My Brother Dan Has Gone to be with Christ

This morning my brother lost his battle and went home to Christ. It all started with a call from the hospital at 3:30am and ended with his family and friends with him as he passed quietly and peacefully at 6:08am this morning. I can’t thank everyone enough for their prayers and ask they continue as we memorialize him over the next few days.

Below is his obituary. All my friends are welcome to pay their respects to the family at the times we have set aside. Thanks again for your prayers and concerns.

Daniel Moreno

January 4, 1961 November 13, 2009

Daniel Moreno, 48 of Cassopolis, Michigan died November 13, 2009 @ 6:08 A.M. at Elkhart General Hospital. He was born on January 4, 1961 in Bronx, New York to San Moreno and Miriam (Orellana) Oliver. He married Lori Wallace on October 16, 2006 in Elkhart, Indiana.

She survives along with a stepson, Coty Solizhis, at home,his father, San (Wanda) Moreno of Elkhart; his mother, Miriam (Joe) Oliver of Georgia; a son, Michael (Melissa) Glass of South Bend, Indiana; a daughter, Tiffany Moreno of Texas; two brothers, Mark (Chris) Moreno of Elkhart and U.S.M.C. Captain Matt (Courtney) Moreno of Twenty Nine Palms, California and two grandsons.

Friends may call from 4-7 P.M. Monday at Stemm Lawson Peterson Funeral Home, 1531 Cobblestone Boulevard, Elkhart. Funeral services will be held at 1 P.M. Tuesday at Crossroads Community Church North Campus, 3322 Middlebury Street, Elkhart with Pastor James Fisher, PhD and Pastor Samuel Que officiating. Burial will follow.

Mr. Moreno was a member of Crossroads Community Church and a big NASCAR fan. He was a graduate of Memorial High School.

Memorial contributions may be given to the Crossroads Community Church Latino Ministry. An online guestbook may be accessed at www.stemmlawsonpeterson.com

Praying for My Brother Dan

Good evening my friends. I post tonight heavy hearted. My brother Dan has still not shown any real improvement. His lungs are not working well at all. Dialysis continues for the third day and it is amazing how much fluid they continue to take off of him. His kidneys are just unable to keep up with his needs.
The doctors are not optimistic at this point. There is still hope that further dialysis will improve lung function to a point he may improve. The outlook is poor at best. I find myself in one of those dark and disturbing places contemplating the fact my brother may not survive. I see the grief on my Dad's face every day and my heart breaks. I have not as yet been blessed with children but I cannot imagine the grief of watching a child go through the pains of life support, dialysis, and the litany of procedures Dan has had to endure the past weeks.
My brother and I have had strains in our relationship over the years but recently I was very proud of him as I saw him taking dramatic control and responsibility for his life. He had been getting assistance with re-training and had planned to start classes in information technology. We had recently spoken about his future and he was seeking my advice on getting started. What was more moving is that he had taken even more dramatic steps to right his life with God. My father is the director of Latino ministries at Cross Roads Community Church in Elkhart, IN. Dan has been attending the Latino service on a regular basis and the affect on his life was visible. It had been a moment of joy in my dad's heart seeing Dan actively seeking God in his life.
His condition is a hard pill to swallow knowing his life was beginning to turn and he had pointed his feet in the right direction. My only piece of mind is that if his time here is short, it won't be long before he is with Christ and his suffering will be over forever. God is great and amazing. I am still praying fervently for my brother's recovery. Anything is possible through Him. I pray that all who know me will lift my brither up even more than they have and that God has a long future planned for Dan with his family and friends. If God has chosen that Dan is to come home to Him than I honor God's will and ask for prayer for my family and myself as we deal with a future without my brother.
I leave it God's hands and ask for your continued prayers. Thanks so much my friends and God Bless..

Latino Ministry Baptism '09

Here is a video I did from still shots at the Crossroads Church Latino Ministry baptism this past weekend. I am interested in any comments.

Thanks.

UAC and VMWare Infrastructure Update in Vista

First off,  let me start and say I don’t have much bad to say about Windows Vista. It has it’s issues just as other Windows releases have. It is in no way comparable to the disaster of Windows ME. It has been a big win everywhere I have installed it for my clients.

With that off my chest let’s get to what I intended to talk about. I have a lot of ESXi installs out there and  I have learned that like every other OS, its needs to be patched on a regular basis. The Infrastructure update tool is pretty easy to use and and does a nice job. Here is the caveat I ran into with Vista and my hope is this will make someone else’s life a lot easier if they run into this problem.

When trying to run the Infrastructure tool at a site I kept getting the error “VMware update site is unavailable. Try again later.” Well one time is a fluke, a second time is strange, and a third indicates you have a problem. I did all the firewall stuff searching for blocked traffic and the like. No dice. I am really scratching my head on this and then after and looking at a more detailed error I saw that the Infrastructure Client was spitting out an error of Access Denied in one of the logs. BINGO! I know why it is  not working.

Here is the solution and it is a good one to keep in mind for any odd errors when the system you are using is running Vista. I closed to the VMWare Infrastructure Update tool and re-opened it by right-clicking on the icon an selecting “Run as Administrator.” Sure enough…problem solved. It went right to VMWare and downloaded almost 200 Megs of patches for my host.

I hope this little tidbit  is useful when you are stuck and can’t figure out why your application is spitting out a weird errors . It really sucks to be stuck with no idea why something is broken. This solution is one for everyone’s mental toolbox.

Thanks for reading and please check back soon, follow me on twitter, or subscribe to the RSS for my blog.

Technorati Tags: VMware,Visa,Odd Errors,Infrastructure Update,UAC

New Offsite Back-Up Service Set & Ready

Well, again I have been noticeably absent from the blogosphere. I am thankful to say that I have a lot to do and the work just keeps on flowing. With that said, this blog entry is all about offsite back-up!

No IT guy worth his or her salt can deny that data needs to be backed up and a copy must go off-premises. Most will admit that getting a consistent routine together and keeping it running can be a challenge. While in New Orleans last year at Jeff Middleton’s (author and designer of SBS Migration) conference, I met the team from e-Folder and saw that they had a pretty slick offering for branded off-site back-up that I could provide for my clients. I never jump into anything quickly. I finally had an opportunity to vet this service and am happy to say it is ready to go.

Here is the way it works. It is ridiculously simple. The account creation page and location to download the software is http://backup.cmsupportservices.com . There is a free trial link where you can sign-up and test it yourself for thirty days with no cost or obligation. The trial includes 512 MB of server space and no bandwidth limitations. If you decide that this is the way to go, you can upgrade your account to a full version at any time.

The software installs on any systems you want to backup. Mark what you want to backup and how often. There are many different options on how to backup your data. You have versioning control and can backup as often as every hour or even more. The system is compatible with SQL and MS Exchange.  It is also multi-platform compatible and works with Windows XP 32 and 64 bit, Vista 32 and 64 bit, Server 2003 & 2008 32 and 64 bit, Linux, & MAC. Exchange backup is mailbox level and a very robust Exchange backup methodology.

The cost is very affordable when you look at what you have to lay out for disk to disk solutions, large tape arrays, and the software to drive it all. The base cost is 14.95 per month and then 5.00 per Gigabyte for the the first 14 Gigs of data. Data beyond the 14 Gig ceiling is billed at 2.50 per month. Exchange email is 2.00 per mailbox and then 1.40 per Gigs of email data.

As many of you who read my blog know, I love the SonicWALL CDP disk to disk solution. The reason I have brought this offering to my portfolio of services is that not everyone has the capital to make that type of investment all upfront. In the long term view, the costs are similar to a solution like the SonicWALL CDP. With C&M Support Offsite Backup Data Service you are strictly pay as you go. Your data is backed up automatically and offsite. If you need to restore the data you can do it yourself or we will help you. In a catastrophe we can provide your data on a hard disk in one business day. If you have mobile users, all they need is the software and an Internet connection. The backup of their data is now one less thing on your plate.

Please feel free to go to the site and try the service. I am open to your feedback and will be happy to assist you with the set-up. If you have large back-up needs, get in touch with me and I may be able to provide more aggressive pricing. Thanks again for visiting my blog. Come back soon.

Technorati Tags: Backup,Offsite,CDP,Exchange,PST,SQL,cmsupport

SonicWALL NSA & CDP Year End Deals ...

Hey everyone. Again I have been noticeably absent from posting to my blog. I am so busy I  have to plan out every minute of the day. I am so excited about SonicWALL's year end deals I just had to make a quick post and share the details with everyone.

Near the end of the quarter I always call up my reps at SonicWALL and look for some great deals. Here is what is happening right now.

• A package including a SonicWALL NSA 3500 with one year of C0mprehensive Gateway Security Services and a free SonicWALL SSL-VPN 200 with 24 x 7 support for one year is going for about $3100.00.  Retail price on this package is about $6500.
• A package including a SonicWALL NSA 5400 with one year of Comprehensive Gateway Security Services and a free SonicWALL SSL-VPN 2000 with 24 x 7 support for one year is going for about $6100.00. Retail price on this package is about $11,400.
• A package including the new CDP 5040 backup appliance with a total of 3 Terabytes of back-up storage and one year of 24 x 7 support for about $8500.00. Retail price is about $11,900.
• A package including the new CDP 6080 backup appliance with a total of 3 Terabytes (expandable to 6 Terabytes) of back-up storage and one year of 24 x 7 support for about $9400.00. Retail price on this package is about $13,600.

All these deals go away at the end of the year. If you have some budget left and want to save a ton of money, drop me a line. I will be glad to get you one of these deals. Thanks again for reading my blog.

Technorati Tags: SonicWALL,NSA,CDP,Continuous Data Back-up,Firewall,Year-end deals,Comprehensive Gateway Security

A New Look for My Blog ...

For those of you that have read my blog, you may notice that I have moved to Blogger from Microsoft Live Spaces. The move was precipitated by Microsoft taking my site offline for an alleged acceptable use violation. Needless to say, there was no violation. Someone was just not careful nor did they tell me before the site was taken down.

This is totally unacceptable! I am still back-posting so all my historical content is available. It is not an easy thing to do. Over all I like Blogger so far. I still have a lot of work to do to get it the way I want it. The old MS Live Spaces site is back and working. I am not going to post anything more than an I have moved message. All of my new posts will be here from now on. I just can't afford to have someone take my blog down again without notice and have done it with no valid reason.

Thanks for reading and stay tuned for more soon.

A Needed Microsoft Security Patch Delivered Out of Band

I received an alert from Microsoft last night that a new security patch has been made available. It is not often that patches are delivered out of band of the normal process. The patch revolves around a vulnerability in many Microsoft Operating Systems. The full list and deeper details can be found here. What happens is that with a carefully crafted RPC instruction, executables can be run on the affected server or workstation.

I have already applied the patch in house and all looked good. I just finished customer wide deployment and feel much better now that the word is out on the vulnerability. If you support a network you should get this patch out right away. It is already available for all needed system on Windows and Microsoft Update.

Technorati Tags: Microsoft,Patches,Security,MS08-067,Remote Code Execution,RPC,Operating System Vulnerability,KB 958644