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Since I was quite happy with how the server room reconfigure turned out, thought I’d grab a quick photo earlier on today:

Not a bad setup out of the DO now – 14 Win 2k3 servers, 8 Apple X-Serves, a VMWare ESX 3.5 box, the obligatory Linux server, a couple of 7.2Tb DAS fiber channel arrays, and an off-site 2Tb NAS for storing backups. Throw in 27-ish remote sites with at least one X-Serve in all of them except Platinum and that’s a good number of servers to be looking after Still seemed like I had too many meetings today, buggered up my plans to dodge out of work early.

The last couple of days have been pretty busy at work, but again in a nice way I’ve been able to jump pretty much right in and just start getting jobs done to help out which works well, and I’ve been pleased how well I’ve handled working with the computer systems again given the couple of years I was out the game. Managing Windows servers isn’t too bad either I was wanting to lean away from Windows management, but as it’s not the day to day to grind of dealing with client machines and end-user problems arising from Windows nuances, it’s actually quite okay. There’s also 7 brand new X-Serves for various roles ready to go in, so that should be fun too.

I got an apartment sorted today, I signed the lease and picked the keys up earlier. I went with one of the houses I’d seen on Tuesday from Jimmy Guinn, as the other places I’ve looked at have either been a little way out from the main areas in the center of town, or $1200 without utilities making it pretty expensive. But, I’ll be able to get straight into this apartment next week and get a little more settled.

Hopefully tomorrow is good day to round off my first week, and I’m booked to fly back to Tunt with Yute in the afternoon – weather is meant to be clear and should get me back into the village without too much of a wait hopefully. Certainly a different commute home on a Friday afternoon!

All in all, a pretty good day Work was interesting, but good fun. I got some office space sorted (I’ll be living in a cube!), and started looking over the current setup. The other guys there were real friendly + helpful and we started going over the servers they’re running, and tomorrow we’re all going to get together and start to work out what my responsibilities will be in terms of maintaining the core server functions leaving the other guys to concentrate on the actual server role. Shouldn’t be too complicated and makes things a little easier.

There’s 11 Windows Server 2003 systems, a mix of Dell PowerEdge 2550′s, 2650′s and 6850′s, as well as half a dozen Mac X-Serve servers with another 4 brand new ones sat in boxes ready to go. There’s also a ProLiant E5405 Windows Storage Server 2003 acting as a 2Tb NAS, with a VTrak E610f 6Tb NAS just hanging out that isn’t up and running yet. So, not hurting for storage space! The trick will be aggregating all the backups from the multiple servers onto the storage devices. First task will be moving one off site I guess. But, this was a photo I snapped at lunchtime – the district office is the green building on the left, with Bethel Regional High School on the right:

I also saw an ad in the offices about a house for rent so called up this evening – turns out the guy has a bunch of houses around town and came picked me up and toured me around them which was real nice of him. He had one apartment in a tri-plex right down by the river near Swanson’s, so fairly central, pretty much fully furnished and including all water, heat, sewer and electricity for $1150 a month which I took. Is a nice little place, nothing too fancy, but clean and tidy and somewhere to sleep! Is literally right at the end of the trail from Tunt up to Bethel just off the river so stupidly easy to get to if I ride the snowmobile up in the winter, and being right near Swanson’s, one of the major grocery stores, will help too. He’s going to sort out a rental agreement and bring it round tomorrow so I can move in next week (cos I’m going to have soooo much stuff to move in…). Real nice guy – Jimmy Guin (not sure on the spelling), and he’s a contractor around Bethel so would fix anything right up if something broke.

But, I swear I’ve never met so many people with English connections or stories! 8.05a.m a lady came with a MacBook that wouldn’t power up – had spent a year or so teaching in Newcastle. Ted, the technology director, had grown up around the north east and visited last summer. And then Jimmy’s daughter and her husband and currently living in Liverpool studying for her master’s degree! Have met more folk with connections to England than when I was living there

I went round to Jason’s tonight since his wife, Kimberly, headed into Bethel after school to meet her sister – we watched some boxing, playing a few games on the Playstation 2, and laughed at Koda wanting attention all the time. Was a good few hours. Came back home to see a nice pretty box from United Utilities, our phone company. The engineer in the village had obviously been told we’d signed up for DSL at home, and so had called Kat before disconnecting the phone to upgrade the line at the exchange, then dropped the DSL modem round. Very nice surprise

Couldn’t get it going on the Mac at first which was a bit annoying, especially when it worked first time under Windows XP. Figured it was because the Mac was being smarter Sure enough, it was. Double-checked the settings under OS X and there’s an option for ‘PPPoE Service Name’ under the network connections for connecting via PPPoE. This isn’t an identifier like the ‘Service Provider’ option, so after leaving it blank, the connection immeadiately came straight up. If you’re having problems configuring a PPPoE DSL connection on a Mac, I couldn’t find anything in the FAQ’s or knowledgebase on that one – just remove the service name and try connecting again.

And, just to completely reassure me that the Mac works much better, it repeatedly disconnected under Windows every couple of minutes (prompting me to fear the phone lines simply couldn’t handle a DSL connection…), yet under OS X I’ve been sat online for 20 minutes without even a little hiccup. Happy days

I was looking over some of the events taking place at LinuxWorld UK Expo at the end of October, and some of the workshops and seminars looked pretty cool. Don’t think I’ll head down as can’t exactly fob it off as work-related anymore, and don’t really have money floating round to jump on a plane or train down to London for a couple of days. Went down just for one day a couple of years back, and it was a long, but rewarding day – would recommend it to anyone already around the London area.

But, one of the sessions is being hosted by ‘Chris Lewis MCSE‘. Nothing against the guy, don’t know him from Adam, and never met him, but why on earth would you want to brag about being an MCSE when speaking at Linux convention? I’ll wager there are speakers that are RHCE or LPI certified that aren’t detailing it on the programme. I’m not judging him, but can give a ton of people I know in the Linux community that will instantly turn-on off to someone holding Microsoft certifications, even if they’re promoting migration from Windows to Linux-based networks in the enterprise.

Wish him the best of luck with his presentation though – he might need it!

So, the eBay auctions ended. Didn’t fetch quite as much as I was hoping for on the Ibanez bass guitar and the Marshall amp, but kinda balances out as the Yamaha Pacifica electric went a lot higher than expected, and the Shuttle media center PC just about did alright. Wasn’t expecting great things from eBay anyways. Will probably have more stuff going up when I get back from Japan though, including all the audio equipment out of my car

But, the fun started arranging collection with ParcelForce. Done it dozens of times before through work (all but a distant memory now…), but not as a home user for a few years. First up, you can’t be running anything other than Windows for the site to function. Bit of a bugger with a MacBook or Kubuntu desktop computer being all I have on offer (and quite happily, I must add!), so had to troop off and knick my dad’s computer. You plod through filling in all your details, pretty standard stuff, then it comes to payment.

Now, I’m not a huge fan of WorldPay for payment handling, as they just re-direct all over the place and you never really know what on Earth’s happening. Get annoyed by companies that don’t make at least some effort to integrate payment processing. Makes me nervours, especially on a computer I don’t mantain. Rant aside, I put in my payment details, and Internet Exploder does one of it’s little bottom burps, SP2 blocks pop-ups, so Verified by Visa fails. Click the button to allow pop-ups for this transaction and wheeeeeeeee!!!! back to the start we go asking you how many parcels you would like to send…

Not impressed.

All sorted (I hope), and pretty sure the right parcels will go to the correct buyer! On the plus side, I found 2Gb Crucial DDR RAM for the MacBook shipping for £130 and figured I’d treat myself. As much as the MacBook is impressive, it really doesn’t like multi-tasking with a few Firefox tabs open on only 512Mb RAM, and especially so if you’re running GarageBand or iPhoto (pretty much shut all other apps before processing audio in Garageband!). I’m hoping to play with (read steal) dad’s JVC Mini-DV camcorder whilst in Japan and use iMovieHD and iDVD to create my own movies when I get back, so guessed more RAM can’t help, and hopefully should make all the stuff with the Unsigned Rock Podcast much quicker + easier too

A recent article over at ZDNet raised some interesting questions. I always take articles like this with a pinch of salt, but it doesn’t seem too far from what’s probably going.

First thing – Microsoft provides admin rights to the majority of users right across the enterprise. Flies in the face of security rule #1, that one. Very few users should actually need admin rights in my opinion, and it’s not hard work to develop structured GPO’s that provide the flexibility users require. If they’re requiring admin rights to install apps that otherwise don’t provide a valid MSI to install without privileged user rights, is that something you really want on the network? I wouldn’t.

Yes, for those in the development environment I can see the reasoning, but most others shouldn’t. Even I don’t log in with admin rights – maybe 5% of the time I log in with a dedicated admin account, then back to my normal, everyday account. How have they fully tested Vista’s User Access Control (UAC) on a large scale without even deploying it themselves? Would I be happy implementing such access control lists knowing Microsoft haven’t used them extensively? No. Seems a case of “Do as we say, not as we do”.

The second bit that stands out – their internal IT support doesn’t get advance warning of security patches and vulnerabilites. Is communication so lacking they don’t give their own boys a shout when problems arise? Especially in an environment where goodness knows what is being installed by your users, I would have thought patching vulnerabilities would be pretty important, and I’m amazed they don’t get early releases.

There’s still the argument of “Well, we set time aside each month to roll out security updates rather than delivering them as soon as they’re available”, but again, how can Microsoft ensure they aren’t going to break something by releasing fixes without patching large portions of their own network? Hands up who can name 5 security updates that then received updates themselves?

Although I run Linux exclusively on all my home machines, Windows still remains pretty much the only choice in our network environment, primarily because of the extensive control provided by GPO’s and the automatic deployment of OS updates across the network. Seems kinda ironic that Microsoft themselves don’t make as much use of their own major selling points!