10 IT Skills that Today's High School Kids Have - Do You?

Such a true point of view of today's kids.  I knew so much about technology in high school that even many college seniors did not know.  That was a 4-6 year gap.  I've been out of high school almost 10 years myself. 


As IT Professionals, we've seen technology change very rapidly over the past 10 years. We've managed to keep pace and learn new skills on the job or through training courses. What might surprise you are the skills that high school kids possess today. Here is a look at some skills that many high school kid have - do you?

Read on...

Make sure you have the correct support #

I had a client call me today. They had no internet after a storm came through their area. After some troubleshooting, I noticed that their cable modem was not showing that it had a signal. I proceeded to look up the phone number for the ISP and after making my way through dozens of menu options I was put on hold for the next available representative. After about 40 minutes on hold and another 10 trying to find the correct account, i found out that I had contacted the wrong phone number for support. I was calling for a business connection and I had contacted residential support. My next call to the business department landed me a support rep in less than five minutes.

What did i learn from this? Always look for business level support phone numbers before contacting an ISP.

VSA Container Restores Using Commvault

I spent a good portion of my morning working with Commvault Technical Support on restoring VMware Virtual Machines. Our Commvault server and media agent is licensed for VSA backups using our vCenter Server as the proxy. We are using Simpana 9 with Service Pack 2a.

Our overall problem was that when performing a container, I was getting the following error:

Unable to open the disk(s) for Virtual Machine [VMNAME]. Please ensure that the proxy is able to communicate with the ESX host and resolve the ESX host address. Also verify that the disks types configured to the virtual machine are supported.

This was a quick fix by Commvault. Commvault includes in own version of the VWware VDDK in its base directory. By uninstalling the version of VDDK that had been installed manually, Commvault now looks in its base directory for its version of the VDDK and our restores was successful.