who is AuTechHeads? are you a blogger, a technician, an industry professional?

Do you have things that make you passionate about technology that are outside the norm? 

Why are you here? what could the site do for you?

These are the questions that I have in my head every time I write a blog post. I am here because I love technology. I love printers, scanners, computers, routers, unified communications, network design, helping people with technology, you get the idea.

What the site does for me is help me learn about stuff that normally I would never hear about. I love reading blog posts about real people using technology to help their clients or their companies. I learn from others on this site. The site is a gateway to experiences - your experiences, whether a new technology or old, a new way to approach a problem, using technology, or how you worked out that a specific product that you work with every day can do things that the rest of us never dreamed were possible.

If you blinked and missed it, I had a job. I don't right now, but am hoping to change this pretty soon. The following happened when I did.

I have told a couple of vendors to check out this site, see if they can get interested and perhaps contribute to the content. Out of the blue, recently, one popped up as a review for the products that they sell. It was, essentially, one great big ad.

Angrily, I phoned the local representative and blasted him for getting one of his people to put up a patently obvious marketing piece. He was as angry as I - the particular vendor doesn't engage in that type of marketing as it sullies their image, which is never an ideal thing to promote for a short term exposure, long term condemnation.

The ad originated from a serial blogger overseas, and this is where it got a bit squiffy. (I like that word, even though it isn't real)

The site admin on autechheads had removed the article. no problems with that, the vendor was a bit relieved. We managed to ...

Whew.

I have just got a moment to update where I have been, what I have been doing and why I haven't visited for a while. 

Firstly, I have been monitoring discussions here, but have not been in a position to respond. Earlier this year, I changed jobs. I have had 2 retrenchments in the same number of years (isn't the economy strong?) and my new employer has me working from home. This is not my idea of fun. Working from home is great if you are single, or have no kids. If you are married, it probably includes doing stuff around the house as your significant other thinks up ways to make your life hell. As it is, I have an ex-wife who feels that I am a babysitter for my kids on call. This is a big learning curve as that is not the case.

I am (still) working for an iSecurity distributor. I have had a very short time to understand some complex technologies, be in a position to explain them to resellers and yet, every day there is something new released for me to learn about. Many of ...

Data. We save it, store it, back it up and access it as we need to. We grow larger and larger storage capabilities to fit it in, we implement backup regimes with SAN / NAS and Virtual Tape Libraries to avoid "slow" transfers to tape. We end up using tape anyway.

How many companies and departments have a disaster recovery solution in the works, either being implemented or planned? What happens if that strategy is called into action due to a hardware failure or malicious action?

If I told you that the main cause of data loss through deletion or removal by malicious action is actually from an internal source, ignoring the Internet and external users for a moment, how can you ensure that it doesn't happen? What implementations are there in the market that account for internal user attack?

Most firewalls sit at the gateway. they probe for signatures that identify external behaviours, they don't look back in. If the user is behind the gateway and firewall, in the "safe" zone, how can a sy ...

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 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 ...

There seems to be a growing trend to publish articles that are of interest to a select few of the IT industry, and throw it out to the general population, in an attempt to sensationalise mundane events and occurences in the Australian Government.

 Recently, I saw a new article talking about the recent tender release from a department where the brand was named. The journalist seemed to think that this was of the utmost importance, as they had contacted the department to advise of the error, and the department had retracted the tender, only to re-issue it without the offending brand. The thing is, regardless of whether the department re-released the tender, their preference was made known by the first document. How does an IT company respond effectively to the tender? they quote the product that the tender originally mentioned.

How does this effect the greater IT community? well, the department made a mistake. the journalist got them to re-issue the tender, the resellers quoted on it a ...

I work for an ICT provider. we sell hardware, software, computers, services, etc, etc. One of the things my role in the company requires is cold calling. Old school, I know, but I just can't wait for the company or department to say "oh, I need some kit / software / help, lets phone that nice man waiting patiently by the phone". It never happens, no matter how long you wait. They won't call.

Now that there is a mob out there who are scamming small businesses, home users etc, with their telemarketing teams telling the client about "problems" they have on the computer, my job is just that little bit harder. Government departments seem to be full of people who have had these calls. Small and medium businesses sound tired of these calls, and I get lumped in to the same basket if I so much as mention computers, support or service.  Bit hard when that is what I am promoting.

One customer wanted to know where I was based. "Canberra", I said. Sure. yeah. he doesn't believe me. He thinks I am ...

This is a review for something that I own, a neat little video camera called a Flip. It is a flash drive unit, it records 60 minutes of video, and, via a usb connector that is built in, you can upload to storage on the computer, to email, to twitter, to facebook and, in the latest version of the software supplied in the device, to a cloud storage system. Neat. The Flip cameras are multi-system compatible, they work with windows systems and macs, and there are versions of the software preloaded on the camera, so there are no requirements to connect to a website before being able to use it and upload from it.

There is an ad running at the moment about a kid who has had a party, trashed the house and his mum calls to let him know they are on the way home. He looks at the carnage and tells her to"take the scenic route" - in the background, we see his little sister videoing the house and him, plugs it into her laptop, uploads the video, sends to an email address, her mum's, and then we hear the mother ...

Many years ago, when dinosaurs roamed the earth, and the net was what you caught fish in, I discovered that if my father and his colleagues at a large computer company ran a series of commands to a massive thing called a computer, it would print, on a large dot matrix, a massive picture of the moon and its craters. And so it was done, and it was good. (for me) Never knew what trouble I got them into for doing it, or the money wasted on paper, ribbon and processing power. I had kudos for at least a week at high school over that one...

The computer "lab" had an apple IIe, and we could control a "turtle" on it. wow. riveting stuff.

My father decided to get a computer - a scaled down one for "me" at home. He bought a personal computer, a microbee series 3, with a whopping 32kb of memory. It was so cool, but, sadly, it was on a green screen. (about a week later, my neighbor got a commodore 64, and his house was THE place to be for the neighborhood kids)

Dad then sent me off to my usual ...

I was lucky enough during my orientation at my new employer to get a look at a modular server. Yes, it is another ASI product, and yes, this is my opnion, not that of my employer.

 I have had experience over the years with blade servers, from the IBMs to the HPs, I have seen a broad spectrum of these devices. I have even visited blade.org to get an idea of the baseline design structures of these servers, and what makes them so interesting. I like the idea of running multiple blade servers in a chassis to increase performance, throughput and uptime.

When I saw the ASI Modular server, I immediately thought it was another Blade server. I was wrong, and realised my mistake only after the product manager pointed out that the blades have no hard drives, so cannot really be called blades. They are compute modules. Made me think that I was back in my youth, learning about technology in school - compute module sounded like a different way of saying CPU, as we knew it back then.

So I go ...

Yes, Yes, I know, I work for ASI now. But this review is my opinion, not that of my employer.

But one of the reasons I joined AUTechHeads was for the love of technology, and this device just fits the bill for me for a technology option. I won't mention the price, but it isn't expensive for what it is.

Who can remember the old Tablet PCs, not the latest units like the iPad, the androids and every single incarnation that every manufacturer seems to be releasing, but the old notebooks with a swivel screen and a full keyboard?

Imagine a device like that, only in a netbook form factor. The nimu NL2a is a lightweight netbook, coming in at 1.74 kg with battery, but that isn't the best bit. It is a netbook and a pen based tablet. it is in a rubberised casing, has an accelerometer so that it detects where the screen is positioned, netbook or tablet, and the hard drive parks if it is dropped.

The device is neat, clean lined and, for what it is, surprisingly carrying a fair amount of ...

2 weeks ago, my employer realised that the best way to ensure the survival of the company was to shed staff. Not my ideal solution, considering that, as I was last in, I was one of the ones out. I don't know how they came to the decision, not do I want to, it was pretty hard for them to make - I have done it in the past.

So I started the campaign to get a new job. I scattergun replied to ads, and got quite a few rejections, the job has closed, you are overqualified, etc, etc. I have had a few interviews, and maybe one will drop. Anyway, one of the rejections blew me away. Apparently, I don't have enough experience in the canberra market, selling to businesses and govt. interesting.

I checked my resume, for a clue that may have brought this on. first job was in 1992, at an IT provider  (Communications wasn't sold by resellers back then) so, lets see... that means I have been selling to government and corporate in the Canberra market, to technical staff and CEOs for the past 19 years. < ...

Google got in trouble here for accessing wifi networks and potentially downloading commercial data, email and other data. It went to the AFP, who, surprisingly, took it seriously. Here is the bit I don't get. If you haven't bothered to secure your wifi network and you are running a business, you get what you deserve - a wake-up call. Basically, as the Google streetview car drives down a street, uploading images on a wifi hotspot, it interrogates hosts and, if they are open, connects. Not rocket science. If the connection isn't a defined hotspot, and Google connects, who is at fault? the Google wifi system for daring to connect, or the idiot who hasn't set up any form of protection on the access point? Even Bigpond has defined WPA Passkeys for home wireless networking.

Sysadmins know to protect the network. why would wifi be any different? it is just a network without cables. What really got to me was that Google notified the sites it realised had been connected to in error. Why didn't these operato ...

Social media is great. we can contact people globally, we can form relationships with strangers on face value, we can gain business and expand our reach.

There is a side to social media that we seem to miss. Social media can be damaging. through casual comments, we can put our companies at risk, or ourselves. We share so much info online, who can tell what we are sharing that is dangerous?

If you look at the various mediums in Social media, the standout for damage is facebook. de-friend someone in a cleanup of contacts may hurt their feelings, de-friend them on purpose surely will.

Comment on what has happened recently at work - lazy colleagues, inept bosses, etc, and someone out there, somewhere will probably know them. Not a good way to get a meeting with HR. Facebook or Fb also has other surprise ways to offend. Groups are set up for everything. Join a group that is offensive to someone else you know and get a fast track to losing that friend or colleague's good opinion of you, o ...

So I have been standing up continually for two days. I have seen many old friends and potential new friends, heckled other booth people, generally had a good time of it. But now, in the aftermath, comes the hard part. We have to write the reports of who visited, who was interested in our products, who went into the lucky-prize draw for the Lenovo netbook. (We have removed the booth people's cards; after all this is a prize for the end users, not booth people.) We have to look at all the work done and the actual return on our investment to see if we have a chance to plead to go again next year. The next couple of weeks are the time when we call the contacts and see if there is any additional business that we can gain from the exercise.

Events are hard; they are time consuming, they impact you physically and take you out of the loop for a couple of days. (Especially at the Hyatt Canberra; if you are with Telstra, full coverage. Everyone else, find a vantage point outside that allows you to get a coup ...

The second day way pretty much the same as the first. We had worked out a plan of attack: I would go and engage with people I knew and bring them back to the stand to explain who insitec was and what we do. I had got to the event very early, but this time I had stopped off at the local coffee shop and was full of cheaper, nicer coffee. The start time had allowed me to write the first day's events and be ready for the new faces at the event. It seemed that the delegates were running tag teams. The people who came yesterday weren't all there, and there were people who were new and interested in the company and me.

I had sat in on Don Easter's presentation on the first day and was able to meet the IT Supplier Advocate on the second day. He had mentioned my article on CRN and I was filled with trepidation as to how that went down. I was worried that I had overstepped the boundaries as to my perception of his role, but I needn't have worried. He is a very interesting man and was very interested to see t ...

So here is the journal of a booth boy - my experiences on a booth at an event, and how I discovered how much I missed this....

I got up really early yesterday, day 1. Couldn't sleep. I drove across town and was at the booth earlier than the others. It gave me a chance to see who was also on booths and get an idea of the other things I needed to be aware of. Point 1. Our booth, for whatever reason, is located next to the kitchen door. isn't that supposed to be the worst place to be put? So it goes. I seem to be able to spend time talking to people, not actually on the booth itself, which is a good thing, as the company info is still a bit sketchy for me, seeing as it has only been a month since I joined.

Instead, I am bumping into people that I knew in my earlier sales career and am having a lot of fun doing it. There are many familiar faces, both at other booths and at the event proper. I have managed to touch base with most of them and have some great discussions around managed services, ...