Tech

Giving up with SSLExplorer, I've installed openVPN and successfully got it working! I've also opened up the port on our public WiFi so that other users of openVPN can connect to their offices

Intel and VMware have announced that Intel is investing $18.5 million into VMware, owning about 2.5% of the company. That's a lot of money, showing that intel is seriously gearing up for the virtualisation market. Interesting times are ahead... Ars has some more info here.

[updated Friday 6th July] I'm going to be experimenting with SSL Explorer, a web-browser based SSL / VPN package. As I can't get our exisitng VPN client software installed on my laptop nor on Windows Vista, this looks like the best way for our staff to access files remotely over the net! As there is a VMWARE appliance available for it, i'm also taking the oppertunity to test out VMware ESX Server 3.0.1. ESX is quite different to standard VMware Server -

• It doesn't need an OS installed, it comes as an iso image which you install/boot from
• Processor, Network and Storage can all be limited, prioritised or shared equally between guest machines
• VLAN and Virtual Switches are available to partition your virtual network

Shame I can't get it to work - read on...

Symantec have a few public betas available, including:

• Norton Internet Security 2008 Beta
• Norton AntiVirus 2008 Beta
• Norton SystemWorks Beta for Windows Vista
• Norton AntiBot Beta (in-memory anti-spyware/malware protection)

I would've thought that AntiBot would be part of Internet Security...

The Intel Demoscene Competition 2007 has published this years entries, including quad-core optimised code, and other niceties. Nothing totally amazing, but still worth checking out.

For all you MySQL database developers, I came across this talk the other day on Democracy, it's a good (if slightly old now) talk on how to tune MySQL for performance gains. Most of it is common knowledge but there are a few gems, and it gave me some more insight into the inner workings of innodb! Most of what was said i've already applied to my systems at the University, but I can feel some more tweaking coming on!