Switch Systems Blog

This has got to be the funniest thing I've seen all day...

That's right, it's a USB powered vacuum cleaner!.

In other news, Mr T and William Shatner have been signed up to promote World of Warcraft.. check out the vids on kotaku!.

Microsoft's new campaigns are rolling out over the next few days, we got a taster of this in a foil padded envelope arriving on our desk:

The jellybeans have all been eaten now

There is a fair amount of chatter (slashdot, The Reg comments) about an Animal Rights activist being told to hand over encryption keys for data that was found on her PC [The Register] [IndyMedia]. The new Regulation of Investigatory Powers Act (RIPA) that came into force in October 2007 is being used to persuade people to part with their keys, at the risk of up to 5 years in prison for non co-operation.

We just took delivery of a new toy in the office - a portable LCD digital TV tuner which has AV and VGA inputs... so what did we do with it?

We plugged it straight into our new PowerEdge 2900 which has a VGA port on the front! It's a nifty little unit, it'll interlace any resolutions it can't cope with and has full OSD menu control. It also comes with a car adapter and composite input cables.

Belkin's new "N1 Vision" pre-n wireless router looks pretty sweet.


Currently £104 from eBuyer.

We've been putting the finishing touches to our new remote data backup solution (we've decided on synching files over an openSSL link), and boy have we run into a lot of headaches!

Backing up open files... VSS + Robocopy

Robocopy is very good, though it can't deal with locked files very well. So we thought we'd try using Hobocopy, but this also has a few problems. Without any other way of doing VolumeShadowCopies, we thought we'd have to go back to using NTbackup, but there was a solution to be found... Using this as a guide (you will also need to download this SDK), we now have volume shadows exposed as a drive letter, which we can then Robocopy from!
Tip: use the GeneratedVarsTempScript.cmd so that you can call VSHADOW.EXE -ds=%SHADOW_ID_1% from your own batch file, and remove the -nw switch from the vshadow argument list so you get the MSDE writers (exchange/mssql)

Scripting openVPN:

Scripting all of this via a batch file is a little complex - we also can't use "net start openvpnservice" to start/stop openVPN because we already have openvpn running on the machine! We also can't just run the openvpn.exe file because it doesn't return control back to the batch file. We ended up renaming the openvpn.exe file to "backup_openvpn.exe", and started it with "start backup_openvpn.exe path/to/our_config_file.ovpn", and at the end of our backup script doing:
- replace [tab] and [space] with the appropriate keypresses!

Freeware Ghost Replacement

In other news, ruairi has found FreeGhost, which looks to be a promising project for us windows sysadmins.

This article on arsTechnica says that while the PS3 is just 12 percent of F@H clients, it achieved 78 percent of the new petaflop record - just goes to show how well the Cell processor is suited to the task (it's just a shame that no games have yet harnessed the real power of the PS3...)

Toms Hardware has a lengthy (19 page) review of Windows Server 2008. Looks like Vista, tastes like Windows Server!

Slashdot have put up part 2 of their "behind the scenes" look at what powers /. - part 1 covers the hardware, and now part 2 covers some of the software and configuration.

Today mozilla launched Prism "...an application that lets users split web applications out of their browser and run them directly on their desktop."

I just tried using it with our CRM and I don't think it works well with windows Vista... If you want to try it out you can download it from here. It's more than just a desktop shortcut to a website!

An enjoyable evening last Friday at the FSB/Exeter College award ceremony, our congratulations go out to Underhill Estate Agents (winners of the best employer) and Lefroy Beauty Therapy (winners of best small business).
Switch was nominated as one of the 8 contenders for the 'best small business' in Exeter - thank you to all of our clients who took the time to vote for us, see ifyou can spot myself and ruairi in the picture!

From The Register:

Fasthosts, "the UK's number 1 web host", has fired off emergency emails telling customers to change all their passwords after police were called in to investigate a major data breach.
"As a precautionary measure, Fasthosts has asked its customers to update their passwords. This includes their control panel, email, FTP, and database passwords, all of which can be changed via the customer control panel. Fasthosts has now implemented customer password encryption to further protect customer data."
We've asked Fasthosts why the passwords were not encrypted in the first place. It said: "Historically, Internet companies have rarely encrypted passwords to aid customer service."

This article on the register says "BT reseller DMSL has created a IT repair service that will compete with the likes of the Geek Squad and PC World's Tech Guys by offering support services for home users and small businesses across the UK." - the difference being that the "FixITlocal" service will be operated by local resellers who have signed up to be part of the group.

I'm not sure how they plan to regulate and check the skills/credentials of each individual reseller (a simple "i agree to the PCA Code of Practice" checkbox just doesn't cut it!) , and looking at the sign-up form and text on the website leads me to believe that you have to attempt to sell their supplied products. It will be interesting to see if this has any impact on The Tech Guys.

I've only had a chance to play this for a couple of hours, but first impressions are that this game is fantastic! The classes are quite balanced (though my favourite class the demoman now lacks detpacks and mirv grenades), medics are greatly improved, and the whole game just feels very polished (though that might just be the shiny cell shading). Well done valve!

Ars Technica reports that the Unreal Tournament 3 demo is due out sometime in the next 2 weeks, according to posts on the official forum.
Team Fortress 2 is also out tomorrow at $29.99 for those of you who haven't purchased the Orange Box. Shack News has the new 'meet the demoman' trailer up.