unixwiz

After reading ThinGuy’s Blog: Are PC’s Killing Health Care? I can’t agree more… It got me to thinking when I was in the emergency room of a local hospital last summer. (Long story, but spent a while there) Anyways, while I was there (I have not been to the ER in ages and the last time I was everything was still done on paper), they popped down a little thing on the wall and he behind it was a “Windows Thin client”. The nurse did nothing but b@#*h about how slow it was. I watched and it looked to be running a Wyse Client and using Windows from some place that was not local. I got to thinking about how a Sun Ray environment would work in this hospital. Here are some ideas I thought of while laying in that short bed (I am over 6’5″) for 5 hours.

1. Instead of having the paper charts, when you arrive, your are “assigned” a smart card and all your information follows you on that card no matter where you go (AKA HCHD, Hospital Chart Hot Desking). For example I had to end up going to X-Ray, and the X-Ray tech did not have the complete orders and started taking Chest X-Ray’s instead of X-Ray’s of my knee. (Later found out that they wanted both, but the doctor forgot to put the knee one on the order sheet, if he had seen my chart he would have known that the original reason I was there was for knee problems).
2. The monitoring devices in the room (BP/Heart Rate/oxygen/etc) could be attached to the Sun Ray and therefore your info logged and displayed on the Sun Ray at a click of the button.
3. Each patient could be given their own card for surfing the web, etc.. (if they are ambulatory enough to do this)
4. By using the smart card to keep track of your stats, there is no paper to accidentally get “lost” or stolen (helps with HIPPA).
5. Be a lot faster than the current Wyse Terminals they were using as they would not have to wait for it to boot.
6. Security, there isn’t a day go by that I don’t read about some one losing some one else’s information. I.E. VA Hospital, (which uses some Sun Rays in areas around where I am), This would eliminate all of these loses, if everyone was forced to use it.
7. All Labs/X-Rays posted directly to the persons “card”

Granted some of the above would be a feat to pull off, but it can be done.

I think that using Sun Ray’s is the coolest thing, especially now that I have it set up for all the people in my group to pull their card out of their Office Sun Ray and plug it in to their Home Sun Ray and everything is still there. (If I can just get the performance problems worked out it would be really killer, but something about the combination of Solaris 10, Sun Ray 4 is causing me some slowness, and I am not sure where it is exactly. )

Now if more people realize the benefits of using Sun Ray’s over other “Chubby Clients” Sun Ray’s would take over the world.

Interesting, Security, Sun, Sun Ray, Sun Ray @Home Interesting, Security, Sun, Sun Ray, Sun Ray @Home

Here is the beginning… tonight I looked at my AMEX, and it looks like Sun credited me $480.00 instead of the $559.32. And THEN they charged me 3 times of $508.00… Don’t have a clue what that is for. But needless to say, [in marvin martian voice] I am getting very angry [end marvin martian voice] …. I hope this gets fixed soon, as now I am up to $2,083.32 in charges that I did not want any have only been credited $480. So I still need $1,603.32 back…

Please Sun fix this now…. the way it is going now I may have to cancel the card just to quit getting charged.

Interesting, Random Stuff, Rant, Sun, X2100 Interesting, Random Stuff, Rant, Sun, X2100

Spent the day with a Sun Engineer working on getting a Sun SE3510 Array installed on one of our E25K machines. Here is some background:

12 x 300gb FC drives in the array, 2 assigned as Global spares, and the rest were assigned to 2 RAID 5 arrays of 5 disks each. One array on each controller. Now comes the fun part. Because of the way that the firmware on the controllers works (we have redundent controllers in the 3510 and 2 qlogic cards in the E25K domain) we had to connect 4 links between the 3510 to our San Director. So we have something that looks sort of like this:

What this produces is 3 Luns from the primary controller and 3 luns from the secondary controller being visible on each of the qlogic cards. On the host side we are using MPxIO to handle the multipathing. So if you are trying to do the same thing, remember that you need 4 connections from the Array to the SAN Fabric, 2 to each fabric, if you have different fabric domains. Otherwise, you will end up with only seeing half of the disks on each controller and you will not be in a redundent state. If you try to directly attach the array to the host, then you still need 4 connections and will have to use dual ported cards.. Sun needs to update the firmware on this device so you can make the luns appear on each controller with out having to use 4 different connections and still be redundent.

Interesting, Solaris, Sun, Work Interesting, Solaris, Sun, Work

To things have made me mad tonight…

1. Was watching TV and noticed that two of the channels on our cable (Adelphia/Comcast) are acting weird. The one has an audio sync problem that stems from them using a Digital version of an analog channel. The other channel they have decided that shows in letterbox should be shown in full screen and therefore blow the image up and cut off the edges.. So I went to Adelphia’s Support Page and filled out a support request for problems with the TV channels. Not 5 minutes later I get a response from them saying that the support page is only for Internet related questions and not cable. It said I needed to call 1888-COMCAST to get it fixed. So I wrote back asking why they list about 40 different options on that page that have nothing to do with Internet then….

2. It seems that Sun has some how charged me for another server with out my authorization… See back in March, I orderd a X2100 (the server you are on right now) that had the buy the Support for 3 years get the server for free deal. So I did, but because I had my Ship to Address be my work address, they associated it with being bought by my employer. Which meant that the Support contract and all the bills have been sent to my employeer and NOT me. So I have been trying to get everything switched over to my name. And last week I received this big envelope in the mail from Sun, with a receipt in it for what I had ordered back in March. No big deal I was getting them at work too after some one in another department opened the mail and then sent it to me. But what really made me mad was tonight I check my Credit Card statement (the same card I had bought the server with back in March) and noticed that there was a large charge on it. And wouldn’t you know it, it was from Sun Microsystems. I began to think to my self, it was not time for the support renewal as I paid that in March ($480), and this charge was more ($559.32), which is what I had paid for the extras back in March (another SATA drive, rail kit, dvd drive, etc). So it appears as though they have double billed me as I have not received another server yet (but I am out on vacation this week and they still have the ship to as my Work on this bill). So I am going to have to watch my CC carefully as I suspect that some time this week there will be another charge of $480 show up for the Silver support contract.

I sent an email to some people I know at Sun to see if they can tell me what is going on, but all I know is this is going to be a nightmare to get fixed. I can just see it now, if they ship me another server trying to find a way to ship it back to them. Not something I am looking forward too.. Maybe I will get to keep it …. (haha, it would be the first time I have ever “won” anything). But right now I just want the charges to be fixed.

Any Sun people out there who read this, know of any one I can talk to, to get everything fixed in one shot?

Interesting, Random Stuff, Rant, Sun Interesting, Random Stuff, Rant, Sun

One little draw back I have noticed about using zones on solaris 10 is the amount of time it takes to patch a machine. Right now I am waiting on a SunFire 890 with 8 processors and 16gb of ram with 12 zones (counting the global) to finish patching. I started it at around 8:54 this morning and it is now 11:16 and there are still 2 or 3 patches left to go. Since all the zones are basicly sparse zones, I wonder why it takes so much longer to do the patching? I also hope all this patching fixes my Power supply problem We have replaced the power supplies a couple of times, and the power distribution bored. I put the latest OBP on it this morning and it did not seem to fix it either. So hopefully after this set of patches are done, I will have a better idea whether it is a hardware or software problem.

Solaris, Sun, Work, Zones/Containers Solaris, Sun, Work, Zones/Containers