Monthly Archive for February, 2006

Things I Have Learned This Week

Published
by
Howard
on February 17th 2006
in Hardware, Infrastructure, Internet, Microsoft, Networking, Software, Virtualisation and Work
. 0 Comments

Thing the first:
Microsoft Virtual Server 2005 does not support teamed NICs on the host.

This bit us on the arse earlier this week when we teamed the NICs on the hosts of our virtual environment. As a result, although we could RDP to the host desktop, all our guest machines dropped off the network. A colleague is sure that with a bit of tweaking we could get Virtual Server to play nice with the (HP provided) teaming drivers, but we didn’t really have time to mess about with NIC configuration when there was an environment to build and documentation to write!

Thing the second:
m0n0wall is even better than when I last used it (several years ago). Its packet-shaping feature set is very useful if you want to simulate, for arguments sake, a low bandwidth lossy link between two networks. More on this and how to set it up in a virtual environment later.

Thing the third:
Turning off DHCP Client and Computer Browser on a Windows 2003 Server in an AD domain will break more than you might think. Specifically: the ability to register itself in DNS.

net start dhcp
net start browser

Thing the, aw hell, enough counting… Vodafone’s MobileConnect card will hang onto a 3G connection far longer and with far greater success if you configure it so that it’s *not allowed* to fall back to GPRS.

And finally, the commute from Winchester to Bristol is actually pretty reasonable - as long as you have a comfortable car!

MobileConnect

Published
by
Howard
on February 15th 2006
in General
. 1 Comment

3g_card_cutout3_lr03

That last post (the image and the text above the fold) was posted from within the depths of a MoD establishment via my MobileConnect data card. It’s a very impressive little device which gives me sub-broadband speeds in any area that has a decent 3G signal, and dial-up speeds anywhere else.

In 3G mode I’ve been getting between around 300kbps - with decent latency too - I’ve been able to remote control my home servers quite reliably.

When the signal becomes too weak for 3G it seamlessly fails over to GPRS which is a far more painfull experience! It will revert to 3G as soon as it becomes available again - all without disconnecting the Internet.

Beats sharing a single 128kbps ISDN connection anyway!

Budget SAN

Published
by
Howard
on February 15th 2006
in General
. 3 Comments

Budget SAN

This is the Netgear SC101, a budget (60 quid) SAN device. It takes two hard drives which it presents as storage to any client on the network running the Netgear software. Out of the box you can allocate storage to multiple drive letters, or even set up a pair of mirrored disks to protect your data.

What you can’t do, however, is create a spanned drive set - using all the space on both disks as one big volume.

Well, not without a bit of hacking anyway…

Continue reading ‘Budget SAN’

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