Busy Project Time.........

Just when you think it's all going to be quiet and maybe it will be a good time to get those niggling little tasks out of the way and to be able to sit down and write some decent blog articles someone comes up with the idea of decommissioning a server room to save on power. So now I'm involved in a project that requires the relocation of about 4TB of data to another filer, including updating and moving the servers that use the filer data....

Yes, it's going to be a busy few months.

And a project manager just asked me if I needed any help installing IIS...... Sometimes I'd rather be doing anything else than working in IT.

VMWare course

For much of this week I'm on a VMWare course for the second half of my VMWare training. This part of the course is titled Deploy, Secure and Analyse. The course itself is to prepare me for a server consolidation project that the company I work for is kicking off.
The project invovles several VMWare clusters, a Hitachi SAN and blades. Lots of flashing lights and new technology to break support.

Posting update

Yes I know I've not posted for a bit. No excuses and I promise I will try to be good for here on in!

Lot's of changes at work and enough material to fill the blog every day for a year but I do need to actually get on with writing some of it down!

One article a week from here on in. Not a new years resolution but a start of summer resolution.

Moving house

Well, that was fun!

The move is over. The computers are almost all in place but there is a lot of little jobs that need doing, lots of rewiring for the computers - The study area only has a single plug which is not exactly ideal for all the computers!

It's been quite a week, Moved on Saturday, slept on Sunday then back to work Monday and Tuesday then on a course for Blue Coat Wednesday, Thursday and Friday.

The journey here is a bit more of a pain so I'm looking at jobs in the area - worth keeping an eye on all the options.

Normal blogging service will be resumed over the weekend with a look into reducing the number of services a default installation of Windows 2003 has.

As always, any suggestions for security focused articles please drop me a line.

Blog Updates for the next two weeks

Blog updates for the next two weeks make be a little sporadic as I'm moving house and will have limited net access.

Once I'm up and running I've got a series of blog articles planned that I hope you will all find interesting. Here is a brief taste:

Running Windows using Minimal services

iSCSI on Windows, Linux and NetApp

Issues with P2V and domain controllers

Any suggestions for future articles always greatly received.

Change of Domain Name

Just a quick update to let you know that this blog's URL is changing to http://blog.gdwnet.com. If you access it via http://www.gdwnet.com then be aware that this page will be changed from being a redirector to an index page for some other sub domain sites I'm setting up.
If you are ONLY interested in the blog then you might want to update your bookmarks.

2007

2007 promises to be another packed year in the IT industry with a raft of new releases coming out of Microsoft.

Personally, I can't see Vista making much of a dent in Operating Systems sales apart from people who are buying new pc's and don't have much clue - Vista will be forced upon them no matter if they want it or not.

Office 2007 looks gorgeous and I do like using it - But does it REALLY offer anything new? In the grand scheme of things no it doesn't. It's just another suite of office applications and let's be honest Office 2003 pretty much provided all the necessary applications and fixed a few glaring problems from previous versions.

Exchange 2007 - This I can see having a lot more impact. Exchange 5.5 is no longer supported although many places still use it and interestingly enough, Outlook 2007 will not work on Exchange 5.5 although there is no tech note to indicate this but it is referenced on slipsticks site
I'll be covering Exchange 2007 more in a few weeks time.

Away from Microsoft will we also see Fedora Core 7 released at the end of April.

2007 could also see the introduction of the 1TB drive although once formatted you will only get about 800GB usable... even so the thought of 4 or these in a machine is quite something...!

As for this blog, I'm planning small updates (tricks, tips, etc) once a week or so with larger "here is how to do THIS" type articles once a month or so.

I wish everyone a fantastic 2007.

Blog updates

I've been trying to do a minimum of two blogs a week but I fully admit that blog updates on here have been a bit lax recently. This is not because of a lack of material but simply because work wise things have become quite busy with a number of new projects kicking off.

I have a bunch of material to write up and consolodate into proper blog entries so watch this space.