GNOME Desktop, Away We Go

After prepping and testing the new GNOME desktop, we have closed up all of the beta code and it's being moved into production. The new thin client release is moved into our FOG server and we'll be pushing it out to all users starting today. 60 of the 525 devices will get new code today and be disconnected from the old GNOME server and be moved to the new one. That should net us about 50 more concurrent users to stress test the server. Right now the machine is running great around 100 users, and I think it will absorb another 50 with no problems. Additional departments will be touched Tuesday, Wednesday and Thursday nights.

In other news, looks like SuseCON is being held this fall in Orlando. That's only about 1 1/2 hours from Largo, so seems like a good place to meet more of you.

I am a person that LOVES data. I love to accumulate it, and do research and see what types of things people are doing on the servers. I have been writing data on certain trigger events into flat CSV files and starting to connect the data to our support portal. When the infrastructure is in place and fleshed out, I'll probably move it to sqlite or something. The user detail screen has been modified to show you at a glance all information concerning our employees. The left edge shows their information and shows their active sessions. The right side shows this new data.

In the UI below, I'm showing all of the Alerts. This includes double and triple clicking on icons (which often indicates some kind of problem), logging off the server with software still running (which yields OpenOffice recovery dialogs on next login), instances of forcing software to quit and software crashes. It's very cool watching this all in real time, and we already are finding users having problems that never called. One bad cable can ruin a users entire perception of the servers...and with these tools we should be able to help locate issues.



The next tab shows all authentications, device names and technology used. Very often it's difficult to know exactly where a user is in our buildings and their current connection technique. It's now all available at a glance.



And we are collecting all data concerning *.desktop icons clicked from GNOME. We can see all of their clicks through the data. Very often users describe software to you, and with hundreds of icons it's hard to tell what they are running. Now we can see it at a glance.



Exciting times as all of this technology is pushed live and it's my hope it lives up to its potential.