This Thursday, 19:00 at Fidus.

We have a proposed topic of “Cloud Computing” and it is an interesting topic. I’m not sure that everyone has thought about the long term implications of on-demand computing or how it would affect the way we work. I’m sure it will be an interesting discussion.

Other things of note would be that I will be (if not by the time we get the meeting going) setting up an Asterisk server for my home use. I keep wanting to do it and never get to it. I do have an Asterisk based PBX in the office that I maintain and it’s not fun to be locked out. This is probably the real reason I’m going to get to it now. Once it’s up, I have to decide what I am going to do about my real PBX. Should be lots of fun. Setting up clusters will also be an interesting exercise. Once it’s complete, I’ll do a talk on the setup and how well it worked, as well as firewalls, protocols and strange things one has to do with enterprise gear.

I got back home from Toronto somewhere around 02:30.

Warning: Never do this alone!

Well, good thing I didn’t… Some of that gear can be heavy, so a second set of hands is useful. Loading it into a personal vechicle is also easier with two people - good thing I don’t have a tiny compact car. I can just see this happening in a SMART car or an Innocenti (yes, shudder).

Just learned about this line of commercial systems management appliances (company is named KACE) in a LOPSA forum:

http://www.kace.com/products/systems-management-appliance/computer-management-software-alternative/index.php

Has anyone heard about or worked with/tested these products?

For those who haven’t heard about Journalspace.com going the way of the dodo:

hothardware.com/News/Sabotage-and-Lack-of-Data-Backup-Sink-Company/

Lessons from this incident abound:

• Choosing a sysadmin (what kind of sysadmin thinks that RAID = backup???)
• Managing IT
• Dealing with fired employees that have the keys to the kingdom

Today I was mostly left alone. Gotta love vacation. No progress on the rework of my computers, but I guess that’s what happens when you get caught up in the last throes of a dying year.

Now I have to figure out how to take a day off the first week back :)

On the plus side, I should be left alone for the rest of this day and tomorrow at least. If I’m really lucky, I can rework my firewall tomorrow and maybe get a few machines racked and rebuilt. I’m going to have to take pictures of the racks. I suppose I should get a bigger UPS power supply installed as well. I need to find (or build) a rack-mount DSL modem as well. That could be an interesting project.