Blogs

Recently i was asked to design a matrix for making a decision for a backup solution for a largish enterprise. guess what there were only 2 preeminient softwares to choose from, Symantec and Arcserve, and those are the 2 i have always used too, that got me thinkin, why only 2?? whats so higly involved that no other companies make backup software?? anyways, my person opnion has been symantec backup far outperforms Arcserve, its lighter faster easier to use, compared to arcserve which is just the opposite of the symantec, but apparantly the arcserve 15 is WAY....

Just recenlty and i mean very very recently, i was asked to desing a solution for VPN tunneling, of course first thought Cisco, Nortel blah.. blah.. but they all cost a lot of money. ifyou need a temp solution, go for a free software based firewall/vpn/router/SPI/proxy. and by the free one i mean IPCOP, this is by far the best and the fastest installing firewall and amazingly quick to deploy. all you need is a old computer with 2 networks card, your network config. i:e, external ips and the subnets you want to create as tunnels.

Well... this going to be a rant. i still have no idea why the big banks do not provide internet accesible software for business's. all the companies i consult to use archaic software which dials out through a modem, to process payments. i am aware there is a solution out there with every bank, but as usual its not pushed.

So another Monday, not that i hate them, but i do have very strong dislike for them, especially when i come to work with myriad of IT issues everywhere.

Its's not the newest but still interesting, Microsoft has announced the end of life for windows 2000 server series. July 30th is the date.
so those of you, who are still runnig Win2k PANIC!! not really the 2000 series is such a robust platform, it will just keep on going,
For those of you considering this upgrade, i will advise for it. below are a few links which are a must stop for everyone planning a move.
 

Most Microsoft Outlook users out there love their styles signatures complete with colorful logos. Gmail users have had to make do with just text signatures (much easier on the eyes imho) or workarounds like canned response or extensions such as WiseStamp.
The Gmails Gods have listened though, and Gmail now supports rich text signatures complete with images. Just to go to the signatures section in settings.
Google Operating system

After Google stopped supporting and developing the firefox extension for google notebook (in itself a project abandoned by Google and closed to new users), I could not not find any good alternative for the PC. Yes, there is Evernote - but its bloated and only searches complete words. For example searches for "co" will result in nothing if the word in your note is "cow".

The Australian Financial Review ran an interesting piece on how cloud computing is gaining traction in Australia. With the imminent(?) arrival of the NBN the network will finally become the computer (as Sun has been saying forever).

Currently it appears to be big companies which are getting their feet wet but in reality it is small enterprises which stand to gain the most. Large enterprises will always have in-house IT departments and infrastructure but SME's can finally break free from the little server room at the back.