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Current Status of SmushBox and Smush Mobile My original review of the SmushBox is over here. As I’m writing this I’ve currently just gotten my SmushBox back online after 6 months of downtime.  What happened?  A lot.  The most significant event occurred in the fall of 2014, when Tom Ketola announced to the Smushbox Forums (now offline), and to the various backers, that their business model of unlimited SMS texting and the agreement with T-Mobile was not going to work out.  There were too many logistics with invoicing, billing, and chasing people down for payments.  I can only imagine.  He notified everyone that they would be terminating their contract with T-Mobile and that we were on our own...

The Problem A few days ago, we started having strange behavior in our Configuration Management Database (CMDB).  When looking at certain classes of Configuration Items (CI) we would see the User Interface (UI) display repeated buttons, and there were no CIs in the List View.  Additionally, if you went to the Tables & Columns module and tried to delete all records from cmdb_ci_netgear, the UI would report that the table was already empty (but it wasn’t): Worse still, none of the New or Edit… buttons worked on this List View any longer. The Investigation Our partner talked internally, and found another consultant who had seen this behavior previously, he informed us that it occurs within CMDB List...

Appears that with the coming of OS X 10.9 Mavericks, we are once again faced with various peripherals that cease to function correctly. I often do work that requires a serial port.  I’ve carried a Keyspan USA-19HS with me in my briefcase for close to a decade (maybe more).  I’ve always been able to get it to work properly, but recently, with my upgrade to a 15″ MacBook Pro Retina Display and subsequent upgrade to OS X 10.9 Mavericks, my trusty little friend may have met his day.  Keyspan does not show a driver that supports OS X 10.9 and loading the 10.8 driver resulted in no change from not having the driver. I...

Today marks another milestone in my professional career.  I’m going to begin writing blog posts about a great new Information Technology Service Management (ITSM) tool called ServiceNow.  We recently contracted with ServiceNow at my employer and I’m thoroughly impressed with the solution.  I’m so impressed that I’ve decided to pursue my certification in various aspects of the ServiceNow solution and have now completed my ServiceNow System Administrator training (in preparation for my Certified System Administrator). This first article is going to be about a solution that I implemented while in my System Administrator training:  Notification of Impersonation Events. What is an Impersonation Event?  ServiceNow provides the ability for someone with the admin role to impersonate another...

A friend of mine (he has a blog over here) gave me an idea for a program. He wanted to know when his kids got home (and when they left).  His idea was to have an application that would interrogate his wireless network to see if a specific client was associated with his Access Point.  I started down the path of using SNMP to query the Apple AirPort Extreme he owns, but quickly gave that up.  The main reason I gave up on that solution (which would have been perfect) is that Apple, in their infinite post-Jobs wisdom) has removed support for SNMP configurations from AirPort Utility 6.0 and has eliminated SNMP from their newer AirPort models.  So, dead...