I have been telling myself that I needed to do an update posting here concerning recent changes in my life and how it relates to Networking and Blogging:

1. Technically, I have been promoted at my office to basically performing IT work on a full-time basis. In the past, my time has been split into being the Network Manager/Troubleshooter/All-Other-Things-IT-Related and my time as a Civil Engineer. In the past, this has been about a 33%/67% split in favor of engineering. As of now, it has been swapped to around 80%/20%. This changes was necessitated by the fact that our company has grown to over 75 people and I wasn’t able to do everything that everybody wanted within the time constraints given above. I’m still not sure how this is going to work, but I will start to have a bit more time to do more support work. Yay…

2. I have been resetting up my test-bed network at home to a combination of Vista and W2K3 64-bit servers for testing and configuration. And yes, that means that I have migrated my production Tablet (a Toshiba R25 tablet PC) to Vista Ultimate Edition.

Aside: Toshiba has made most of their Vista drivers available at http://pcsupport.toshiba.com. These drivers are final, even though they remain a bit buggy. The reason why I say they are final - the same drivers are listed on the production support site for the new Toshiba R400 Tablet PC which will come native with Windows Vista.

3. I’m working on a documentation site dedicated to Vista Networking issues. I particularly want to focus on some of the new uber-cool technologies like PNRP and IPV6. Well, maybe my definition of uber-cool may differ from yours. However, these two technologies are one of the best kept secrets in Vista that will make home and small-business users lives much easier. Plus, it addresses many of the complaints about the “functionability” of Remote Desktop/Remote Assistance in Windows XP.

4. I am also taking part in a new “Interoperability” Community that Microsoft has recently unveiled. I am going to address some common interoperability problems between Windows Networking and other systems (i.e., Linux, Mac OSX, BSD, etc). I am going to tackle this from a more small- to mid-sized business perspective.

5. This is a bit OT to this blog, but I have been working on a few projects related to the use of adapting 802.11g and 802.11a devices under FCC Part 97 (Amateur Radio) rules for the setup of a local Emergency Communication Network. See here for a bit more background and here for more information about the “Hinternet”.

That’s it for now. I am about to do a posting on a great OSS firewall that I am currently using at work for a very low cost dual-WAN situation.