Where do the candidates stand on technology? Most of them won’t tell you.

It’s extremely important for IT guys and gals to understand where the candidates stand on technology issues.  I am going to link to each of their technology pages here.  Overall, I am disappointed with the lack of focus on technology.  The Democrats are much better than the Republicans.  All of the Democrats except Kucinich make a mention of technology or “innovation.”  Barack Obama is the only candidate to feature technology as an issue on his website.  Mitt Romney is the only Republican to have information about technology on his website, but it’s not an issues page.  I linked to it anyway.  Have a look:

Democrats

• Barack Obama: http://www.barackobama.com/issues/technology (Includes speech at Google)
• John Edwards: http://www.johnedwards.com/issues/innovation  (A few sparse comments) 
• Hillary Clinton: http://www.hillaryclinton.com/feature/innovation (Only a couple paragraphs)
• Dennis Kucinich: I can’t find anything obvious or through search.

Republicans

• Mitt Romney: http://www.mittromney.com/News/In-The-News/TechCrunch (Interview with TechCrunch) 
• Rudolph Giuliani: I can’t find anything obvious or through search.  Did somebody say 9/11?
• Mike Huckabee: I can’t find anything obvious or through search.
• Duncan Hunter: I can’t find anything obvious or through search.
• John McCain: I can’t find anything obvious or through search.
• Ron Paul: I can’t find anything obvious or through search.
• Fred Thompson: I can’t find anything obvious or through search.

Based on whether the candidates feature technology, Obama and Romney are the leaders for their party.  Obama is the only candidate to feature technology as an issue, so he is the leader.  If you can find information that should be added, let me know.

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I upgraded from ESX 3.0.2 to ESX 3.5 and it was a pain.

I upgraded our ESX servers over the Christmas break.  I had to install a new ESX server, so I took the opportunity to upgrade the rest of our environment.  It was a pain in the ass.  There were a few bugs that caused me problems.  Details below:

I decided to wipe the ESX servers and install 3.5 fresh from the CD.  I did the upgrade from 2.5.2 to 3.0.1 this way and it worked well.  I upgraded the Virtual Center server from 2.0 to 2.5.

VMotion caused me a lot of problems.  I was not able to ping the VMotion port after the upgrade.  This happened to varying degrees on all of the servers.  The last server was the worst.  It was driving me crazy.  I had enabled VMotion and named it properly.  It just would not work.  Eventuall I called support.  They ran vmkping to the IP address of the VMotion port on the server while I pinged the IP address from my workstation.  This seemed to magically enable the VMotion port.  Running just vmkping or just ping didn’t work.  The combination of the two worked for some bizarre reason.

“No Active Primaries” message when I tried to add a server to the Cluster.  This one perplexed me for a while.  It comes from the way clustering works.  Clustering doesn’t work perfectly in mixed 3.0/3.5 environments.  The first server added to a cluster is considered the “primary.”  When I initially created the cluster, ESX1 (server name) was the first server in the cluster.  When I did the upgrade, I took ESX 1 out of the cluster.  It didn’t pass the role of “primary” onto one of the other servers.  So when I tried to add ESX1 back into the cluster, it gave me the “No Active Primaries” error.  I fixed this by removing all of the servers from the cluster and adding them back in.  This thread pointed me towards a solution:  http://communities.vmware.com/message/701671;jsessionid=AA7526EEA3E0EE5EAFAFDB7A761815ED

“Unable to read partition information from this disk”: I got an error like this when I was installing ESX on a machine attached to a SAN with raw drive mappings.  I disconnected the server from the SAN and started the installation over just to be safe.  A good piece of advice… Always disconnect the server from the SAN when you are reinstalling ESX.  There is a decent possibility that you’ll accidentally overright your LUN’s.

 I had some other general problems, but nothing too serious.  Let me know if you have any questions or issues that I can help with.

Happy New Year!!!

2007 was a fun year in technology.  I can’t wait for 2008!