Cisco Smartnet Value

So I find myself at a cross-roads, I work on a relatively small network that runs on mostly Cisco Equipment. The switches and Wireless are Cisco, the router isn't (what other people make routers) and it is time for renewal. Now I bought the Smartnet subscription as part of installing the new wireless system. I am happy with the system and to day have had not a single outage even after a pipe burst and filled one of the ap's with water. The thing is, I don't see the value of the Smartnet contract.

I don't understand paying a percentage of the purchase cost yearly for the duration of ownership. Any one see the value that I am missing?

My Vista Experience

I now have a few machines running Microsoft Vista, and after sufficient testing in the "real world" have come to many conclusions. If you want to have a machine that works, and faster on the hardware with no apologies get Vista Business. Flat out faster, and more stable on my old P4 laptop than XP with the native drivers from Toshiba. The only reason I uninstalled and put XP back on the laptop is the screen was never bright enough in Vista. The laptop has a light sensor that determines the correct brightness for the screen, but because Toshiba never released drivers for Vista the screen was constantly at the bottom of the possible lumens. The brightness could not be turned up because the keyboard function keys where not supported without drivers, so I was stuck with a laptop that didn't support an external monitor, that was too dim for low light browsing, but was about 1.5x's faster than it was running XP.


Other than the speed difference I pretty much never noticed what OS I was in (I run a browser 90% so who cares).

Swoopo is most probably a scam

So if you read Techcrunch via feed reader you will be noticing several ads for Swoopo. The auctions where for all sorts of devices at ridiculously low prices... Too low.

For instance check to following auction:



Not terribly interesting, but does make you wonder how they can give away $1000. I decided to watch the auction for a bit, as well I wanted to see the winner, and the mechanics; plus the auction was almost over anyway. Well the timer kept looping and I decided to read the fine print, circled in red. The final timer(?) starts when the auction gets to 20 dollars. I don't know what the auction started at, but if every bid raises the price $.01 and costs $.75 each the auction will raise about $150k to go from $.01 to $20. What makes it dastardly is they create the urgency with the looping timer that flashes auction ends soon, and no one has any chance of winning until the minimum threshold is met. Also they make it look a comparative deal as the auction previously went for $141.86.

While I do believe there is a sucker born every second, I just cannot believe that there are as many suckers as I watched bid on this auction in the 10 minutes I watched it. I would offer that Matthias Voigt likely gaming the system to induce micro-fraud. I assume that as you can pay with Paypal, the frictionless payment system the world over this gets more than a few hits a day.

Hope Techcrunch takes steps to stop promoting what looks like a full on scam.

Makezine Blog is excellent

I cannot remember where I first heard about Make the O'reilly backed magazine for tinkerers, but I was excited about subscribing. The magazine started off pretty amazing, but after a few issues I noticed way too many Knitting and sewing projects. It was to my great delight that they made a zine that was dedicated to those type of "crafty" projects that didn't appeal to me as making anything. Still the zine suffers from the challenges of all print media, no linking, video or other interactive content. I subscribe to the zine still, but I think the blog is much better; especially lately. They seem to have hit their stride and attracted several great minds to there group and are now showing amazing incremental projects that can help get bigger projects going. The articles about variable power supply design for a breadboard, and articles on how to protect power supplies are they type of bootstrapping articles that can help people with an interest in electronics, but aren't sure where to start get started.

They have articles about how to pick a microcontroller and even how to get started in circuit design, in all none of this has been covered in the zine, and I don't know that it would be worth printing or nearly as good printed. The richness of the content on the blog is available to anyone and that is the way I think it should be, but the quality of the blog is starting to make the zine feel a little like fluff.

Microsoft Windows Server Update Services (WSUS)

After the recent "patch alarm" sounded by Microsoft I decided that I have had enough of so many machines on all different patch levels. As I have worked in IT for several years I was aware of WSUS and getting one setup in my current environment had long been a goal of mine that just kept getting put off. Having recently setup Sharepoint Services on an underutilized virtual server, I thought it would be a good fit for running WSUS as well. If you pay attention the first time you will notice that because Sharepoint disables the Default website, that WSUS services will be running on port 8530, and it even tells you that in the setup dialogue.

After the WSUS is setup, then you need to create a group policy that points users at your WSUS. I only created one and then manually moved machines to the correct groups after the fact, but you can get as fine grained and fancy as you like here specifying the group for users to join at the OU level. If your like me and couldn't use the default website be sure you include the port in your group policy, and know that when testing that if you gpupdate /force this change will require you to reboot, but won't require a reboot as it propagates naturally.

In any event, if you have been waiting to pull the trigger on WSUS for fear that the setup is complicated, or that you will see little benefit from the exercise, fear not. I achieved 87% compliance on the workstations in my environment with a single group policy and the number is probably higher, as I clean up machines that are no longer on the network in my Computers OU.

Facebook login trouble?

Any one else unable to login to Facebook today?




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Update 2pm pst
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Back up.

Qnap TS-639 Pro Turbo NAS is very nice

The blog eHome Upgrade posted about a toy that I would really like. The Qnap TS-639 Pro Turbo NAS is a pretty impressive all in one device for just about any need that you could want. The youtube video really lays them out nicely, but iSCSI target mode and web server with MySQL and python make it one revved up development platform/total storage solution for home and even small businesses.

The one "where to buy" that actually had this item listed had the empty chassis for $1,099 and the 6 X 1tb unit for $1,806-$2,114 (the cheaper one may be a typo as the description lists it as 3x1tb in one spot, but the title says 6x1tb so maybe call ahead).