Paul’s esoteric meanderings

Like most people I have been watching the “Cloud Services” develop and participated in some of the discussions surround the space. These are a collection of the best articles I have found that have shaped my thinking heavily.

Tearing down the walls that limit business

A series of articles on designing Open Networks – Jericho Forum

http://www.blackhat.com/presentations/bh-usa-04/bh-us-04-simmonds.pdf

http://www.opengroup.org/jericho/

TechEd Australia ‘08 Locknote

This is the future of IT over the next 10 years as predicted by Microsoft’s chief navel gazer. I gotta say, I think he’s right.  Read more... (170 words, estimated 41 secs reading time)

I noticed something very strange with a new fire suppression system. There were no valve controls on the system, of the four bottles, only one was controlled. I had to look further into this.

One of the sites I work on had installed an Intergen Fire Suppression system. The basic idea is that in the event of a fire, enough oxygen is displaced from the room, that a fire cannot be sustained, but humans will remain conscious.  Read more... (306 words, 3 images, estimated 1:13 mins reading time)

OK – it came time to rebuild the media centre.

Here are ALL the steps I went through to getting the software install right. A Vista Media Center Build Document.

The changing of hardware, testing codecs, utilites, guides and apps had led to some long running config and stability issues that I couldn’t resolve. Application errors, crashes, codecs, screen sizes, resolutions and audio were all problematic.

After round one a while ago, I had managed to stabilise and expand the system somewhat. The stable hardware config now is  Read more... (920 words, estimated 3:41 mins reading time)

• Case – Zalman HD160 Case (IR, Display & Card Reader disabled)

C’mon guys – no logins for Technet subscriptions – if you can’t keep your directory up maybe you should consider OpenID.

Jesper had a similar problem last week.

This is why I learnt a long time ago – if you have an AD problem – it’s probably DNS.

Creating an empty DNS zone with the same name as your internal zone can lead too all sorts of frustration – especially with the multiple locations in AD that it can end up in. You’ll find yourself knee-deep in ADSI Edit faster than you would ever want to be.

I love DNS, but it’s gotta be right, and it’s easy to get wrong.

http://panko.shidler.hawaii.edu/SSR/Mypapers/whatknow.htm

And this is why we have to wean business off Excel.

Just like programming – it’s all mistakes mistakes mistakes.

I had the same problem as before – Activesync changing my Proxy settings in my Jasjam to use the work proxy, breaking web browsing on the thing via my Telco.

Activesync is different to the Mobile Device Thingy on Vista and although the fix was the same, it took me a bit to find.

Think of this as a Vista Version of KB915151

 Read more... (102 words, 4 images, estimated 24 secs reading time)

My Vista SP1 Laptop refused to connect to our MS ISA VPN for work at some point. There was no error given on the connection interface, but the Application Event Log recorded an Event ID 20227 – RASClient

The user somewhere\someone dialed a connection named WorkVPN which has failed. The error code returned on failure is 800.

Some searching showed others with similar results. The common cause is Windows OneCare. It’s interaction with the Windows Firewall blocks VPN protocols by default. I’m not sure why it doesn’t prompt to allow the traffic, a problem with the application.  Read more... (133 words, 2 images, estimated 32 secs reading time)

So with today’s perspective on updates vs uptime, is that impressive, or scary?

I’ve been a Toms fan forever, but don’t get there much anymore. This is an excellent article.

http://www.tomsguide.com/us/video-streaming-need-to-know-part-1,review-760.html

I recently swapped out my noisy old model Pioneer DVD burner in the flaky media centre for a new Pioneer DVR-215BK with the grand price of $37.

I am pleased to say that it reads DVD’s reliably, which the last one didn’t from new and is quiet, which the last one wasn’t either.

Now I’m not saying it’s silent, but combined with a Media Centre built this way, I can’t hear it.

5/5

Although the Media centre is still a flaky piece of crap.

I’ve been moving all my home PC’s over to wireless as I reshuffle the rooms in my house. As part of this I have had a nightmare of a time with one machine being unable to connect to anything, the media centre dropping connections to the server, and other general weirdness.

I tracked it all to the Browser service and lack of decent name resolution. I have never really liked the browser service, it’s never reliable, but in this scenario, it should perform fine.  Read more... (226 words, estimated 54 secs reading time)

I have seen this one a few times and it’s always entertaining to watch and hard to fix.

Lets say you have a domain name of company.com.xx and you host it yourself. The primary is stored on your DNS server in your DMZ and the secondary with your ISP.  

Now someone in your country will be hosting the .com.xx records. They will have a DNS server with a listing of delegations, that is who is responsible for sub-domains under .com.xx like your company.com.xx 

This is where it gets interesting. Delegation is done by hostname, not by IP address. In this case it will be delegated to something like NS1.company.com.xx and NS2.YourISP.com.xx  Read more... (493 words, estimated 1:58 mins reading time)

If you get an EventID 14148 on your ISA Server (2K4 in this case) and it’s running on an IBM Server, chances are the IBM ServeRAID software has stolen port 8080 for it’s own use. Specifically Miniwinagent will be using it. The docs on IBM’s site say it’s not critical to the ServerRAID management software and only used for firmware updates. If you want port 8080 back you can either uninstall and reinstall without the feature, or just disable the Service.

 Read more... (155 words, 1 image, estimated 37 secs reading time)