Must Watch TV
As I mentioned previously, I have an Apple TV. I’ve setup a US iTunes account which I use with US Vouchers bought off Ebay. You get an amazing exchange rate… I just bought $200 for £47… That makes 1 song cost about 23p which is a lot cheaper than 80p if you use a normal UK account.
I dont really buy music anyway, I’ve been buying a lot of American TV shows and the latest films. Films are $14.99 for the latest ones which sounds a lot but at 23p to every dollar you get to keep a film for cheaper than you could rent one in the UK.
Films i’ve watched in the last week include, “You don’t mess with the Zohan,” this is a really funny Adam Sandler film basically taking the piss out of the Palastinians and Israelites, in a light hearted, American way. Another film I watched was “Journey to the Centre of the Earth,” this was a mediocre action film which ticks all the boxes for a good Kid’s film. From Rollercoaster ride type out of control mining karts, chases from Dinosaurs and Punching Venus Fly Traps. It was a reasonably enjoyable, light hearted watch.
I watched Idiocracy which is a funny film about how life is in 2505 when the thick, benefit fraudulent, baby makers populate the world. The Clever, career minded people don’t have many babies and the world gradually unevolved. There are a couple of Average people from 2005 who were frozen and their Pods got jammed and didn’t open for 500 years… They are cleverest people on earth and become present and first lady. Good film.
I’ve watched lots of other films which I can’t remember now… I’ve been watching quite a few TV shows now aswell, like Series 1 of the The Office USA. I have watched a few of the episodes from the latest series of Southpark, it doesn’t seem as a funny as it used to be, it’s still as crude and brilliant though. My favorite purchase has to be Knight Rider 2008. It’s a new Michael Knight, it’s a new car (New Shelby Mustang GT 500) there is pretty women, good special effects, lots of chases, lots of explosions and it’s all in HD. It costs me $1.99 per episode which is 47p for 40 minutes of Hi-Def entertainment… It’s so Good I watched all of the episodes today.
To be fair, everybody needs Apple TV… The price of content needs to come down for it to be viable for the UK Market, unfortunatly people don’t realise, just because you live in the UK, it doesn’t mean you have to be stuck with the UK TV shows high prices. US content rules!!
Big Move to Cloud Computing
We’ve embarked on a massive IT infrastructure change. Up until about 2 weeks ago we had 4 servers in our building. A Primary Domain Controller/ Exchange Server/ File Server, A Citrix Server, A Phone Server and a Secondary DNS Server (for our hosting). We also had 2 servers at our Data Center, One for Hosting and One for Kaseya.
We’ve now gone from 6 Servers in Total to 3 Physical Servers, total power consumption is about 25% of what it was due to the size of the servers phased out.
Using VMWare and some Jiggery-Pokery I’ve consolidated our Office Servers into Two Virtual Servers on their Own 1U server at the Data Center. All the Physical Servers in the office off and moved everyone to using Published Applications on Citrix Presentation Server 4.0. That makes a massive saving in Electricity for a company alone.
We’ve phased out the old Pentium III looking Phone Server and replaced it with a New Dual Core PC with 2GB ram, this only runs VIOspeed Pronto Server but I think will eventually be virtualized now we’ve fully switched to VOIP and scrapped the ISDN lines.
The next job is to look at putting the Memory out of the Hosting server in the Data Center into the new 1U 64-bit Server to increase it from 6GB ram to 8GB Ram, then virtualizing the Hosting Server and putting it onto this with our two office servers.
Once that’s done we can move Kaseya back to the server which it was originally on with Hosting stuff and save about 4U of space from the big over sized Dell Server in our Rack.
It’s all very exciting, Cloud computing is the future and we are embracing it early. We’ve moved all our mail to Google Apps which may end up changing as it’s really annoying how it groups emails into conversations for Web Mail. I don’t know how much we use Webmail but when you do go to use it, it’s VERY annoying.
Full Usage of Citrix, Virtual Servers and full VOIP… I thought switching to workgroups and having local profiles was a big backward step from using Exchange 2007 on a 2003 R2 domain with lots of Raid and stuff… But when you look at it like that, It’s the lightweight Key to the Future. We can now work from absolutely anywhere exactly the same as if we were in the office.
I’ve done most of this using VMWare and Tools Available from VMWare, we are looking to fully plan and roll out/ migrate to solutions like ours to other Companys. SEE CUSTARD COMPUTERS
Fireworks at the Lodges
I took Sarah to the Lodges this Weekend Courtesy of Chris. We got to our lodge at Tattershall Lakes around 8pm. Sarah cooked me a nice fried breakfast on Saturday morning, a Salad at Lunch, a Sausage and Toast breakfast on Sunday and a Roast Chicken dinner for Sunday Lunch.
We had a great weekend, we waited behind the Clubhouse looking out over the lake at around 7pm for about 30 minutes. We saw no sign of the promised fireworks so took a walk back to our lodge in the hope we could see them from there. They were meant to be fired across the lake but they sort of went up into the sky at the other side of the lake.
I took plenty of some photos and captured the fireworks on Video. It was a great weekend and we enjoyed it a lot, I always enjoy time at the Lodges at Tattershall Lakes Country Park.
Google Apps and Exchange 2007
This week has been quite a busy one for me IT wise. We planned last week that by the end of this week we would of migrated all our Exchange 2007 users over to Google Mail on our Google Apps account. We also planned to fully decommision our Exchange 2007/ SQL/ PDC Server so it can be used elsewhere as it’s quite a beasty server with 7GB ram and 2x Dual Core Xeons.
So we’ve migrated most of the users, one of our users discovered that dragging and dropping your entire inbox onto your Gmail Imap account can just delete EVERYTHING without any warning. It was still there in the EDB file but I can’t access it without buying a $950 bit of software. That’s fine because we have a good backup on Tape. It’s not quite that easy to recover though, not like the olden days of Exchange 2003 which was a doddle. It keeps saying successful but the new data is nowhere to be seen. I’m going to get back onto that once I’ve finished tidying up the current mess which I’m about to explain.
The best way to migrate the data is to use the tool built in to Google Apps which connects to your Exchange Server using IMAP and pulls the data off that way.
I setup an old HP ML110 Server with 2GB Ram *COUGH PC* and made it a DC then transfered the FSMO roles. That’s fine… I connected our drobo to it and remade all the shares, I then used Kaseya to repoint everybody’s mapped drives to this instantly. I also moved our SQL database and made a Kaseya script to change a registry entry which people use for our Custard Jennifer system. Once all that was done all seemed fine still.
We have an accounts package called Pegasus Capital Gold which I tried to move using hopes and dreams forgetting about an old guide I had somewhere in a mail archive, once I found that it was a doddle. So all looks good, I’m about to start going round peoples PCs to put out little fires and then I find that transfering data from this new server isn’t very successful, you get memory errors. I swapped the memory and hard drive and still the same issue.
I’ve ended up building a new server (it’s a dual core PC!) and I’ve had to do it all again, giving it the same PC name so all my converted Pegasus data works ok. To do this I had to transfer the FSMO roles back to the original PDC, demote the knackered DC, rename it, name the new server, promote it and transfer the FSMO roles to this.
Now the drobo is plugged in, the shares are setup and everything is working *fingers crossed*… Now to put out the fires!!
Oh yes and my Type-R is now back! Which I am happy about.
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