From the monthly archives:
October 2011
Telstra steps up the game in the Australian wireless data market with its new 4G offering
4G. It's like 3G..but plus one, right? Well actually, closer to "times ten" but we'll get to that. Telstra have, to somewhat less fanfare than I'd expected, released their new 4G (Long Term Evolution, or LTE) network to anyone lucky enough to live in or around a capital CBD, capital airport or "selected regional" arsea.
What's it do? Telstra introduced their 3G network under the name of "NextG" in October 2006 to replace the aging CDMA network. It uses HSPA+ to provide a (theoretical) downstream speed of a respectable 21Mbps. The network was received to mixed attitudes by users Australia-wide, but has seen significant improvements since its inception. The new 4G network is being implemented alongside the 3G network to expand the speed and connectivity capabilities of Telstra's NextG networks.
What's in the box? The Sierra AirCard 320U (sold as the "Telstra USB 4G") arrives wrapped in fancy Telstra livery with the new branding and colour scheme. Inside the box, the first thing you'll ...
So I finally got my brand new notebook ... and I love it! Here's the rundown!
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;
A/V editing and rendering
graphics editing
gaming
running multiple virtual machines
and, of course, more general usage
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 – ...
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 rea ...
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.
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.
Image (c) Apple, 2011
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 ga ...
Geekin' Out At The Chalk - SMBiT Professionals Brisbane, in association with Alan Burchill and Bryce Telfer, present:
Sunday Spotlight Streaming Session 10:00 - 17:00, 23 October, 2011
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! :)
...
The new Telstra 4G service, read inside to find out my initial experience and quick tests to see how it performs.
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 ...
In the month of November, join Shane Hoey (PowerShell MVP) and Chris Brown as they run some free (as in free beer) PowerShell virtual workshops. If you're interested in learning or refining your PowerShell skills, or you know of any system administrators who may be, this could be well worthwhile.
In the month of November, join Shane Hoey (PowerShell MVP) and Chris Brown as they run some free (as in free beer) PowerShell virtual workshops. If you're interested in learning or refining your PowerShell skills, or you know of any system administrators who may be, this could be well worthwhile.
PowerShell is undeniably revolutionising the way we administer systems, and will, in no time at all, be a mandatory skill for sysadmins everywhere. If you’ve not learned it yet, have a passing interest, or would like to brush up on your skills, please sign up below (did I mention, it’s free?).
Please click here and check out our website, PowerShell Down Under for more info!
...
Backups are the difference between happy management & upset management with unemployed staff. Better to do it than not, after all, what have you got to lose?
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 ...