Switch Systems Blog

Just been playing about with openVPN, and have got a multi-site network successfully working. What amazes me is the speed, we did some windows domain joining and client app transfers and they went through with no hitch, and shared folder browsing is faster than via terminal services! We love you openVPN!

At the Popular Science Blog, this entry shows a portable projector (think size of a mobile phone) in action. I want one!

According to this article on The Register, don't ask Excel 2007 to calcualte what 77.1 x 850 is! There is a bug in the new calculation code which presents itself when multiplying two numbers whose product equals 65,535 - or the limit of a 16bit unsigned integer. A fix is in the works, apparently... another reason we're not advising clients to upgrade to office2007 at this time!

This Article by the BCS reports on a survey by the Economist Intelligence Unit that says 83% of CEOs now believe that IT's predominant purpose will be to enable revenue growth and actively drive business performance (within three years).

I've got to say, these 3Ware Escalade raid cards are brilliant - the drivers and web-based UI are well programmed plus the performance is great - I really like it when things "Just Work"!

I've had enough of this card already... I bought it to replace our cheaper silicon image cards, only to find out that they are also re-branded silicon image cards! We have several Fujitsu Primergy servers, and one card installed fine into one of the servers, but it doesn't seem to want to work in this other identical server. If drives are attached to the card, it hangs windows2k3 startup (and safe mode doesn't work either). Disconnect the drives, and the card is fine... This is the third make of SATA RAID card that I've tried. We had some good looking Promise cards but they had bios conflicts with the Primergy's onboard SCSI Anyway, i've wasted enough time on this - we've now got some 3ware Escalade cards on order, lets hope they fare a little better.

The Exeter Uni Mens Hockey Club (whom we sponsor) are playing their opening home matches this weekend for the Slazenger England Hockey League (South Division). Matches are at the University Sports Park on Saturday at 13:30 when the team takes on Robinson's from Bristol, followed by Holcombe (Kent) at 12:30 on Sunday. Good Luck everyone!

It's my birthday (yippee!), I think the best gift so far has been a £300 mechanics bill for my car At least i'm mobile again and can stop borrowing my flatmate's car... In other news, I had to remove the front USB, front audio, card reader port and power button from my PC case in order to fit in a new graphics card (one that'll play ET:QW at a respectable framerate!). Now the only way to turn on my PC is to wake-on-lan!

This article by the BCS says a leading IT security representative group has urged small to medium-sized enterprises (SMEs) to take security issues seriously when adopting wireless technology.

I'm really looking forward to this Wii game, it looks like it's taking shape very nicely!

The new Enemy Territory: Quake Wars demo will be released to the general public at 6pm BST. I can't wait! There's a yahoo video preview here.

The british government has responded to an online petition about the BBC's iPlayer on-demand TV service being windows only. As far as I can tell, there hasn't been any change bought about by the petition - the BBC had already stated that they were working on supporting other operating systems and would review this process every 6 months, which is essentially what the PM's response says.

A Recent Survey of Businesses performed by the Devon Rural Renaissance has some interesting facts on IT usage in the region, which echoes much of what we are telling our clients, and that's rural firms are failing to use new technology.

• 31% of businesses surveyed do not use broadband... That's almost a third!
• of these, almost half reported that they simply weren't able to do so due to lack of skill or technical resources.
• The relationship between age of an owner and plans to introduce internet trading have a clear declining linear correlation (i.e. the young are more likely to use the internet for trading)
• 80% of businesses reported that they would need more skills in computer/ICT usage within the next 3 years.

Interesting reading - check out the full article above or call us for more information.