd, it’ll be good to give my brain a rest, turn off email on my phone, and relax a little.
Jun ’07 8
Ran into the first logistics mess of the conference this morning. Like most people, I planned to check out of my hotel this morning and check bags at the convention center for the morning sessions.
When I arrived, I found a long line that wasn’t moving very fast. Turns out they had one line for airline check-in and one line for regular bag check. That’s all they had for everyone checking bags. It took over half an hour to reach the front of the line, and the line behind me had grown to over an hour wait. Would have been much more efficient to use the huge empty space in the registration area and setup a roped off area to place bags instead of hauling them from the line, around the counter, and into a room behind the registration desk.
Nearly missed breakfast and my first session. I expect this is a convention center screw-up, but the show organizers need to address this for next year.
