Are your Google Apps Calendars not public anymore? Here's how to fix it!

Sometime on November 30, Google broke public calendar sharing for apps users. This means that any calendars previously shared with the world (like, for example, my IT events calendar) are no longer visible. As is typical for Google, the change was made quietly and it was not immediately obvious how to fix it. But here’s what you should do if your calendar is no longer public.

Apparently, Google made a mistake when coding calendar sharing for Google Apps domains: The domain wide sharing controls only applied to primary calendars, not secondary calendars created by users. This meant that Google Apps administrators could not control public sharing of calendars.  Google fixed this issue by making the Google Apps calendar sharing settings apply to both primary and secondary calendars, pushing this out live around November 30, 2011.

The problem with this fix is that it breaks all public shared  calendars by default. Apparently, the grandfathered or default setting for calendar sharing was “only free/busy information”. But users could create their own calendars (what Google refers to as a secondary calendar) and set sharing to any value they liked. In fixing this, Google broke all sorts of public calendars this week.

You need to fix Google's "fix" in Apps Dashboard

Here’s how to fix Google’s broken fix:

1. Log into the Google Apps Dashboard as the Apps administrator
2. Under “Service Settings”, click “Calendar” (or point your browser to https://www.google.com/a/cpanel/YOURDOMAIN.COM/ServiceSettings#ServiceSettings/service=calendar)
3. In the “Sharing options” section, you will see “set user ability” for outside your domain. By default, this will be set to “Only free/busy information (hide event details)”. Instead, set it to “Share all information, but outsiders cannot change calendars” or “Share all information, and outsiders can change calendars”. This does not appear to change the permissions of existing calendars, so it should be safe to change.
4. If public sharing was previously enabled for a calendar, it should automatically be re-enabled now. If not, click the little triangle next to the calendar’s name in the Google calendar interface, select “Share this calendar”, then make sure “Make this calendar public” and “see all event details” are selected.

Here's the fix

It is really frustrating that Google would make a change that affects existing sharing settings explicitly chosen by Apps users, and doubly so thanks to Google’s ridiculously opaque and difficult tech support mechanisms. I couldn’t locate an answer in Google’s own support pages, though (ironically) a Google search did reveal the answer on one of Google’s own pages.

© sfoskett for Stephen Foskett, Pack Rat, 2011. | Google Broke Public Calendar Sharing For Apps Users – Here’s How To Fix It
This post was categorized as Personal. Each of my categories has its own feed if you'd like to filter out or focus on posts like this.

We all lose now that Google shut down open RSS sharing from Reader

Late this afternoon, Google finally flipped the switch and turned off the integrated “Shared Items” link blogs In Google Reader. Now, Reader automatically shares to Google Plus, a walled-garden social network for nerds. Where once Google embraced standards like RSS, Reader’s shares are now held captive. Lots of folks are not happy about this.

What Changed in Google Reader?

Before: The "Share" toggle was a curated RSS feed of good stuff to read

My big gripe: Google removed the rarely-used but much-loved “shared items” feature and swapped in the Google Plus social network in its place. Although old shared items feeds are still accessible (here’s mine!), they are hidden away and apparently can no longer be modified.

After: +1 is Google's Roach Motel, with only "Send to" remaining

The “Send to” feature remains, but this is a script initiation rather than a toggle like “Share” or “+1”. And “Send to” doesn’t appear in Mobile Reader – only “+1″. So my frequent on-the-go reading and sharing is gone, too.

And you can’t subscribe to your friends’ shared items anymore – you have to read them on Google Plus. Remember, Google Reader is all about RSS. That’s what it is. So removing RSS creation from Reader is inexcusable! If I can’t curate an RSS feed, I’m now left with half a network. It’s consume-only in terms of RSS, with all content curation and creation shifted to Google Plus.

Also gone are public tags, which some folks used and loved, as well as discussions, which were mostly silent. And the blog widget and bookmarklet are now non-functional.

Google also gave the interface the “white-out” treatment, draining it of color like a Halloween vampire. The new interface is so sparse, with exaggerated white space and tiny bold fonts, that my eyes have trouble scanning and reading. Even compared with Google Plus, the new Reader is ugly.

Why This Change Matters

No thanks, Google. Give me back an RSS feed of shares!

Let me repeat what I said above: Google Reader is a social network built on RSS. and it’s just been cut in half. Rather than reading and sharing, Reader is now just an RSS reader application. And even the reading part is emasculated: You can only read site RSS, and since you can’t subscribe to friends’ shared items anymore (’cause they don’t exist). Your readership of others’ “likes” will shift to Plus and its inferior and bloated experience.

In other words, the new Google Reader is nothing more than a static RSS reader in a browser. It used to be much more than this: Reader was my main blog reader, and the first application I went to in the morning. Now it’s much less – Google went backward.

Since there’s no API or RSS feed for Plus shares, Google has created a “Roach Motel” instead of a social network: Likes check in but they can’t check out! Reader’s main sharing feature is a one-way pipe into Google Plus, reducing the value of Reader itself. And there’s no way to automatically “circle” the people you used to follow. They’re just gone.

Alternatives to Plus

Of course, there’s still “Send to”, Google’s customizable sharing feature in Reader. And it’s quite possible to use that to send “likes” to Twitter or Reddit or Facebook. But “Send to” is a “click-hunt-click” experience in the browser, and it’s not available in the mobile version.

A better alternative is to stop using Reader and move to some other application. The problem is that these only allow you to share outward: If you’re interested in continuing to follow the shares of others, you’re out of luck. Most will likely adapt to sharing on Plus only, and those shares are walled off inside Google’s private world.

Unless someone comes up with a workable alternative, or until Google adds RSS or a worthwhile API to Plus, we’re all sunk. And we’re all poorer for it. Thanks, Google.

Stephen’s Stance

I’m not whining and crying because Google broke something I love. I’m upset because Google redirected a vibrant world of sharing into their own walled garden with no way to escape. This move effectively captures the fraternity of Reader sharers and firmly directs them to Google Plus for sharing and commenting. Sure, the new Reader is ugly and features are reduced generally. But the elimination of the sharing and reading feedback loop is a real loss to Internet users.

© sfoskett for Stephen Foskett, Pack Rat, 2011. | Google Reader’s Roach Motel “Un-Friends” the Internet
This post was categorized as Apple, Everything, Personal, Terabyte home. Each of my categories has its own feed if you'd like to filter out or focus on posts like this.

I think this sentiment is just as valid today as when I posted it in 2008!

Although many discussions in the storage industry focus on the relative merits of one protocol or another, the conversation occasionally turns to the core issue at hand: We continue to patch together a system based on outdated concepts. Most storage protocols continue to mimic direct attached storage, and most of our so-called networks act as point to point channels. An ultra-modern virtualized storage infrastructure with all the latest bells and whistles still holds the concepts of block and file at its core. Whenever the storage industry has tried to bring about real storage management they have been stymied by a lack of context for data.

No amount of virtualization, and no new protocol, will fix this. Put simply, we need a storage revolution.

Channels, Blocks, and Files

Most innovation in the 1980s and early 1990s focused on moving storage out of the server. SCSI allowed disk to exist in a separate cabinet, RAID allowed multiple physical disks to become a single virtual one, and these were mixed to become the prototype storage array. Although SCSI allowed one-to-many connectivity, it was never a true peer-to-peer network, even once it was mixed with network concepts in the form of Fibre Channel.

Even today, SAN storage is focused on providing faster, more flexible, and feature-packed direct-attached storage. A modern virtual SAN hides a complex arrangement of caching, data protection, tiered storage, replication, and deduplication, masquerading the lot as a simple, lowly disk drive. It is sad but true that all of our work as an industry has been dedicated to recreating what we started with.

Networked file-based storage is no better. Although NAS devices have all the advanced features of their SAN cousins, they must present a simple file tree to the host to retain compatibility. File virtualization merely presents a larger homogenous tree.

Inside the server, too, features and complexity are hidden to retain a familiar file system format. Volume managers can do anything a virtualization device can, but must present their output as a simple (though virtual) disk drive. File systems, too, have added features but still present a familiar tree of mount points, inodes, and files. Even ZFS, possibly the most advanced combination of volume management and file system technology yet, must present a simple tree of storage to applications.

The Metadata Roadblock

This outdated paradigm, of disks and file trees, is ill-suited to today’s storage challenges. Data must be categorized so actions can be taken to preserve or destroy it based on policies. Data must be searchable so users and applications can find what they want. Data must be flexible so it can be used in new ways. Our antiquated notions are not capable of meeting these challenges.

One simple problem is that we lack context for our data. Most file systems merely assign to a file a name, location, owner, and security attributes. The most advanced can contain extended metadata, but this is rarely seen in practice since many applications cannot agree on how to use this data. Microsoft’s Office suite can store and share extended file attributes, for example, but these live inside the file rather than in the file system. The promise of expanded Office attributes is only realized in conjunction with a content management system like SharePoint which lies above the lowly file system.

What if the storage system could keep this data instead? What if it could logically group files according to project or client, mining keywords and authors, and maintaining revisions? These concepts are not new, having been implemented in content management systems for years, and certain elements appeared in file systems, like Apple’s HFS and VMS’ Files-11, for decades.

Cut Down the Tree

File metadata would allow advanced features, but truly taking advantage of them requires a more fundamental shift in the way applications access files. Rather than sticking to a traditional hierarchy of directories in a tree (which was, after all, simply a primitive metadata system), we should remove the tree altogether. Allow files to become data objects, identified by arbitrary attributes and managed according to an overarching policy.

This future vision is decidedly different from our current notion of storage, but is not so far off. Many organizations now rely on central data warehouses based on SQL-language relational databases. As many storage managers have grumbled, databases tend to ignore storage management concepts entirely, managing their own content independently.

But not all applications need a database back-end, so another initiative seeks to provide generic object storage for wider use. Called content-addressable storage or CAS, these devices have traditionally been used only for archival purposes, since that was their first market application. As vendors break free of proprietary interfaces in favor of open ones like XAM, CAS could transform storage itself by eliminating both file and block storage at once.

Similar concepts are already at work in the so-called Web 2.0 world. Non-traditional databases like Google BigTable, Amazon S3, and Hadoop allow massive scalability for object storage. API-sharing initiatives with many Web 2.0 companies can be seen as similar prototypical object storage frameworks. Any of these could be leveraged to provide a new world of data storage, and many are gaining traction even now.

Stephen’s Stance

Although traditional block storage is here to stay for disk drives, and tree-type file systems are likely to remain the foundation of operating system storage, new object-based concepts could change the world in fundamental ways. As applications become “web aware”, they also become object aware, increasing the likelihood of such a storage revolution. For the majority of applications, this new world would be a welcome one indeed.

© sfoskett for Stephen Foskett, Pack Rat, 2011. | We Need a Storage Revolution
This post was categorized as Apple, Computer History, Enterprise storage, Virtual Storage. Each of my categories has its own feed if you'd like to filter out or focus on posts like this.

Virtualization decouples physical infrastructure from logical resources

Virtualization of IT systems decouples physical infrastructure from logical resources, hiding complexity and enabling new capabilities. However, not all potential benefits of virtualization have meaningful value outside IT circles: Too many of our discussions revolve around the very complexity that virtualization technology should be hiding! True business value is derived from transformed virtual resources in the next-generation data center, not the incremental capacity gains of virtual servers. But how will we get there, and what will this future look like?

The Problem with Virtual Servers

Implementation of virtualization technology to date has merely delivered condensation of physical resources: 250 physical servers are condensed onto 20 physical servers, but 250 virtual server images remain. True, this does result in the reduction of data center footprint, from rack space to power and cooling, enabling moderate cost savings. But these are not examples of real consolidation, let alone business transformation.

Many have lamented this “virtual server sprawl” and suggested alternative methods of consolidating low-utilization applications into larger, more flexible “resource servers”. For example, numerous SQL servers can be combined on a single central server with more focused management. But these larger resource servers are not normally virtualized since their concentrated I/O demands can overtax current server virtualization platforms. Therefore, consolidation and virtualization remain separate.

This is the problem with conventional server virtualization. It enables us to condense data center demands for some systems, but delivers very little else apart from new backup and management headaches. Certainly we can provision servers more quickly, and we might be able to recover from a disaster more easily, but these are IT-facing benefits that other business entities care little about.

Storage and Network Virtualization

Virtualization of storage and network resources face even higher barriers. Where server virtualization has quickly delivered incremental “green” savings, these benefits are harder to come by in other areas.

Storage virtualization primarily delivers flexibility. SAN or NAS systems can be combined into larger pools, allowing existing resources to be better utilized or provisioned more quickly. But there is only a little cost avoidance to be gleaned from more efficient use of storage capacity. Real cost savings would require reduction of infrastructure, and constant data growth makes this extremely difficult to achieve. Other benefits, like enhanced data migration or heterogeneous replication, ought to be invisible to the business anyway.

Network virtualization lags even further behind. Only a few shops have attempted to use technology like InfiniBand to enable flexible virtual connectivity, though the future Converged Enhanced Ethernet concept is beginning to spark some interest. Here again, financial benefits from network virtualization technology are limited to a moderate reduction in future equipment cost.

Transforming the Data Center

In all three instances (server, storage, and network), the financial benefits are merely the sideshow. The underlying benefit from virtualization of IT infrastructure comes from the extension of IT systems outside the data center, a change on the order of the advent of minicomputers or the spread of open systems.

VMware recently laid out a serious and compelling vision of this future Virtual Data Center as VDC-OS. Their concept is evolutionary and radical at once, with the simple virtual server infrastructure of today augmented with increasingly uniform and flexible storage and network layers. This culminates in a truly virtual data center, where running server images can move from device to device, location to location, and even out to the cloud.

VMware’s brilliance is in leveraging what works today (virtual server images on ESX) to build a foundation for complete virtualization of physical resources. But virtual servers running on VDC-OS remain tied to the present: They run the same operating systems and will likely remain bound to the same “one (virtual) server per application” world view that pervades open systems today. This leads to exactly the same situation of server sprawl that has proven a management nightmare.

Others are extending the web hosting concept to enable custom applications to be run on the scalable, flexible, multi-homed servers that run the world’s biggest Internet applications. Google and Amazon’s visions are decidedly post-data center, with applications, rather than server images, being the primary unit, and database-style storage replacing conventional blocks and files. Use of these web-oriented application platforms has so far been limited to entirely new systems built from scratch to take advantage of them, limiting their appeal to current IT environments.

Where Is the Business Value?

Yet, most discussions of these virtualization strategies (mine included) fails when it comes to demonstrating real business value. We must move away from quickly-forgotten cost savings and focus instead on profoundly transforming how IT serves business goals. Virtualized infrastructure allows flexibility and scalability, changing how everything in IT works.

Whether it uses conventional operating systems and applications or re-engineered web-enabled solutions, virtualized infrastructure fundamentally changed our world. Organizations would be free to physically move their systems, even outsourcing or offshoring the infrastructure component entirely. They could move to an on-demand purchasing model for logical capacity, not just bits and bytes.

In the process, they would render current server platforms, operating systems, and storage devices irrelevant. Undoubtedly, attaining this future remains a while off, but IT professionals should consider its implications. Much of what we do is focused on making the “plumbing” work efficiently rather than serving the needs of the business. Where do we stand once the perennial issues of performance, availability, and scalability are solved?

photo by Roy Smith

© sfoskett for Stephen Foskett, Pack Rat, 2011. | Where Will Virtualization of Data Center Infrastructure Take Us?
This post was categorized as Enterprise storage, Gestalt IT, Virtual Storage. Each of my categories has its own feed if you'd like to filter out or focus on posts like this.

How granular is your storage? This question is just as relevant today as when I first published this article in 2008!

Many storage challenges focus on correlating high-level uses of data (such as applications) with the nuts and bolts of storage infrastructure. These discussions often revolve around the conflict between data management, which demands an ever-smaller unit of management, and storage management, which benefits most from consolidation. Developing data management capability that is both granular enough for applications and scalable enough for storage is one key to the future of storage.

Storage Management: Scaling Up

As I discussed in a previous Sunday Series piece, Turning the Page on RAID, the data storage industry has traditionally focused on reducing granularity. Disk capacity has expanded, and RAID technology has multiplied this by combining multiple physical drive mechanisms into a single virtual one. Storage virtualization technologies, from the SAN to the server, have also often been touted primarily as a mechanism to reduce heterogeneity. From a technical perspective, therefore, granularity has been an obstacle to overcome.

The core organizational best practice for storage management is the reduction of complexity and the enforcement of standardization. Consolidation of storage arrays and file servers is a common goal, as IT seeks to benefit from economies of scale. The goal of both initiatives is the creation of a storage utility or managed storage service. This mirrors efforts on the server and network sides to consolidate and virtualize hardware.

Although both technological and organizational factors have traditionally driven granularity out of storage, this does not have to be the case. Virtual pools of storage are ideal for providing storage on demand, as disk-focused RAID groups give way to more flexible sub-disk storage arrangements. And an operational focus on standardized storage service offerings has the potential to enable scalable management of these smaller units.

Filing Service

File-based protocols would seem to have more potential for granular storage management, but they have been undermined by the hierarchical nature of modern file storage. Whether the connection to a file server uses NFS, CIFS, or AFP, the key unit of management is actually the shared directory, not the file. All files in the share \\firefly\backups would be located on the same server and would be managed as a unit.

NAS virtualization can change this somewhat, as can more specialized NAS servers. Although Microsoft DFS enables consolidation and virtualization of NAS shares, it does not allow subdivision of shares below the directory level – all files in a directory must be placed on the same server. Tricks like stubbing and links allow for some movement, but these do not solve the core issue. Specialized virtual NAS devices from F5 (the ARX, nee Acopia), NetApp, BlueArc, Symantec, and others have the ability to move files individually, providing as much a virtualized storage environment as any block-focused enterprise array. Avere is also beginning to talk about granular file management.

But even an ideal virtualized file server lacks the kind of granularity demanded by users. They care about data, not files, and most applications consolidate their data storage into a few files. Consider a database, for example, where users want each record treated uniquely but storage devices see just a few much larger files. We need a storage revolution, where someone creates an ideal storage platform in which each individual record or object includes custom metadata and is managed independently. This would truly be a massive change, however, and it is not clear that all applications will follow the object storage model of Google and Amazon.

Small is Beautiful

Barring a revolution in data management, our best hope is to allow greater granularity in storage management. As mentioned above, virtualization technology has the potential to enable management and protection of any unit of storage, right down to the individual block or record. But the reality of storage virtualization has not matched its promise.

What is needed is greater integration. Each layer of virtualization (file system, volume manager, hypervisor, network, array, and RAID) also hides necessary details from lower layers. Consider the case of a virtual server snapshot: The application and filesystem must be in a quiesced state to allow a snapshot to be taken at the storage level, but the storage array has no intrinsic information about how its capacity is used. A given LUN might contain dozens of servers on a shared VMFS volume, so all must be snapped together.

Integration can be enabled by sharing more information through APIs. VMware leverages Microsoft Volume Shadow Copy Service (VSS) integration for shared storage so a VMFS snapshot can call the operating system and even applications (Windows Server 2003 only, for now) to prepare the data. Similarly, VSS can communicate directly with supported iSCSI and Fibre Channel arrays, calling a snapshot at the right moment. And Microsoft is, no doubt, enhancing VSS as we speak.

As virtualization technology matures, expect this type of integration to improve. We hope to see more APIs exposed by VMware and Microsoft, allowing communication up and down the stack to break through the information barrier. Imagine a future where a standard API like VSS can pass a message through VMware, Xen, and Hyper-V to the underlying storage array to initiate a snap. I predict that this kind of integration-enabled granularity is not too far off.

© sfoskett for Stephen Foskett, Pack Rat, 2011. | Granularity: The Hidden Challenge of Storage Management
This post was categorized as Computer History, Enterprise storage, Virtual Storage. Each of my categories has its own feed if you'd like to filter out or focus on posts like this.

I'd love to be greeted by this scene on April 1!

I love April Fools day. Like Halloween, it gives us all a chance to take ourselves a little less seriously and just have some fun. And the best April Fools pranks are those that point out real limitations in our thinking and mindset. That’s always been my April 1 goal: Why not combine Wi-Fi and PoE? And doesn’t the “giant iPod Touch” sound like a hoax?

I’ll be cataloging my favorite April Fools pranks from this year on this page. Check back as I update it!

• Wireless Fun
  • Jennifer Huber takes on the proliferation of ugly wireless access points Making Wireless Sexy – HourglassAire
  • Narrowcom To Unveil Wi-FiBASE-T (by yours truly!)
  • Aerohive…Now with Rainbows – what a clever and well-made video!
  • Airesham Redefines Wireless Convergence – a really silly wireless networking spoof by Lee H. Badman
• Enterprise Storage FTW!
  • From Storage Newsletter: NetApp to Acquire EMC for $9.5 Bilion
  • Seagate triples up heads/platter ratio
  • SNW to Offer Free Access to Press Room, Embrace Social Media, MORE!
• Networking What?
  • Cisco and Brocade working together on interoperable TRILL products
  • Alternative to IPv6 in the Works
  • VMware’s vSphere 5 vStorage API for Token Ring Integration:
    • FCoTR To Take Over The World (Howard Marks)
    • vSphere 5 To Include vStorage API for Token Ring Integration (Me)
    • Storage Vendors Announce FCoTR and VATRI Support (Scott Boss)
• Enterprise IT Funnies
  • From Debian, the Canterbury Project
  • From VMware comes Cloud City
• In the Workplace
  • Computer Training for Moms
  • @Chyldofthebit upgraded his co-worker’s computer
• Around the Internets
  • Nokia Microsoft deal falls through as Nokia merges with Google
  • Robert Novak outdid himself with GoDaddy announces new PKoIP protocol, innovates tying panties in knots over the Internet
  • CloudEra MapIncrease
  • Livedrive announces industry leading, game changing technology for online backup and data storage
  • Google brings us Gmail Motion, the Voice-alyzer, and is hiring 32,000 WPM typists as autocompleters
  • Google Inadvertently Classifies Google Places As A “Content Farm” And Removes From Search Index
• More Fun
  • PLAYMOBIL(TM) Apple Store Playset
  • Okay, We Give Up (from Scientific American)
  • Officially Official: 420-HP BMW M3 Pickup hauls ass, nearly 1,000 pounds
  • Introducing the NWC Royale Membership
  • iPad colocation from MacMiniColo
  • Kodak Relationshiffft
  • B&H Double Takes
  • The best new iPhone/Android app: GreyScale
  • Introducing Starbucks Mobile Pour
  • Deals For Hipsters
  • A 3D monocle from Toshiba

© sfoskett for Stephen Foskett, Pack Rat, 2011. | April Fools 2011 Roundup
This post was categorized as Personal. Each of my categories has its own feed if you'd like to filter out or focus on posts like this.

Now for some highlights from the week:

• My writing:
  • I wrote another post for Network Computing: Storage Capacity Still Drives Accessibility
  • I picked up a new 2011 MacBook Pro last Thursday, and took it along to Redmond. You might want to read my MacBook Pro review series:
    • 2011 MacBook Pro Review: Introduction
    • Decision Point: Comparing the 2011 MacBook Pro Models
    • Benchmarking the 2011 13″ Core i5 MacBook Pro
  • I had some time on the plane, so wrote up some things I’ve been meaning to get out:
    • How Google and Dropbox Revolutionized My Laptop Migration
    • Keep Multiple Macs in Sync with Dropbox
  • Some good deals popped up this week, too: Great Deals on iPads (for now) and Get a Cradlepoint PHS300 Portable 3G WiFi Router For Just $79!
  • This week marks my first Storage for Virtual Environments seminar, so I kicked it off with Introducing Storage for Virtual Environments (From My Seminar)
• Other great stuff:
  • Terry Slattery is perhaps the most-famous CCIE, and we were lucky to have him join us at Networking Field Day in September. But he wanted to talk about Infoblox & NetMRI at Tech Field Day from last month! He also wrote about IPv6 Economics – Why Move To IPv6?
  • Another great post from Tech Field Day comes from Matthew Norwood, who will also be joining us in two weeks at Wireless Field Day: HP Networking – The Vision(As I Understand It)
  • Last week saw the unveiling of the iPad 2: I don’t often share John Gruber’s writing, but I loved The Chair, and also really enjoyed MG Siegler’s piece, An iPad Lover’s (Initial) Thoughts On iPad 2
  • Some interesting tech notes out of Redmond:
    • Using Hyper-V with large sector drives on Windows Server 2008 and Windows Server 2008 R2
    • An update that improves the compatibility of Windows 7 and Windows Server 2008 R2 with Advanced Format Disks is available
    • File Server improvements from Windows Server 2003 to Windows Server 2008 R2. 8 items for 8 years…
  • A great Greg Schulz post on bit-level encoding: From bits to bytes: Decoding Encoding
  • Nigel Poulton is always worth reading, but his take on Storage Benchmarking and Formula 1 is especially rewarding
  • Nerd Vittles didn’t like the Motorola Xoom: A Disappointing Introduction to Android 3.0
  • Another great enterprise networking piece by Greg Ferro: Diverging Ethernet Switch Markets
  • Who’d have thought it? Exploring the Limits of Datacenter Temprature
  • Some great information on the next Mac OS: iOS on the Desktop: Hands-On With the OS X 10.7 Lion Preview
  • Bill Hill put together a great single-piece on Tech Field Day Posts as well as Fixed Block vs Variable Block Deduplication – A Quick Primer

Subscribe to my Google Reader feed or follow me on Twitter to see these in real-time.

© sfoskett for Stephen Foskett, Pack Rat, 2011. | Back From the Pile: Interesting Links, March 4, 2011
This post was categorized as Apple, Enterprise storage, Everything, Personal, Terabyte home, Virtual Storage. Each of my categories has its own feed if you'd like to filter out or focus on posts like this.

My new MacBook Pro was up and running with my data in less than an hour, thanks to Google and Dropbox!

I replaced my trusty MacBook Pro last week, the latest in a series of upgrades stretching back over 25 years. In the past, moving to a new computer is a time-consuming process of installing applications and moving data. But things were different this time: I still had the installs to do, but most of the data migrated on its own.

A Cloud of Data

Like many people, I’ve spent years unconsciously integrating my workflow with cloud applications and services. My email was first, and moving it to Google’s servers pulled my calendar and contacts along as well. This kind of data “wants” to live in the cloud, where it can be accessed on my phone, laptop, desktop, or any web browser I happen to be seated in front of.

Over the last few months, I have begin to use Dropbox to mirror my documents off-site. A clever trick allows this cloud-based repository to keep multiple computers in sync as well, and I recently set it up between my desktop iMac and the old MacBook Pro.

My only portable data set that still doesn’t live in the cloud is the collection of music and movies I like to take with me. The iMac maintains a massive iTunes repository on my Drobo, but I like to take a few thousand songs and a few movies and TV shows on my laptop as well. It seems ironic that this data is so stubbornly local, considering that, for the most part, it purchased and downloaded from a cloud service!

That’s It?

The majority of my data migrated automatically to my new computer

Just after buying my new 2011 13″ MacBook Pro, I sat down in a cafe next to the Apple Store to have a look. I was still in range of the Apple Store guest network, so the laptop was already online. I typed my information into Apple’s Mail, Contacts, and iCal applications and watched as Google re-populated them automatically.

But even I was surprised at the ease of moving the rest of my daily data. I downloaded the Dropbox client and entered my credentials. In moments, my entire Documents folder began filling up, and the astonishingly-quick Apple network made short work of a decade of content. By the time I finished my smoothie, I was up and running.

Stephen’s Stance

The ease of this migration is simply amazing: I was up and running quicker than I could have driven home! Google and Dropbox made short work of my “working set” of data, and I could have been literally anywhere on the planet. How times have changed!

Once I returned home, I fired up rsync to pull over the iTunes library and I was ready to retire the old machine. To be on the safe side, I pulled the 640 GB hard disk drive out of the old MacBook pro and installed it in an external enclosure. I’ll replace it with another drive and re-install Mac OS X before handing it down to a family member.

© sfoskett for Stephen Foskett, Pack Rat, 2011. | How Google and Dropbox Revolutionized My Laptop Migration
This post was categorized as Apple, Everything, Personal, Terabyte home. Each of my categories has its own feed if you'd like to filter out or focus on posts like this.

• My writing
  • First up, a battery charger? La Crosse BC-700 Review: A Battery Charger That Does Not Suck
  • I urge you to See W. Curtis Preston’s Backup Central Live!
  • I was looking for The Best Network Card For VMware ESX Home Lab Machines
  • From my Network Computing blog: Unified Storage: What Is It Good For?
  • I was amazed to see the result of my HP Photosmart printer series: The Power of Negative Publicity
• Other great links
  • Chris Evans wrote a solid piece for Datamation: Virtualization and Storage: Overview, Vendor Solutions
  • Matt Simmons talks about dealing with storage: I’m here to shard data and chew bubblegum…
  • Alex Popescu’s 5 Approaches to Scalable Storage Solutions led to Jeff Darcy’s Introduction to Distributed Filesystems
  • Xangati talks Field Day: Running Comprehensive and Deep at Tech Field Day #5
  • And then there’s Wireless Field Day, courtesy of Andrew von Nagy: Shamrockin’ the Wireless Industry
  • Greg Ferro continues spreading the word on FCoTR: Presenting Silvano Gai With FCoTR Button
  • Howard Marks takes up the topic of specialized hard disk drives: Yes, Virginia, RAID Drives Are Different
  • Howard was spurred by Simon Gallagher, among others: Home Labbers beware of using Western Digital SATA HDDs with a RAID Controller
  • The continuing saga of Google Chrome and H.264 takes a weird turn: Microsoft adds H.264 support to Google Chrome
  • Simon Long fights the good fight, presenting solid technical info: VMware View Desktops: IDE or SCSI? BusLogic, LSI Logic or PVSCSI?
  • A key topic in storage is the balance between performance and capacity, as noted by Xiotech: Performance and Capacity Tradeoffs and the Rise of a New Class of Storage
  • An amusing infographic: The United States of Shame (CHART)
  • Kevin Houston takes on Cisco UCS: What Cisco Has to Do to Win the Blade Server Market
  • Finally, Jeremy Gaddis is back with Bypassing the Internet Kill Switch

Subscribe to my Google Reader feed or follow me on Twitter to see these in real-time.

© sfoskett for Stephen Foskett, Pack Rat, 2011. | Back From the Pile: Interesting Links, February 4, 2011
This post was categorized as Enterprise storage, Personal, Terabyte home, Virtual Storage. Each of my categories has its own feed if you'd like to filter out or focus on posts like this.

• My writing
  • Is NFS A Viable Protocol For Converged Networking?
  • EMC Taunts NetApp: Counting Coup or Poor Sportsmanship?
  • When Marketing Becomes Pointless
  • NetEx Joins the Roster of Tech Field Day Presenters
• Other great stuff
  • Bob Plankers takes his turn at bat for FCoTR with a Fibre Channel over Token Ring Presentation @ WI VMUG
  • This old post by Scott Drummonds about VMDirectPath is worth revisiting!
  • I couldn’t have said it any better, Louis: The Best Thing Apple Does Is Ignore Everyone Else
  • Chad Sakac and the gang were great hosts last week. Here’s more about their cool new tiny array: VNXe = incredible things.. in tiny, transformer-like packages!
  • Jon Langemak’s post on SAN Terminology is worth reading for newbies to the storage scene
  • Finally, Further clarification from Google about h.264

Subscribe to my Google Reader feed or follow me on Twitter to see these in real-time.

© sfoskett for Stephen Foskett, Pack Rat, 2011. | Back From the Pile: Interesting Links, January 21, 2011
This post was categorized as Apple, Enterprise storage, Everything, Personal. Each of my categories has its own feed if you'd like to filter out or focus on posts like this.