Besides that, I want to wish all of you a happy new year and may this year shower with good fortune (and no server crashes).

I have been spending the past few weeks playing with Windows Home Server, Hyper-V virtualization, and finalizing my Windows Server 2008 beta testing.  I also have deployed a CentOS based Voice-over-IP system, created a website for work, and a whole host of fun and not-so-fun activities.  I’ve also resumed being active in the newsgroups, primarily around Vista networking and DFS-Replication.

Whats on tap in the near future?  I want to review two Linksys router firmware packages – my new all-time favorite Tomato and a new public access point firmware known as Coova.  I’m implementing Tomato at home and have used Coova as our new wireless guest portal at the office.  Second, I need to update my pfSense review – actually give a 1 year overview.  Finally, I want to discuss some of the issues with Samba and Windows Vista.

Again, I would like to thank you for visiting the site.  If you have comments, questions, etc, feel free to contact me via any of the mechanisms listed at the top of the site.

While there, we learned much, shared much, and everyone mutually benefited from the experience. Thank you to Wendy and Jessep for getting everything setup for us and to the presenters for sharing information with us and for listening to us for our suggestions and constructive criticism. My highlight sessions? The NAP and the PNRP/IPV6 presentations. Jeff Sigman is an “energetic presenter” and the IPV6 presentation reinforced some of the things I am currently using/deploying with Vista and Windows Server 2008. Thank you to the Windows Home Server team for the awesome reception.

While at Winstock, I started to think about communication. I’m not very good at it. I’m trying to improve on it, though. I will set that as my “Halloween” resolution (since New Years resolutions never seem to stick past January 4). So in that vein, I do want to mention that you can communicate with me via any of the following methods:

• Twitter – jeffreycentex
• AOL IM – jeffreycentex
• Yahoo IM – jeffreycentex (notice a pattern here?)
• MSN Messenger – jeffrey at jeffreyrandow dot com (you know what to correct)

I won’t always be available to talk, but I’ll try to be accommodating when possible.

Also, please pass on any suggestions, tips, or leads. Thanks for reading!

Jeffrey

This is a sanity test posting. 

The past month has been filled with many projects that are taking place at the office and a few new home projects. Among these include:

• Setting up a branch office infrastructure, complete with a wireless WAN backbone and a restructuring of office resources. And this was done on a budget. A very slim budget – as in $1600 for the wireless WAN hardware and installation labor and about $3600 in a new server for this branch office.
• Migrating to a SAN. Our engineering office was running off a combination of NAS devices totalling about 500GB. We were quickly filling up this space with the massive amount of expansion that we have been undergoing, so a new storage “scheme” was necessary. We ended up installing a HP SAN that will start at 2 TB and will grow in the next three/four years.
• Migrating to Exchange 2007. This is a still on-going process. We have been running Exchange 2003 from just after it was originally released and have been relatively happy with it. However, in January, our Exchange box basically “died” and we have been operating a somewhat precarious condition ever since while waiting for management to approve new hardware. We also felt that we should take this time and upgrade to Exchange 2007 to help improve our internal workflow as well as better support our fleet of Windows Mobile devices that have been deployed to our Assistant Project Managers and Project Managers. This has been an experience and I have learned much that I will post about in the future.
• Due to the branch office addition, we also needed to change our interoffice phone system to tie this branch office to our PBX. We ultimately installed a non-SIP based phone system that integrates into our Intertel telephone system (not my personal choice, though…)

All of this has contributed to many sleepless nights and many shifting deadlines. The entire timeframe for the branch office was a total of three weeks from first being told to the move in date (last Monday). I’m happy to say that the move went off with a minimum of interruptions with the exception of the telephone system which has been fraught with problems.

Things I learned:

• Get the PBX provider in the loop at the very beginning of the process. This was our ultimate “critical path” and we couldn’t get everything in place in the three week timeframe. Intertel told us 4 weeks and that is how long they took.
• Buy a real SSL certificate for Exchange 2007. This would have spared about ten to fifteen new grey hairs on my head.
• Budget more time early in the process for preparation. We were unable to do much in the first week and a half as we did not have access to the premises. However, we should have set up more of the hardware/software infrastructure earlier in the process instead of towards the end as we did.
• Make sure that any hardware that you need is ordered personally. Do not take the word of others that the equipment has been ordered.
• Read the instructions for the Wireless Bridge Kit. (my fault there…)

I am now going to try to relax a bit more and try to recover from my total of 70+ hours of overtime the past two weeks.  One positive – or negative, depending on your perspective – my birthday is next week.  I’m getting old.

Well, have a pleasant weekend and don’t work too hard. 

• Vista Activation Key for 5270 – Join the Beta Program or get one of the CTP builds from MSDN. Also keep an eye on some of the community sites for when new invite codes are offered.
• Installing Exchange Server behind NAT Firewall – It works well. I have this setup on my home network testbed and at my office. The key is in securing it well and limiting the number of ports you forward.
• Windows Mobile Public Folder Sync – Windows Mobile/Activesync do not support this natively. However, Microsoft has made a rather old tool available for contacts (Outlook PCS) that basically copies over the public folder to your personal contact folder and tagging them with the “Outlook PCS” category. This isn’t an ideal solution, though. Chapura has made a program called “PocketMirror Professional for Windows Mobile” that will let you sync public folders and subfolders for contacts, calendars, and email. This works well if you meet the hardware requirements – at the present time, PocketMirror does not work with Windows Mobile 5 devices. Also note that this product does not work with Over The Air (OTA) activesync.
• Media Center Domain Hack – I have added a comment to my original post that links back to where you can find out how to enable the proper networking support. I was disappointed that MS removed password caching support from Windows Media Center 2005 that was enabled in the Pro SKU…
• Vista Beta 2 – This hasn’t happened yet… They’re close, but not there yet.

These are a few of the queries that I have seen here (and all of these were searched in the past three days) that are not explicitly answered.  And yes, there are a lot of SSL-Explorer fans out there… 

More later…