Last night, I became aware of two amazing projects that have exciting, almost revolutionary, ideas behind them.

If you read my blog post yesterday - and it seems to have been well received so far - you'd be aware that my mind is presently very much occupied with the difficulties of open communications, and especially the ability of governments to interfere with that. I don't believe that governments should have the ability to take away the basic human rights of communication - whether that be meeting in person, telephone, text message, or the myriad ways possible via the Internet.

By now we should all be fully aware that restricting communications has nothing to do with anti-terrorism or crime prevention, and that these despicable acts continue irrespective of how tightly communications are monitored or prevented. You're free to disagree of course, but my feeling is that the only effect of this is to push criminal activity further underground, and to make it even harder to po ...

Last week Research in Motion announced plans to incorporate applications for the Android mobile operating system (developed by Google) into their Blackberry devices, which run their own, proprietary operating system.

I, for one, think this is an absolutely brilliant idea and something that the mobile phone sector is desperately going to need in years to come.

Having the ability to move applications between devices and operating systems is something that has been missing from the mobile phone sector since applications and mobile computing started to become all the rage for consumers a couple of years ago.

Currently, when a customer moves from one phone to another they basically lose everything that they had stored on their previous device; applications, contacts, notes, whatever.  All this information is (usually) stored in special formats that are only readable by devices from the same manufacturer and running the same operating system.  So when you change, you have to sta ...

There has been some hot debate over time over the merits of Senator Conroy's Internet Filter plan for Australia. There are certainly those that feel that this kind of censorship is a Good Thing™ ... I, however, am not one of them. In theory, the filter will eliminate only Refused Classification (or as the Senator's been fond to say, 'illegal') content - material that the government of the day decides is not suitable for public consumption.

But this is where the problem begins. Once elected to government, no-one can stop them from deciding what to add to the list. If someone becomes disenchanted with the government, and starts posting negative opinions online ... there is the risk that the government could take a dislike to it and declare that it's an incitement to public dissidence, or some such similar definition. Worse still, it's unlikely that an elected official will be the one maintaining the list - instead, a bureaucrat who is empowered to make his own calls is much more likely... ...

In response to an article by Mark about how he's configured his new Mac Pro for TTFN's video system, I posted the following comment.  I figured, after reading it, that it has wider appeal than just in that thread, so I have re-posted it below.  Please note, Mark had configured his Dual CPU Mac Pro with 4GB, 1GB, 1GB modules per CPU, which is what prompted my reply.  Also, the following information applies equally to Intel-based Mac Pro systems (and possibly other Mac systems) and Intel-based PCs and servers.

.-=-.-=-.

G'day Mark,

I need to bring you up to speed on how RAM performance works with Intel chipsets and Nehalem/Westmere CPUs as it seems you're a little confused here.

Without knowing exactly what chipset is in your Mac Pro (or which CPUs) as there's no mention of this information in your article, I'll need to be a little more general than I could if I had more of this information available about your particular system.

The exact type of C ...

Ah yes, the press have finally caught hold. The end of the Internets is nigh! We have IPocalypse! Vint Cerf is sorry!

I will freely admit to not having paid the attention I should to IPv6, and I'm still a relative dummy about it. I'm quite good with IPv4, although if you want a basic grounding in it, I'd suggest Google can provide some great tutorials. In many ways, I think it's a pain in the bum though. Remembering 4 byte IPs is so much easier.

I am by no means alone though.There are far too many IPv4-only implementations around. Even Microsoft, arguably the creators of the most ubiquitous operating system in the world, were rather slow in adopting IPv6 support. Tech.Ed Australia 2010 delivered an IPv6 network to promote this support; but even then, they found that application support for IPv6 was lacking. You can hear about the challenges here, but it's easy to understand the significance of features like Windows Update and Windows Product Activation not working over IPv6.

Fo ...

We went through risk and process alignment, prioritisation, and delegation in the last post. The idea with this is to enable a framework which, within the context of your DR scope, will permit you to recover the IT environment according to business (or your own) expectations. But what of the DR scope itself?

The scope of your Disaster Recovery plan is, by its nature, limited to the IT systems and information that the business considers essential for availability within a short time after a disaster. Developing and understanding this scope is important, because the business needs to understand what it will be getting, and you need to understand the expectations that are placed on you. Your opportunity within this is to set realistic and achievable expectations, and if these are not considered to meet business objectives adequately, to obtaining the resourcing or funding needed to accommodate these needs.

I don’t suggest, of course, that resourcing and funding is in any way automatic or ...

In the previous post, we introduced some key concepts for disaster recovery. In short, we tackled the need to avoid assumptions where ever possible, the types of scenarios to plan for, and the need to apply a risk management approach. These are pretty good foundations to any level of IT disaster recovery. The deeper you go, the less relevant it will become to individuals and even small to medium businesses, but it’s useful to have a high level understanding of.

What does a risk management approach look like? If you are, by chance, familiar with Information Security Management Systems (ISMS), which are covered by the ISO 27001 standard, you’ll be familiar with Plan-Do-Check-Act. This is a simple iterative process which encompasses all possible information security activities.  The concept is that the business, and IT, can manage risk to ensure appropriate decisions are made to manage the risk associate with activities such as;

Within the context of IT, Disaster Recovery and Business Continuity are perhaps the single biggest risks to businesses today, beyond simple . There are both positives and negatives to the widespread adoption of information technology in business, but this is also dependent on how technology is or has been applied. For example, IT can genuinely reduce the amount of paper-based risk that a business has – with the only copy of data existing on paper, and the paper residing in your office, a fire or flood could take it out quite easily. However in making that argument, we’re also making an assumption – that backups are made, and that a viable means of disaster recovery has been identified.

Sadly, in my experience, business make a lot of assumptions. In my time as a systems integrator, contractor, IT manager, and so on, I’ve seen a huge amount of them. It’s certainly been good experience for me, but assumptions would have to be one of the major problems with disaster recove ...

Folks I'm assisting with and leading up the Brisbane spearhead for this program.

We believe that many businesses are going to be significantly affected by the recent flood events. A lot of these businesses have no insurance and limited or no IT support or disaster recovery plan.

A program has been set up by a number of MVP's and other like minded community IT professionals to help support those effected get operational as soon as possible.

What we need.
1. Location to receive any and all equipment from local donations as well as those from interstate that are already starting to mount up. Desperately we need somewhere here in Brisbane to act as our logistics and shipping and receiving centre.
2. Donations of ICT equipment to assist those that have been flood devastated.
3. Any support from a technical as well as logistical slant to help this effort.

We appreciate any a ...

Hello autechheads,

Continuing on from my post a while back about my initial experiences with SCSM SCSM Initial Experiences there have been a few developments.

Firstly, the Exchange Connector I referenced which allows connection to an Exchange mailbox for jobs, has been finalised. Hopefully it will appear in Microsoft Downloads soon...

SP1 was also released on 16th December (Technet Blog Click Here) which has a bunch of improvements, including SQL Server 2008 R2 official support. The install for me was incredibly easy and smooth, just running the update on each server/client without any issues or anything notable.

So, there's a few more reasons to consider migrating to SCSM. Some of the limitations I mentioned on my first post are still there, but there's a bit more support and maturity with the product already.

I have found myself in a situation now, where I need to move the databases from one SQL server to another. Sounds easy? Why am I asking you question ...

Last year, I signed up for World's Greatest Shave just a week before the event, and was able to raise $1,200. My goal was $1,000 to shave my head - otherwise I was going to colour it. Since then, I've actually been quite fond of keeping my hair short - not quite as short as the number zero shave I had for WGS!

This year, I'm growing my hair specially for World's Greatest Shave - so there's something decent to shave off. If you're not sure what it's all about, I'll let the Leukaemia Foundation explain:

"Almost 10,000 Australians will be diagnosed with blood cancers and related blood disorders this year. Although survival rates are improving, blood cancer is our second biggest cause of cancer death.

In 2010 it is projected that:

The Leukaemia Foundatio ...