I just spotted this on the Telstra website. Telstra have up’d their low end data plans significantly. Previously, $29 got you 80Mb per month which is barely enough for those of us with an iPhone. Telstra have now increased the $29 plan to 300Mb. Whilst this falls short of the 700Mb Optus are offering and 1Gb from 3, it is still a 375% increase. Other plans are $5 for 5Mb and $10 for 150Mb.

If you are on any of the aforementioned plans, you will be automatically “cut-over” to the new plan sometime between August 1st and August 15th.

For those needing more than 300Mb per month, Telstra also offer a 1Gb and 3Gb plan for $89 and $119 respectively.

For more details, check the Telstra Browsing Packs page here.

Just a quick post (written using Worpress for the iPhone) to let you know that this blog is now optimised for the iPhone.

Whilst browsing through my local Borders on the weekend, I spotted this little gem that I was planning on buying from Amazon anyway. As far as OpsMgr resources go, this is the bees-knees. A collaborative effort by Kerrie Meyler, Cameron Fuller, John Joyner and Andy Dominey (the same people that bought you ops-mgr.spaces.live.com), this book covers everything you need to know about OpsMgr and then some.

The average rating on Amazon is 5 stars and deservedly so. I can’t recommend this book highly enough. If you are an OpsMgr admin or you want to know more about the product, this is the definitive book on the subject.

Buy this book from the LazyIndustries aStore

Here it is Australia…

Optus have finally released the details for their pricing and plans of the iPhone.

Details can be found here

This is just a quick post to highlight a great OpsMgr blog with terrific resources. The blog is maintained by Kerrie Meyler, Cameron Fuller, John Joyner, and Andy Dominey who are all knowledge leaders in OpsMgr.

Of particular use is the Tuning and Configuration section that has a series called "OpsMgr by Example" that looks at ways to tune and refine some of the key Management Packs.

I highly recommend this blog for any OpsMgr admins out there.

Operations Manager on Live Spaces

A quick update to my previous post from June 10 on the iPhone. I have had an off the record conversation with a friend of mine at Vodafone and it would appear that the iPhone won’t be as cheap in Australia as it is in the USA. Whilst they have not heard a firm price (Vodafone exec’s are *VERY* tight lipped), the rumours circulating the halls are to expect prices to be somewhere between $500 and $700.

More interestingly from my perspective are the data plans they are going to offer. Again the rumours are to expect data plans similar to existing modem based plans (2Gb for $30 per month).

I have been running the Tech Preview of Live Mesh for a couple of weeks now and have got to say it is one of the cleanest, slickest apps I’ve seen. This crosses over from being “just another online storage service”, to being a full blown desktop file/folder synchronisation tool. It allows you to add multiple devices (Mac and mobile device support coming soon) to allow sync’ing of files and folders. These files are then accessible offline or online. This allows you to work on any document within your “Mesh” and the next time you are online it will automatically sync to all your other devices.

Anyway, I have 3 invites available to the first 3 people to respond.

Steve Jobs, CEO of Apple announced on June 10 the availability of the iPhone 3G. This is the very same phone that mobile providers Optus and Vodafone will be selling as of July 11 in Australia. The cost of the new units are half that of it’s predecessor at USD199 (AUD210) for the 8GB version and USD299 (AUD315) for the 16GB.

Steve Jobs has been quoted as saying that “the pricing would apply internationally”.

Really?!?!?!

An Optus spokesman was quoted at CeBIT on the 20th of May saying he estimated…

“the price tag would likely be around $700 or so.”

$700 or so is hugely different from the AUD315 as quoted by Jobs. Even if we allow for a 20% premium applied by Optus or Vodafone that still only equates to AUD378.

I hope for the sake of all Australian’s that this doesn’t turn into a money grab by either of the mobile providers. If it does retail for the $700 or so, my advise would be to source your iPhone 3G from eBay or a friend overseas. Hell it might even be cheaper to fly to Bangkok and buy it from there.

Source: Optus gives iPhone release date and price - Current.com.au Cheaper iPhone on sale in Australia next month - Herald Sun

I recently had the need to uninstall a ManagementPack from OpsMgr without using the Operators Console (kept getting a exception error every time I opened the console after importing the eXcSoftware Management Pack). Here’s how I did it:

Here’s how I did it:
• On the RMS, open Command Shell.

 
• You’ll need to know the name of the MP, so at the powershell prompt type Get-ManagementPack. If [like me] you have a large number of MP’s installed, you’ll probably want to pipe this into a text file, or expand the Screen Buffer Size to something like 3000, run the command and then [right click and select find to] search.

• Once you have the name we can now uninstall the MP. Start by typing the following:

  $MP = Get-ManagementPack :where-opject {$_.Name -eq ‘eXcSoftware.nonWindows’

  We’ve now set the variable $MP to contain the values for the MP. Now type in:

  uninstall-managementpack -managementpack $mp

• Sadly, there is no confirmation that the MP has been uninstalled. You’ll have to go into the console to confirm.

Thankfully [for me] this did fix my issue. I really must get around to setting up my test OpsMgr environment rather than working live with production.

OK, I know a few post ago I wrote about our initial installation of OpsMgr. Well since then things have ramped up and we are almost ready to fully cut over to OpsMgr from MOM. Almost!

There are 2 hurdles I am yet to overcome and they are (to a certain extent) show stoppers.

Hurdle 1:

We (sadly) use a product called CA UniCenter ServiceDesk (or USD) as our help desk application. Now, I’ve used a fair few SD apps in my time and this is by far the clumsiest of them all. In fairness to CA however, we are a few releases behind and aren’t planning an upgrade any time soon, and this is part of my issue.

Unfortunately we have no means by which to have alerts generated by OpsMgr inserted into USD. Why, I hear you ask? Well it’s like this…

At present, MOM alerts are emailed to a central mailbox where (through almost magic) the emails are processed by a USD tool and entered into USD. Alerts are assigned against the name of a corresponding CI item (e.g. SERVER1). This works well as MOM uses the NetBIOS name of the server. This doesn’t work with OpsMgr because there is no way of passing the NetBIOS name in an alert, just the FQDN (e.g. SERVER1.DOMAIN.COM.AU). When USD cross references the email with the CMDB, it doesn’t find an entry for the FQDN, just the hostname.

An advisory call to Microsoft just confirmed what I pretty much already knew. No available variables, no X-Path, no access to the NetBIOS name at all.

I am working on a few solutions to this issue and should have it resolved within the next day or 2.

Hurdle 2:

Like most companies, we have a DMZ and therefor servers in said DMZ. Both MOM and OpsMgr use mutual authentication to communicate with servers and ensure the integrity of the traffic. This could be disabled within MOM (assuming you are willing to wear the risks [minimal though they may be]). Microsoft (if their grand wisdom) have enforced mutual authentication within OpsMgr, making it difficult to setup DMZ (let alone cross domain/forest) monitoring. Documentation is sketchy at best, though I was able to find a guide at www.systemcenterforum.org but it is clearly not comprehensive enough (it glosses over some important information around certificates and assumes a certain setup).

On the whole however, OpsMgr is a big improvement over MOM. It’s object oriented monitoring means more control and greater granularity on alerts.