I recently decided to upgrade the unmanaged 24 port gig switch I have been using to a managed switch - make that 2 managed switches. I saw a deal on ebay for a couple of Dell 2724 switches that can be placed in managed mode. The price was quite good and I wanted to be able to create a couple of VLANs, but I didn’t want the howl of the fans from the Cisco switch I have.

It was a smallish crowd (four) who met for the July meeting on what may have been the hottest day of this summer. The initial discussion list was waived in favour of talking about tablets and smart phones. The tablet we were discussing was an acer refurb tablet running Android and attempting to:

1. Connect to a public WiFi access point
2. Tether it to a recently purchased Android phone. Via WiFi hotspot and USB.

Connecting to the wireless network seemed to work, but free wireless was not found. Rather than continue on, the real objective was to use the 3G service on the phone for places where WiFi is unavailable.  Initial attempts appeared to succeed, but actual connectivity was not present. I offered my phone (iPhone) as a hotspot and everything worked flawlessly. I used both the local WiFi and 3G as services and it worked on both. Bruce had his Android phone and we tried with that and it worked properly as a hotspot and USB tethered. It seems the phone has a firmware bug.

Title: July Meeting
Location: The Second Cup, Bells Corners
Link out: Click here
Description: Given the venue, nothing terribly formal.

• PXE -> gPXE -> iPXE
• Generators and UPS units
• Cobbler

Start Time: 19:00
Date: 2011-07-21
End Time: 21:30

I could get used to this, given how simple it has been. Still working properly after another upgrade. The past few systems (Geeklog, Drupal) have all had serious issues and this one (Wordpress), not a peep.

As a matter of fact, in the time between initiating the post and getting back to it, there was yet another update. It also installed without issue.

Friday was Canada Day, Monday is Independence Day. That makes it a very long weekend when you take stat holidays in Canada and report into a group in the US ($DAYJOB). As a result, I get to spend the Monday collecting any items that cropped up on the Friday and taking care of them before my compatriots south of the border have a look at them. This doesn’t really happen all that often, but it’s nice when it does.