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Hardware!

by | Dec 2, 2008 | evilzenscientist, Uncategorized

I went mad and ordered a new rack-mountable 24 port Gigabit switch. Should arrive early next week; should be simple change control.

As an aside – I used Microsoft Live Search with Cashback! $13 in my pocket 😉

Infrastructure updates

by | Nov 10, 2008 | evilzenscientist, Uncategorized

I’m moving my primary Active Directory and Kerberos box (which also hosts the internal DNS and DHCP) from Windows 2003 to Windows Server 2008 this evening.

That should free up a box to put System Center Operations Manager 2007 on to.

My goal is to get Operations Manager to map and display my home and lab infrastructure – and to alert on health and performance issues. I hope to use Operations Manager 2007 R2 beta; that will give me cross-platform monitoring. I’ll try and tie in some other partner tools to get some sexy mapping and alerting.

Blog updates

by | Nov 2, 2008 | evilzenscientist, Uncategorized

Live family blog is now updated and running WordPress 2.7 beta 1. This site will be updated later today.

Looks like a small cache/redirect glitch somewhere on the WPG integration – it was rewriting URLs in a strange way. That’s working now.

Amazon S3, Azure, Live Grid and the cloud

by | Oct 30, 2008 | evilzenscientist, Uncategorized

Now Amazon have opened a European S3/EC2 datacenter in Dublin I am experimenting with video hosting on Amazon S3 and having data in Europe.

Several reasons:

  • there is a big fat pipe out of that datacenter into most European markets; most of the family watching our videos are in Europe. It’s a lot of hops closer (lower latency, better experience) and it’s a whole lot faster (not slurping out of my server rack at 1 Mb/s at best)
  • I don’t have to worry about the storage of the data. It’s just there.

 

I’m looking at moving other data into the cloud too; waiting to see what Microsoft offer up in terms of Azure and other offerings. Live Grid is consumer grade right now – but looks like a good start.