Wednesday, August 29, 2007

Windows Steady State

Windows Steady State

A new product from Microsoft for controlling changes to PC's. Allow full roll back of the system. This is something I am definitely going to be looking more closely.

http://www.microsoft.com/windows/products/winfamily/sharedaccess/default.mspx

Monday, August 27, 2007

Gallery 2 Online

A couple of weeks ago, we launched a Gallery 2 image management solution for our photography / production ministries. (http://gallery.menalto.com) Needless to say they are in love with it, and so am I. We were able to use one of our older servers to host the application. We bumped up the storage with an Areca Raid 6 Storage Controller and 6 500Gb Drives. I was able to run Gallery on Windows by Downloading and installing the Web Developer Server Suite (http://www.devside.net/). This gave me the core of what was needed to install the Gallery 2 programs with out all the usual headaches of configuring the Apache / PHP / MySql core on Windows.

Once that was done, we were only 30 minutes from having a functioning Gallery 2 Site. If you want a sneak peak, check our http://gallery.calvarymelbourne.org.

All New Wireless

We just got our new wireless system from Aruba Networks. I was very excited to get this equipment. It is a really easy / awesome way to handle wireless, and what's better, they dropped thier price to meet the "other" company we were looking at. Aruba produces some serious Enterprise Wireless equipment. Setup was unbelievably easy. No configuration is made to any of the AP's. There is a base controller unit that we installed in our server rack. We configured the secure SSID, and then the public access SSID. Made one DNS entry, and viola. Anywhere we plug in an AP we get immediate secure access.

The Aruba gear locks onto your network and then GRE tunnels back to the controller where all of it's security and configuration data are TFTP'd back to the individual AP's. Basically, it took about 1 hour to configure the controller and the network, and now it only takes the time to plug the AP into the network (because all the ap's are POE).

Very Cool!