Monthly Archives: May 2009

new beginnings at work

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During the CCNP course which I took back in February, myself and a colleague got excited about all the things we were learning and how we should be applying these concepts back at work.  Things like 802.1x authentication and proper wireless security, voice over IP, even things as basic as VLANs – we didn’t (and still currently don’t) do any of it.

We started planning what we could do with our office network if let loose on it, and even began to draw up some plans.  Then a thought struck – this could be a service we offer to schools.  Schools in Kent (typically, not in all cases) have some fairly shocking networks.  There is a lot of cheap kit flying about, networks built from switches from a dozen different vendors, basic configuration out of whack, really quite bad stuff.

So, a service for schools….  We knew that we would need to put a fairly convincing case together to swing the idea by the management team, so with the office network in mind, we started building a service specification document in the mould of something that we could use when presenting to schools.  Two birds with one stone (is that a phrase used outside the UK?) – we would like the opportunity to overhaul our creaking office LAN, and this would give us the opportunity to present a case for renovation of our own environment, and offer a proof of concept for a service to schools.

I should point out that neither I or my colleague are currently involved in roles within our organisation where this sort of service would be part of our work.  We support the broadband service for schools, and this, although linked, is in a somewhat different direction.  There is an issue as to whether we are “available” to support such a service, but hopefully this case fairly simply be overcome.

I’m pleased to report that following a meeting with most of the management team our idea was accepted as a good one with some managers quite excited by the idea of bringing it to life.  What’s more, they were unified in their agreement that our LAN needs investment and agreement was made for us to lead its renovation.  A very successful meeting!

The head of unit suggested that we commission a couple of pilot school installations so that we may get an idea of whether the service will work, so a couple of lucky schools will get bought and paid for brand new networks in exchange for kind words and praise when we inevitably give them a lovely shiny new network (hopefully!).

Hopefully the start of something new and exciting, and something that my employers can be proud of for years to come.  Watch this space….

home nas + cloud = joy

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I just put Windows 7 on my laptop at home, and it was a breeze.  Not only is the installation for Windows 7 almost a pleasure to work through, but the whole process was made all the more simple for the fact that I have recently purchased a NAS device for my home.

A NAS (Network Attached Storage) is in essence a hard disk with a network connection which means that all your data is stored on the network, just like it is (or I hope it is) in your office LAN environment.  In the office, such a device is usually a server, or in many cases today one of these NAS devices.

The difference between a home NAS and an enterprise level NAS is all in the specification.  A company server or NAS will have multiple disks in RAID systems protecting against an individual disk failure, and access speeds will be high, creating a highly available system.  Most home NAS devices are single disk systems, meaning if that disk fails, you’ve lost everything.  I should point out now that this is no different almost all PCs – people generally buy a huge disk for their PC and store everything they have on the PC.  Well the same applies, if you lose your hard disk in the PC, you’ve lost your stuff.  As it happens, if something is going to fail in your PC, there it more chance that it will be the hard disk than anything else.  Note to all – always have a backup!

I wasn’t going to put all my stuff in the hands of some single disk punk NAS drive and risk having it all go bye-bye – do you know how long it takes to rip 150 CDs into iTunes?  Nope, if I was going to have a NAS it needed to be at least two disks in what is known as a RAID 1 system – a mirror.  In a RAID 1 you have two disks, and they mirror one another – whatever is written to one is written to the other, and when you read data you can pull pieces of it from either disk which can speed up data retrieval times.  The only downside is that you need two disks, and you only have the capacity of one of them.  Another note here, there is another system called RAID 0 which is not really RAID at all (the ‘R’ in RAID stands for redundant).  Here data is written across both drives which means that the total capacity both disks combined is available, but if you lose one disk you’ve lost the data on both of them.  RAID 0 is sometimes known as striping too.

Back to my system….  I went for an Icy Box IB-NAS4220-B from RAIDSonic.  This is an empty drive enclosure which takes two disks.  To fill it up I went for two Seagate Barracuda ST31000340NS 1TB hard disks – lots of capacity.  Once everything arrived I took it all home and set about putting it together.

The drive enclosure is secured with a few screws just to keep the lid on, so I popped those off.  Inside there is a basic circuit board and the connectors for the two SATA disks to plug in.  What is also inside is a temperature sensor, which once you have installed your first disk (or only disk – you don’t have to have two, but why wouldn’t you, right?) you tape to the top of the disk.  Then, once the second disk goes in you have a temperature sensor sitting in between the two drives.  This tells the system whether or not to power the fan.  To be honest, I think in my device the fan is pretty much on all the time judging by the light humming coming from behind the sofa, unless the cat has climbed the evolutionary ladder and taken up humming.  The hard disks push into place in between four rubber fixings which form part of the screw attachment fixing – you screw through these rubber rings and into the mounting holes in the drive itself.  This ensures that the drive isn’t subjected to too much shock if the enclosure is bumped about.  All clever stuff.

Once I had the disks in I fired the little blighter up and connected via the web interface to the management console.  The device initially has an IP address which is fixed (I think, this is from memory from a few months ago, please correct me if I’m wrong).  You hook up a laptop straight into the ethernet port on the device and away you go.  Setup is a doddle, there are loads of options on the thing but the essentials are getting the storage right,  I told it to create a RAID 1 system and format as FAT (for my Windows systems) and let it get on with it.  If you poke about in the interface you can have it manage your DHCP, be an iTunes server, a Twonky Media server, a printer server (it has a USB port for attaching said printer), an FTP server.  To deal with file and FTP access you can setup users and groups to grant access to users, and even grant quotas.

Although the speed of access is nowhere near 100Mb, it’s still very usable for the home and dare I say it small office environment.  In my house everything is wireless, so I’m restricted by the bandwidth available via the wireless connection anyway.  Overall I am very pleased with my NAS and now much more comforted that I have loads of space, and some redundancy built in too.  And you know what, a few weeks after I got this up and running, one of the drives failed.  If that had been a drive in my PC I would be screwed, but I just shut the NAS down, took out the dead drive, packaged it off to Seagate (the Seagate drives has a 5 year warranty) and they sent me back a new one.  When it arrived I popped it back into the NAS and it went off and rebuilt itself.  Cool huh.

The title of this post suggests there was more to my joy of this solution than just the NAS itself, and that is correct.  Usually when I rebuild a PC or laptop there is always something I forget to backup, my profile, favourites or desktop items.  Not now.  As well as making sure everything I need is on the NAS, I now use many “cl0ud” based services to supplement this, which also has the benefit of making certain stuff I need available wherever I am in the world.  I use FastMail for my email which provides IMAP access through Outlook if I want it, or a web interface if I’m travelling, Google for my contacts and calendar (and secondary email account) which I can sync to my iPhone (which means if I lose my iPhone I don’t lose all my calendar and contacts too), Delicious for my bookmarks, together with the Firefox extension plugin which enables my Delicious bookmarks to take the place of the Firefox ones.  I even have my iTunes library now on the NAS.

This all meant that I didn’t hesitate in bombing my laptop and putting the new release candidate of Windows 7 on my laptop to play with – I took a quick look for stuff I might have saved to the desktop and blew it away.  And I lost nothing.  I’m going to do the same with my desktop PC soon too.

By the way – Windows 7 rocks, try it out.