Just A Word (or two) From Steve

Building a Green Server Room – Push Air Where You Need It

steve — Sun, 25 Apr 2010 05:47:14 +0000

Having optimized my air flow situation in the server room, the next step was to get that cold air into the servers. I have never been a fan or believer of using cabinet blanks to block off air-flow because I always thought that having air move through and around servers served a good purpose. Most [...]

Lenovo S10-3t Netbook

steve — Sun, 11 Apr 2010 01:22:43 +0000

We have decided to look at a few netbook computers for our employees that do a lot of travelling. While everyone currently has a notebook, the frequent flying executives and some others would prefer something smaller. Knowing that most of them use Windows, but have iPhones, I thought our first test would be with a tablet [...]

HP Procurve MSM410 – Our Wireless Winner

steve — Mon, 22 Mar 2010 16:00:00 +0000

I have been writing about our difficulty in trying to find a reliable, manageable and secure wireless networking access point for our company. After failures with Cisco and Bluesocket, I was beginning to think that there were really no enterprise-class devices around anymore. We checked out Netgear, DLink, Motorola and 3Com, but nothing stood out. Finally, [...]

Building a Green Server Room – Optimizing Air Flow

steve — Mon, 08 Mar 2010 15:00:12 +0000

I thought I had done the best I could with optimizing our small server room. We have two rows of server cabinets which hold all of our servers, file systems and management devices. I arranged the cabinets so that both rows had the servers facing toward the aisle between them. My reasoning was that it would [...]

BlueSocket – Dead on Arrival

steve — Mon, 01 Mar 2010 15:00:49 +0000

This is part two of my saga into finding decent wireless network appliances for our enterprise. In part one, I talked about our evolution with Cisco/Aironet products up to the fatal results with their 1130 model. In calling around to some vendors, resellers and enterprise administrators, I got the most unusual recommendation. They were all talking about [...]

Switching to Netgear

steve — Tue, 16 Feb 2010 00:22:33 +0000

I have been on the lookout for a replacement switch for my home network of about ten computers and game systems. I have been using an old outdated Cisco 3500XL that was starting to fade. I had to cut the power to the fans because of the noise and I wanted to act before it [...]

Cisco 1130 AP devices – From Ecstacy to Agony

steve — Thu, 11 Feb 2010 19:30:31 +0000

We have gone through a few Cisco wireless devices which originated from their acquisition of Aironet. The first AP-350 devices had a simple GUI for configuration and were extremely reliable. Unfortunately, they were only using 802.11b and had problems with some of the early 3rd party WLAN cards. The move to Cisco IOS later in [...]

Exchange 2003 SP2 on 2008 R2 domain? Not so fast

steve — Mon, 04 Jan 2010 02:15:41 +0000

There has been a lot of discussion about running Exchange 2003 SP2 on a Windows 2003 server while upgrading the domain to Windows 2008 R2 native mode. There are two real authorities that I rely upon and unfortunately there is disagreement. First is Microsoft TechNet. According to their Exchange Server Supportability Matrix, last updated on 12-09-2009, [...]

GoDaddy Changes SSL Policy Without Warning

steve — Sat, 19 Sep 2009 23:24:44 +0000

I just got a notice that my SSL certificates were going to expire and it was time to renew at GoDaddy (http://www.godaddy.com). Not a problem. Just go to their website and renew the certificate in a few clicks. Matter of fact, we just renewed a previous certificate a couple weeks ago and it was easy, [...]

Thinking CMS Portal? Thinking SharePoint? Think Liferay — and save in every way

steve — Mon, 03 Aug 2009 01:09:00 +0000

We have been working with Sharepoint since the 2001 version came out. It’s main purpose was to act as a Content Management System (CMS) for document control within our manufacturing area. It quickly expanded to be our corporate Intranet site with areas for each operational department. In that version, it was fairly difficult to get people to use [...]