Someone asked me if I could pull some info about the Managed Hosting sector using DataSift so after crafting the CSDL for the query I recorded 24 hours of tweets & Facebook posts and managed to gather some insights. Most of these facts are not surprising; for example people are still bleating on about 'cloud' as if it were something new and the gender disparity is huge. With that said there are some interesting facts such as the overall sentiment was a meagre 0.18 out of 100 with the lowest and highest sentiment of -20 and +8 respectively. Additionally it would appear that those ...

I recently secured a bargain on Ebay getting a Cisco 5505 Advanced Security Appliance for only £200 which a fry cry from their prices back in late 2008 (~£600) so instantly set about increasing the security of my IPv6 LAN. Most Networks consist of a LAN and a WAN segment, unfortunately due to my previous IPv6 work and the inherant nature of IPv6 the LAN also has public Global Unicast addresses secured via rather crude RRAS filters. To increase the security of the LAN I need a firewall with seperate IPv4 and a IPv6 interfaces and a dual stack LAN interface. interface Vlan1 nameif ...

Looking through one of my smaller 2008 dual IPv4 & IPv6 installations I noticed that in the IPv6 section the FQDN in the name column had artefacts. Weirdness. ...

My first dabble with IPv6 was back in late 2008 when I experimented with Dual Stack DHCP in the RC of Windows Server 2008. Now that IPv6 is enabled by default in all of the OS's I use in my home (Fedora, Windows 2008 & Windows 7) I decided to go back and check my traffic graphs and the results surprised me. There was a spike in Oct '08 when I was first experimenting with IPv6 and visiting as many native IPv6 sites as I could and then it tailed off as one would expect. Interestingly the traffic started to pick up again in July of 2009 and in the 2 years of having IPv6 Internet ...

Microsoft have continued the trend of going x64 all the way and 2008 R2 is 64bit only. The first thing we need to do is install the pre-requisites via a privileged PowerShell; Import-Module ServerManager Add-WindowsFeature NET-Framework,RSAT-ADDS,ADLDS -Restart Once the machine has restarted you will need to ensure you set the machine name and a DNS suffix. Assuming the checks all work you can click install and off you go; Once all is installed the next step is to prepare a config bundle / auth package (I can't quite remember what Microsoft call ...

I recently had the opportunity to provide Internet connectivity to the first Airsoft Arms Fair so the Stall operators could show YouTube videos, Retailers could utilise Paypal and so media outlets could do Live blogging or upload high resolution pictures throughout the day. The core of this setup was a series of 3G Modems linked up with 3G to ethernet devices such as the Solwise NET-3G-3GWIFIMRW. These were backed off onto a server running Squid and BIND with DHCP containing all the relevant proxy auto config data (plus some IPTables magic for those that didn't play nice). Couple ...

With my new Exchange 2010 environment working quite happily it was time to remove the old 2007 stuff from the setup. This is extremely easy to do but I haven't posted anything in a while so I thought I'd document the process. To start just load up the Programs and Features section of Control Panel, choose Exchange and select Uninstall. The first screen is utterly pointless At the next screen you need to deselect the options you no longer require. Ideally as I'm Uninstalling and not Modifying the installation I'd have thought you'd select that which you want to ...

With Exchange 2010 available on MSDN I decided to take the risk and jump straight into a migration as the only thing as fun as a well planned migration is shooting from the hip on full auto. Exchange 2010 cannot co-exist with Exchange 2007 unless it is SP2. The Exchange 2007 SP2 install was exceptionally pain free (It was so easy I may not sleep properly tonight) and with that done it was time to start preparing my new Exchange 2010 server. A base copy of Windows Server 2008 (non R2) will have the following pre-requisites; .Net 3.5 (SP1) PowerShell 2.0 Office 2007 System ...

As I was updating to the latest Wordpress (2.8.6) I noticed that the About page still showed my old setup. I moved to a shiny 'new build' flat a year or so ago and unfortunately my old Compaq 9000 Rack Cabinet wouldn't have fitted up the stair case :/ so I bought a nice flat pack 28u Rack Cabinet and set about virtualising all my legacy stuff. VM Hosts Using the 2 S411 cases I already had I installed; 2x ASUS P5B-VM 2x Intel Core 2 Quad Q6600 8x Corsair 4GB DDR2 800MHz/PC2-6400 XMS2 2x Hiper 880W 85% Efficient PSU 4x Adaptec 1430SA 4Port PCI Express SATA II RAID Card 16x Western ...

One of the common issues that appears when integrating a hybrid vision of Hosted Exchange with someones existing infrastructure (so not really Hosted Exchange at all!) is synchronising credentials between the Exchange Server and the local machines or for the more tech savvy the 'hackiness' of having disparate forests. Cross Forest trusts are a possibility and merging one with the other (i.e having the Hosted Exchange solution bound to the existing domain) is another but there are many issues with that (mostly political). What I intend to do is utilise the 'Branch office' concept that ...