Spy Journal 3.0 Filtering the web for you

I ran the annual KROSTech 30 hour LAN last weekend. While we have a fair amount of gear that was purchased specifically for the LAN we needed to take some of our home network installation as we had decided to host the the Bathurst spectacular (6 hours of racing) on a Gigabit Network for better performance.

In order to work out how to strip components from home and set up the LAN properly as well as leaving the family with network and intenet connections I used Visio to create my network diagrams. It took me 45 minutes to set this up.
Click the image thumbnails below to see the fullsize network diagrams.

Home network before reorganising. There is redundancy built into this network. What you can see from the diagram is the physical layout of the house and that has made decisions about where switches and the wireless router are located. Most switches can be instantly replaced in case of failure. The tablet is in the media room running Windows Media Centre. It is connected wirelessly and also through a 100Mb wired connection. Gives us portability and stability of connection. The other laptop roams the houe as needed - eg to play games in the dining area or to use as a workstation for extra staff on occasion.

Our main web server failed on Christmas Eve. I sent an emergency SMS to the techs and they started work right away. It took 30 hours to fix! A raid controller card failed on the server and once it was replaced the entire raid array had to be rebuilt.

This site only came backup about 5 minutes ago. 

Thanks goodness the techs were available to work on Christmas day - I am, so thankful to them for that! 

Did you know that a simple piece of paper fixes 70% of failed iPods? Stephen Ironside, a student at the University of Arkansas in Fayetteville once faced a modern problem that his iPod that had filled his life with music had stopped working. As it was out of warranty he put it away until one day he read on a blog that it could be fixed with a small folded piece of paper.
As neighbourhood repair shops have disappeared, fixit websites have developed to fill this gap. Peter Wayner has written an article on this phenomenon. Some of these websites focus around questions that are answered by anyone who has faced a similar problem, those who offer advice are rated on the quality of that advice. Other sites offer repair services and sell replacement parts.

I thought I would see what all the fuss about Apples New OS X Leopard system is. Not much really.

I watched the guided tour and I was quite impressed by the shiny monitor, minimalist keyboard and mouse and the bloke doing the presentation. None of the features were original or new (from a PC perspective) with possibly the only exception being the ability to change video backgrounds in your chat window (though only with some one else who has Leopard as well.)