We switched over our phone providers when we moved.

Here’s how it looks so far:

Utah:

Local - Qwest - $45 per month
LD/Intl - AT&T - $75 per month
DSL - Covad - $130 per month

Washington:

DSL - Covad - $130 per month
VOIP - Vonage - $30 per month

Most of our phone service was international to the UK - we made very few local or long distance calls. Now with Vonage we’re getting those as part of our plan.

The other big saving is in killing the local service. I got Covad with naked DSL (also known as a dry line) - so there’s no dial tone on the phone - just data.

The wireless network is re-configured and running.

Finally I got the wireless network, IPsec and wi-fi security configured to let authorised laptops be part of the private backbone. No more uploading photos to the NAS server only when docked!

I had to swap out the old wireless router – an old Netgear – it would randomly drop DHCP offer packets from the backbone to the bridged wireless network. Even the online docs from Netgear say it’s problematic.

I upgraded to a new 802.11n router – works perfectly and gives great throughput.

The old Netgear is now the guest, non-backbone access network. Wireless access for guests and family without letting them loose on the backbone.

It’s ITIL reading time again.

Following on from the ITIL v2 Managers Certificate I am now working on the next step for the ITIL v3 equivalent.

It’s been difficult finding the details – but what is now clear is that the route to the ITIL v3 Diploma is via the v3 Manager Bridge training.

To that end I’m off to sunny Brisbane in July (in the middle of the Queensland winter) to sit a 4.5 day Manager Bridge course and then a multiple-choice exam. The pass score for the exam is something like 80% – so I’m reading the ITIL v3 books – yes all five of them.

It’s nice to have google eat the spam instead of me.

Before the move I switched the MX to use hosted google mail – I saw an immediate drop in spam handled by spamassassin.

The flip side is that my hosted google mail shows about 2000 spam being caught for my emails every day.

Finally I got to re-rack and power up the servers after the move (that’s another post!)

Obviously being offline for a few weeks meant that there were updates to be applied.

One nice update that was available is the new version of WPG2 – the integration of WordPress and Gallery 2. The project is here http://www.wpg2.org/

WPG2 was updated to version 3.0.6 – which integrates with the new security model (password hashing) of WordPress 2.5. The update has been a few months in the works – kudos to ozgreg and the rest of the hackers on getting this out of the door.

I did the double upgrade to WordPress 2.5.1 and WPG2 3.0.6 – and so far everything is looking great on the main family blog site.

I’ll let this sit for a few days – and then update the other sites.

At last – back online. Posts from the technology side of the move coming soon.

One thing that was new to me was the number of ‘internal’ promo videos made by each Microsoft BU. There seems to be a real drive to fill headcount by recruiting and poaching enocuraging people to move across.

During my New Employee Orientation (NEO) this was one of the better videos – for Entertainment and Devices (E&D). It’s pretty good; made better by the use of a cover of Girl from Mars by Ash. (Takes me back to the early 90s!)

Not long now…

Beta 1 installed on my non-work laptop now.

I’ll keep updating this.

Tracks of the weekend so far:

The Ting Tings – That’s Not My Name (Tom Neville Remix)
Goldfrapp - Ooh La La
Happy Mondays - 24 Hour Party People (Jon Carter Remix)
Colin Meloy - lead vocalist of The Decemberists - live
Durutti Column - Sketch for Summer

Ah - Colin Meloy is playing in Seattle on our first weekend up there. What are the chances of a late pass with no babysitter?

The Durutti Column track is from their first album “The Return of the Durutti Column” - I first got a copy of this over twenty years ago on cassette. My only CD copy is on disc 1 of the FAC400 Palatine 4 CD compilation.

We joke about Utah beer - but the hand-crafted local brews are big on taste if not on alcohol.

Good to see that several of our favourites won at the 2008 World Beer Cup:

Category 11: Other Low Strength Ale or Lager (15 Entries)

Silver Medal
Polygamy Porter
Utah Brewers Cooperative
Salt Lake City, Utah

Bronze Medal
Provo Girl Pilsner
Utah Brewers Cooperative
Salt Lake City, Utah

Category 54: Ordinary Bitter (10 Entries)

Gold
Cutthroat
Uinta Brewing Co.
Salt Lake City, Utah

Category 70: German-Style Brown Ale/Düsseldorf-Style Altbier (22 Entries)

Silver
Bobsled Brown
Utah Brewers Cooperative
Salt Lake City, Utah

and one that we haven’t tried:

Category 70: German-Style Brown Ale/Düsseldorf-Style Altbier (22 Entries)

Gold
Alt and in the Way
Squatters Pub Brewery
Salt Lake City, Utah

This weekends move plan:

• park the DNS for the domains
• finish the email hosting moves (move mail, redirect MX)
• start decommissioning servers for move
• reconfigure wireless for interim access

Totally shot because covads customer systems are offline between Friday night and Sunday night. No notification at all.

I’ve now got to reschedule during Monday when everything comes back online.

I called the 24×7x365 support and spent 30 minutes trying to talk to somone who could help. Turns out it’s an outsourced service in the Phillipines; the outsourcer has zero idea of current issues and can only log tickets.

I’ve escalated this within Covad; two issues:

• where was the notification of outage
• why don’t the 24×7x265 support have the ability to answer within 30 seconds that there is planned outage (it took 30 minutes to find this out)

The notification is the important part - I chose Covad because they had (at the time) stunning support; when I’ve called from Chicago, London and Sydney before about issues the person answering was intelligent and technically able to talk about DNS, ICMP quench issues or the like.

I recently discovered Windows Live FolderShare. (Thanks Vic!)

Installed and running in minutes - it’s for syncing files and content between machines; in fact it’s the same functionality that was introduced in iFolder 3 for peer-peer sharing.

Worth a look for home use; supports Windows XP, Vista and OS X.

Moving the mail from home to the Google hosted service really has made my daily and weekly admin easier.

The main thing that’s changed is the amount of spam and the infrastructure needed to manage it:

The last few spam coming in are for the non-switched domains – they’ll be switched over at the end of this week.

I finally moved the mail service to Google Apps.

I looked long and hard; and even thought about moving the mail to a hosted environment for a few months.

Finally I tested out the google hosted email service – and it looks pretty good.

On the positives:

• fully hosted, in the cloud service
• backup, restore and availability are all looked after
• anti-virus is included
• anti-spam is fantastic
• web mail, POP and IMAP services
• 6GB ++ per user
• it’s FREE!

The only downsides are around:

• questions about privacy
• no SLA on the free service

At the end of the day this frees up two servers running multiple services; and saves me the backup and availability headaches.

• IPCop with Copfilter

• Spam Assassi
• Clam AV

It should also give family a better experience (webmail/POP to a google datacenter rather than to my server) and give me more bandwidth to play with.

This was released at the end of last week – and it’s running on one of my blogs (this one – www.evilzenscientist.com)

Still running 2.3.x on the others – mainly for the Gallery 2 integration plugin WPG2.

WPG2 is a great plugin, ozgreg and capt_kirk have done a great job of making the join between the blogging and photo gallery worlds. Apparantly some heavy lifting is needed to integrate with WP2.5.

One of the things I get to plan is moving the IT infrastructure. Pulling the plugs and moving the servers is the easy part; but what about the DSL, static IP, mail, MX records, DNS..

I think I’ve found a solution for the mail (hosting the mail server) and the DNS is already moved out and re-hosted on two different DNS servers. Might be just web-mail for a week or so – but that’s more than enough.

The blogs and photos will be offline while the servers are on the move – the rest of the infrastructure is just internal stuff; NAS, print, authentication etc.

Any hints and tips from those that have moved SLES and Windows 2003 servers before?

Slowly but surely moving towards general availability.

Download from here.

I’ve got three Apple Airport Express units to stream music around the house. They work really well – and when used with Rogue Amoeba Airfoil I can play pretty much any music now via Airtunes.

However… I’ve had a sticky problem for the last year – 50% of the time iTunes or Airfoil just can’t see all of the Airport Express boxes. I’ve spent a lot of time researching Bonjour (aka Rendezvous, zero touch, multicast DNS) and doing packet traces. No joy. Everything looks fine; the multicast DNS is working fine over 5353; the radius is within limits; firewalls are non-blocking; the data is not crossing a router. I was stumped.

Tonight I think I fixed the issue. As part of de-cluttering for the impeding house move I took my last 802.11b device off the wireless subnet and bumped the configuration to be exclusively 802.11g. Instantly everything started working.

So in summary: Airport Express, Airtunes, iTunes and Airfoil really work well on an exclusive 802.11g network.

Hope this helps someone else.

Most hotel internet connections use an outbound SMTP proxy to store and forward email.

I’m never happy with that – it means that my mail could be delayed/lost/corrupted/tampered with/read on the way.

[Note: I know – SMTP is SMTP – it’s not secure; it’s like writing a postcard – but if I can avoid that proxy – it’s one less set of eyes..]

I’ve now configured Thunderbird to connect to a high port that’s NATted back down to port 25; I’ve also forced TLS to the mail server.

In theory that should keep my outbound mail (or really internal mail that only sits on my web server) a bit safer.

(Not a rant; I’ve not had the Kool Aid or the Lobotomy yet..)

Really only of interest to US readers - those in Europe probably have no idea of the context here.

My 16 month old boy needed tympanostomy tubes (ear tubes or ear grommets) to drain off fluid from a recurring ear infection. A five minute procedure - but it does involve day surgery and a general anesthetic.

My previous health care benefits were excellent - friends in Utah kept telling us we had incredible insurance - with good coverage, choice and a reasonable deductible and co-pay. Even so we estimated that we would end up being around $750 out of pocket for the ear tubes.

Microsoft Health care is fully funded. No deduction from my pay; no co-pay; no deductible. Incredible.

Before I joined Microsoft everyone I knew who had joined raved about the benefits. Now I know it’s true.

Take a look at this: http://www.viewmyworld.com/ - especially the first video on Microsoft Perks.

So what changed between running a laptop at Novell and Microsoft?

Desktop OS

Firstly my Novell laptop was primarily a Vista machine. I’ve been using Vista as my primary desktop since November 2006. It’s helped build a better ZENworks Configuration Management.

Microsoft is obviously standardised on Vista.

Collaboration

Email is the killer. I do miss a lot of the advanced features of GroupWise – particularly the email status tracking. Outlook/Exchange won’t show me the delivery/read/deleted status. GroupWise was a killer in knowing that your ‘red’ emails had been delivered and deleted without being opened.

I don’t miss GWIM at all; I still use Pidgin (formerly GAIM) as my IM client – running plugins to all of the major networks. I do really like the Unified Communications via Office Communicator and Outlook. One thing that Microsoft IT has done well is brought together IM, email, fax, voice and voice messaging into a single place.

Applications

Obviously most of the Microsoft internal sites are IE only. (Great UI, great user experience – but lots of ActiveX). I’m also running Firefox 3 Beta 4 – that’s my personal preference.

No OpenOffice – that’s a given; one thing that did surprise me was that everyone is using the newer Office 2007 doc formats; even to outside people.

Network and access

Wow. I was really impressed by the IT organisation. IPv6 on the wire; IPsec everywhere; smartcard and certificate security for wireless and remote access; Network Access Controls running with quarantine.

Certainly it’s given me some new ideas for my home network

A new and faster server for the web site, blogs and photos.

Back to the nightly builds. WordPress 2.5 beta 1 is sneaking out soon - and it’s running here.

Nice work on the admin UI - looks clean and fresh:

Rumours were flying around last week - I even got a factually incorrect mention from Matt Asay on CNET which paid for this months hosting bill.

Well just to extinguish the rumours - I started with Microsoft - the Beast of Redmond, The Borg, the Monopolist - this week.

I’ll blog some time in the next day or so about my first week.

In true geek style I’ve been using Backpack from 37signals for a while. I use it for work, planning and just keeping on top of projects. I also share it with Grania for packing lists when travelling and most importantly - the Honey-Do list.

Here’s an example:

Sheer joy. Coupled to an RSS feed so your feed reader can tell you when there’s more jobs put on the list..

As well as the household tasks  I’m also spending the downtime updating the infrastructure. WordPress, Gallery2, plugins, anti-virus, patching, checking logs, cleaning logs - there’s a lot to be done.

Wow. My experience of being “Zero Day Stopped”.

Suddenly at 7pm Utah time everything stopped working. GroupWise, IM, Bugzilla, Innerweb - everything.

I’m now set adrift in the world of no BlackBerry, no email, no IM, no Bugzilla, no testing..

It’s refreshing - but very, very strange.

Apologies to everyone who has been Zero Day Stopped in a less planned way.

My last day at Novell was quite civilised.

I went into the office; dropped off a ton of confidential materials for shredding, dropped off my hardware (laptop, hefty ESX server), wandered around saying goodbye, did my exit interview with HR, went for lunch with my good friend Father Fowles, went back into the office to say goodbye to a few more engineers, handed in my badge, went home.

[Update: My Novell ID is now lost down the memory hole.]

BlackBerry:

Laptop:

I’ll be laptop-less from Friday

Must remember to wipe the machines. Darik’s Boot and Nuke is my favourite. http://dban.sourceforge.net/

Thanks to everyone who mailed me this weekend. Over 150 mails so far - and still coming in.

Sorry for shocking people by leaving Novell - I guess I had the “Red Pill” pretty bad.

No news on “where” yet.

As for the “Goodbye” - I’ll be having a couple of beers in SLC on Friday 14th March. That’s the Friday before BrainShare.