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 ...

The next version of the Airbana Airsoft Map has been released: New features include; Embeddable YouTube video's for sites and retailers Dynamic / On Demand Weather forecasts for sites The Airbana Twitter bot (http://twitter.com/Airbana ) Edit History - See whats been changed recently Per Site Date Listing - Simply find your site and click to get a list of Skirmish dates! 'Custom View' Links - zoom / pan to an area on the Airbana map and get a custom link for that view Regularly updated 'Static Image' of all Site locations Auto generated TomTom Point of Interest files ...

I mentioned a while back that I am working on / experimenting with Cloud Storage and whilst studying the bandwidth graphs / YSlow / FireBug output on one of my websites I wondered if utilising Mosso's CDN would improve response times / reduce the time Apache spent serving content that never changes. After some initial experimentation with their frontend app and the API I had moved all the content for one of my project sites to the 'Cloud' and (I hope) through to the CDN. The Setup: The configuration for the experiment is as follows: 2x LAMP Server [ Core2 1.86GHz / 4Gb RAM / RAID 1 ...

There are a few more technical projects in the works but since its been so long since an update I thought it best to add a quick post. Since adding myself to Twitter (http://twitter.com/N_A_M_O_S) I've wrote a few bots. The L4DStats Bot only updates stats regarding recently played games and shows top player and top weapons for that game. It is a recognised Twitter app and hopefully Clans / Dedicated Server owners will make use of it. The L4DStats Bot can be followed here: http://twitter.com/L4DStats The Airbana Bot will Tweet any updates made to the Airbana database including ...

Recently I've been looking at CleverSafe's Storage Cloud product and as part of the research I noticed that a small scale DSNet provides more than enough IOPs for small scale mailbox installations. I took a selection of decommissioned mid-range [Pentium Dual Core / SATA I Disks etc] Workstations to which I installed CentOS 5.0 and the CleverSafe software. 4 IDE SliceStores and an Accesser provides enough IOP throughput for around 50 mailboxes. Ramping this up to 6 SATA SliceStores and there is enough IOP throughput for 70 mailboxes. We're obviously not talking about large scale ...

I as well as many others have been enjoying Valve's new game Left4Dead and whilst I was enjoying the Match Making system and general carnage the SysAdmin in me was thinking "dedicated server....". After grabbing a few more achivements (Witch and Hunter headshots ftw) I set up a dedicated server for Left4Dead and let it run on its merry way. Whilst investigating the cvar's and other server options I discovered the logging and thought to myself; "Well Valve are keeping track of the Acheivements but who keeps track of each and every kill?" 2 hours later and the groundwork for L4DStats was ...

When I heard the news that McColo had been pulled I wondered if we'd actually see a drop in Hostile traffic and Spam. Turns out that there has been a massive drop in Spam levels coming through some of the filters I have dotted around the place. C&C or Spam Hosts? I wrote a little script to see what percentages of machines that had made incoming connections that were then classified as spam were still alive. The majority of hosts were still contactable in some way shape or form but weren't listening on known SMTP ports, some were alive and actively listening on SMTP ...