So the last post I wrote was 3 months ago. A lot changes in 3-months. The products I was advocating at the old company (they retrenched me for commercial reasons) are still there, and are great, I am just not selling them anymore.

One of the comments on my old post about backup hit a chord. It was about small users, backups and tapes.

I am a mac user. I have been for several years, even when I was only using a PC, I would skin it up to look like a mac. (sad, right?) Anyway.

Apple gives all apple users a product called time machine. Smart mac salespeople convince you to buy an external hard drive. So I back up once a day, all my data is duplicated and goes into the drive. PC users have similar options, home users back up so as to save valuable photos & documents.

The basics of backup are there. 

What happens when a small to medium business has lots of data? Do they:

a) Back up every day?

b) Backup once a week?

c) Backup every day to th...

A belated Merry Christmas and Happy New Year to all.

 Quite a number of people have noticed I've been uncharacteristically quiet of late, both here on AuTechheads and around the social media traps - not to mention offline. The short answer is that I've been job hunting, with increasing levels of desperation. It's distracted me quite a lot, and I'm sure most can understand.

I'm by no means alone in this - my good friend @themolk up in Queensland has been working his heart out to find a permanent job for a couple of years now.  His is a tale of disappointment and letdowns which dwarfs my own - but thankfully he's been able to make ends meet for the most part. That said, if anyone has a job lead for him, I know he'd be grateful! There are yet others in the AuTechHeads community that I know of looking for work, but of course each has their own tale to tell. This is mine.

Up until September, I had a job in the public sector as an IT manager. It was quite a good job for the grea...

Hi All,

Quick post to let everyone know that the AuTechHeads are getting together for social drinks on December 3, 7pm after Infrastructure Saturday. We're meeting at the Villager in Brisbane.

All AuTechHeads members are welcome, attending Infrastructure Saturday is not a prerequisite so please spread the word and RSVP so we can book the venue with correct numbers.If you're a new member or you're looking to meet some new people in the group please come along and introduce yourself.

If you're interested in sponsoring this event or future events please get in touch with any of the core team members.

Where: The Villager, 185 George Street, Brisbane
When: 7pm - lateWhat: Drinks (Beer & Wine) + Snacks & a lucky door prize all sponsored by TechSmith !

Numbers are limited
RSVP by November 30

Simone
@kittenstix

Infra Sat: http://www.infrastructuresaturday.com/
Our Awesome Fri...

Last night was (at long last) the first AuTechHeads Melbourne MeatUp! At 7.30 a bunch of geeks rocked up to Squires Loft Steakhouse for a night of steak, wine, beer and chat. We were fortunate enough to be joined by Microsoft staff Jeff Alexander, Catherine Eibner and Rocky Heckman, in addition to AuTechHeads James Bannan, Chris Brown, Jodie Miners, Ben Ball and Jerome Brown.

Much discussion was had about all things ranging from Xbox to System Center to Golf. Zune Music Pass was the subject of much attention, in the wake of its Australian release last week.

Hopefully last night is a sign of good things to come within the Melbourne end of the AuTechHeads community. If you're in the area, please sing out, we'd love to hear from you. Please don't forget to join the Melbourne Members group.

Thanks again to everyone who came along, we appreciate your support

Yes, we know it's next Monday, and a school night, but hopefully we will see you there!

Venue has been confirmed as Squires Loft City Steakhouse at 12 Goldie Place, Melbourne 3000, booked for 7.30PM.  RSVP is mandatory for numbers reasons, so please use the registration form below or tweet us.  Please hit either @hjmcmanus or @chrisbrownie up on Twitter.

Officical hashtag is #MelbourneMeatUp so check it out!

Link to map of venue here.

I was recently privileged to be the guest of HP in Singapore for their Cloud Innovation in APJ event, where they announced a number of new Converged Systems products and services. HP is making a big push toward the cloud in the Asia Pacific region, with some major investments in Cloud Centers of Excellence, and product suites to match.

One of my long standing thoughts on cloud services is that they often don’t consider the existing infrastructure, from the client site(s) all the way through to the cloud’s edge. I’ve always disliked the assumption that ‘everything’ can go to the cloud, and that the WAN or Internet providers in-between the cloud and its customers can deliver 100% availability. Neither of these can be proven true with any level of certainty – especially third party network uptime. You could argue that, in Australia for example, matters have improved significantly and will probably improve even further with the advent of the National Broadband Networ...

After reading about the improved battery life in the 4S, I had a great first day with the phone. After actually getting it and turning it on from about 8:30am, playing with it for the morning, and then doing a full restore from my old phone. Apart from the charge while the restore was going on, I didn't charge it for the rest of the day. Played lots with it in the afternoon and had about 10% charge left by 11pm that...

I recently moved on from my IT Manager job within the NSW Government, and a top priority for me was to buy a new notebook and desktop computer - the old ones having gone back to my employer. I don't use a desktop myself, but the family does for various purposes, and they've fallen in love with the All-in-one touchscreen style; I'll review that one next. I'm in the habit of using a notebook for everything, and I find I need a fairly high powered specification to meet my many and varied needs, including;

While my work notebooks have grown ever greater in power, they've never totally suited my needs - the closest I'd come was a HP Elitebook, but I've found the HP offerings can be quite inflexible and limiting within my price range. There are plenty of HP notebooks that do suit people, and I feel they're quite good for business use (with a decent SOE),...

This is my first real foray into blog posting. This was originally written for someone that had recently implemented Microsoft DFS Replication and was having a bit of trouble. Having dealt with some evil DFS replication issues in my past, I thought it would only be proper to lend a helping hand. I have decided to share these tidbits with the world so that hopefully it helps someone else out in the future.

So here goes:

File Quotas are a pain -  File quotas in DFS replication can burn you – hard. The DFS health report will come up with an error about being out of disk space, but will not reference anything to do with file quotas. Essentially, DFS will try to replicate a file that has ownership to a user. The user will have filled up it’s quota at one side of the replication. When this occurs, DFS will error out. If you decide to setup user folders with quotas and DFS, make sure that you use FSRM and set up the quotas to email the users when they are reaching their full ...

If you've been living under a rock, you would probably know that Apple released the iPhone 4S on the 14th of October, to much noise and hullabaloo. I was one of those who trekked out early to pick one up on the day of release. Now the noise has gone away, and I've had it for just over a look, let's take a look at it and see how it goes.

As a point of reference, I had an iPhone 3GS for over 2 years, didn't upgrade when the 4 came out, and have been struggling with iOS 4 on the slower processor for some time. So naturally, an upgrade to a 4S would be a sizeable one, regardless of the features of the new phone.

The Apple iPhone 4S is the latest smartphone from Apple. In many ways an upgrade from the iPhone 4, the new device sees Apple enter the dual-core mobile processor era, with the 1GHz A5 dual core chip with 512MB RAM. Apple claim the A5 processor improves graphics performance by up to 7 times, and while it's hard to gauge whether that metric is corr...

G'day All (and anyone else listening in),

Just a heads up to let you know that SMBiT Professionals Brisbane is running a Spotlight Session this coming Sunday (2011-10-23) at the Chalk Hotel in Woolloongabba where we're delving into Group Policy with Alan Burchill and Remote Desktop Server with Bryce Telfer as related (in particular) to an SBS 2011 environment.

The event will be streamed live for financial SMBiT Professionals members in our SharePoint site, under the Brisbane sub-site.

For everyone else, the event will be streamed free (of cost, password, however not advertisements) at:

http://www.justin.tv/hiltont

http://www.Ustream.tv/channel/SMBiTPro-Brisbane

So, feel free to get your geek on with us this weekend - the show starts around 10:00 AM and will be over just in time for us to watch the Rugby Union final!  :)

Hi,

Thanks to Telstra, I've been given a 4G card to trial - so let's see how we go! This is just a quick 'Out of the box' experience and not intended as a full review or guide. 

First, I've put the SIM into the rather short and fat 4G modem, and plugged that into my laptop. It's autodetected and kicked off an installer.   Several minutes later, the installer is done and launches the Telstra Mobile Broadband app! But, it's saying 'Cannot detect SIM card'. What have I done wrong?  

I pull out the modem, open it up and switch the SIM card around the other way. It's not too clear as to which way it's supposed to go, but looking at the manual it does confirm I had it incorrectly inserted.   Back in it goes, and look it's now detected and showing me signal strength!   I click the 'Connect Now' button and am instantly connected.

The Telstra Mobile Broadband program pops up a top news story, as well as giving me links for some Online Services - BigPond H...

Please click here and check out our website, PowerShell Down Under for more info!

A few years ago, I had a coffee cup that stated, with a picture of a homeless man busking: "Software Meltdown, Data Destroyed, Didn't do no Backup, Now I'm Unemployed". I used to trot that cup out at meetings with clients, vendors, you name it, the cup was at nearly every meeting I attended. Then it crashed. I didn't drop it, it just died when I was on holidays. When I bought it, there were two cups exactly the same. A smart bet would have been to buy the second cup as a backup when this exact situation occurred. I didn't. When the cup was cracked and unusable, I realised that my attitude was that I would be ok, it would last forever.

I treated data exactly the same way, up until the day the cup broke. I kept everything locally, I didn't use the H: drive set up on the server for me, I didn't even bother to save my Outlook PST file. As is the way with data, it grew. the outlook data grew until one fateful day, without warning, it crashed the system. When I rebooted, I got the chilling message that a...