by ezs | Apr 20, 2008 | evilzenscientist, Uncategorized
We joke about Utah beer – but the hand-crafted local brews are big on taste if not on alcohol.
Good to see that several of our favourites won at the 2008 World Beer Cup:
Category 11: Other Low Strength Ale or Lager (15 Entries)
Silver Medal
Polygamy Porter
Utah Brewers Cooperative
Salt Lake City, Utah
Bronze Medal
Provo Girl Pilsner
Utah Brewers Cooperative
Salt Lake City, Utah
Category 54: Ordinary Bitter (10 Entries)
Gold
Cutthroat
Uinta Brewing Co.
Salt Lake City, Utah
Category 70: German-Style Brown Ale/Düsseldorf-Style Altbier (22 Entries)
Silver
Bobsled Brown
Utah Brewers Cooperative
Salt Lake City, Utah
and one that we haven’t tried:
Category 70: German-Style Brown Ale/Düsseldorf-Style Altbier (22 Entries)
Gold
Alt and in the Way
Squatters Pub Brewery
Salt Lake City, Utah
by ezs | Apr 19, 2008 | evilzenscientist, Uncategorized
This weekends move plan:
- park the DNS for the domains
- finish the email hosting moves (move mail, redirect MX)
- start decommissioning servers for move
- reconfigure wireless for interim access
Totally shot because covads customer systems are offline between Friday night and Sunday night. No notification at all.
I’ve now got to reschedule during Monday when everything comes back online.
I called the 24x7x365 support and spent 30 minutes trying to talk to somone who could help. Turns out it’s an outsourced service in the Phillipines; the outsourcer has zero idea of current issues and can only log tickets.
I’ve escalated this within Covad; two issues:
- where was the notification of outage
- why don’t the 24x7x265 support have the ability to answer within 30 seconds that there is planned outage (it took 30 minutes to find this out)
The notification is the important part – I chose Covad because they had (at the time) stunning support; when I’ve called from Chicago, London and Sydney before about issues the person answering was intelligent and technically able to talk about DNS, ICMP quench issues or the like.
by ezs | Apr 18, 2008 | evilzenscientist, Uncategorized
by ezs | Apr 17, 2008 | evilzenscientist, Uncategorized
I recently discovered Windows Live FolderShare. (Thanks Vic!)
Installed and running in minutes – it’s for syncing files and content between machines; in fact it’s the same functionality that was introduced in iFolder 3 for peer-peer sharing.
Worth a look for home use; supports Windows XP, Vista and OS X.
by ezs | Apr 17, 2008 | evilzenscientist, Uncategorized
Moving the mail from home to the Google hosted service really has made my daily and weekly admin easier.
The main thing that’s changed is the amount of spam and the infrastructure needed to manage it:
The last few spam coming in are for the non-switched domains – they’ll be switched over at the end of this week.
by ezs | Apr 14, 2008 | evilzenscientist, Uncategorized
I finally moved the mail service to Google Apps.
I looked long and hard; and even thought about moving the mail to a hosted environment for a few months.
Finally I tested out the google hosted email service – and it looks pretty good.
On the positives:
- fully hosted, in the cloud service
- backup, restore and availability are all looked after
- anti-virus is included
- anti-spam is fantastic
- web mail, POP and IMAP services
- 6GB ++ per user
- it’s FREE!
The only downsides are around:
- questions about privacy
- no SLA on the free service
At the end of the day this frees up two servers running multiple services; and saves me the backup and availability headaches.
eDirectory/Novell NetMail
It should also give family a better experience (webmail/POP to a google datacenter rather than to my server) and give me more bandwidth to play with.
by ezs | Apr 5, 2008 | evilzenscientist, Uncategorized
This was released at the end of last week – and it’s running on one of my blogs (this one – www.evilzenscientist.com)
Still running 2.3.x on the others – mainly for the Gallery 2 integration plugin WPG2.
WPG2 is a great plugin, ozgreg and capt_kirk have done a great job of making the join between the blogging and photo gallery worlds. Apparantly some heavy lifting is needed to integrate with WP2.5.
by ezs | Apr 4, 2008 | evilzenscientist, Uncategorized
One of the things I get to plan is moving the IT infrastructure. Pulling the plugs and moving the servers is the easy part; but what about the DSL, static IP, mail, MX records, DNS..
I think I’ve found a solution for the mail (hosting the mail server) and the DNS is already moved out and re-hosted on two different DNS servers. Might be just web-mail for a week or so – but that’s more than enough.
The blogs and photos will be offline while the servers are on the move – the rest of the infrastructure is just internal stuff; NAS, print, authentication etc.
Any hints and tips from those that have moved SLES and Windows 2003 servers before?
by ezs | Apr 4, 2008 | evilzenscientist, Uncategorized
Slowly but surely moving towards general availability.
Download from here.
by ezs | Mar 30, 2008 | evilzenscientist, Uncategorized
I’ve got three Apple Airport Express units to stream music around the house. They work really well – and when used with Rogue Amoeba Airfoil I can play pretty much any music now via Airtunes.
However… I’ve had a sticky problem for the last year – 50% of the time iTunes or Airfoil just can’t see all of the Airport Express boxes. I’ve spent a lot of time researching Bonjour (aka Rendezvous, zero touch, multicast DNS) and doing packet traces. No joy. Everything looks fine; the multicast DNS is working fine over 5353; the radius is within limits; firewalls are non-blocking; the data is not crossing a router. I was stumped.
Tonight I think I fixed the issue. As part of de-cluttering for the impeding house move I took my last 802.11b device off the wireless subnet and bumped the configuration to be exclusively 802.11g. Instantly everything started working.
So in summary: Airport Express, Airtunes, iTunes and Airfoil really work well on an exclusive 802.11g network.
Hope this helps someone else.
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