Back in the ‘real’ world now after a week away … Isle of Wight: sunny, cool, windy, relaxing, no thinking about work/stuff; winner!
Brain dump:
- The General Election: Labour getting 35% of the votes gives them a majority of 60 seats? Where is the justice in that? Apparently, in England (as opposed to the whole country), Labour actually polled fewer votes than the Conservatives, but still ended up with 100 or so more seats. That really is ridiculous. At least Blair has had the decency not to say anything to suggest that he has “a strong mandate from the people” or whatever …
- LUG-Radio stuff. All LUG-Radio regulars (including me) have their blogs syndicated to Planet #lugradio; if you’re interested, we still play Enemy Territory twice a week too; see the Clan LUG-Radio site for details; on June 25th, there is LUG-Radio Live, which will be fun: meeting all the online-only-so-far contacts, listening to a variety of interesting talks etc. I’m looking forward to that one.
- Work: We start the formal move to new premises on Thursday 2 June, but today saw the first new pieces of equipment (firewall, switches, email server etc.) delivered to the new site. As a colleague said, “The ball is rolling …“. As part of the moving process, I have been clearing out my office; this is Interesting, since there’s stuff there which dates from my predecessor’s time and before (early 1990s). And there’s a lot of very old equipment that we’re having to throw away, just because it’s not really any use keeping it – a few select pieces have been collected by the local geekery and found new homes, but most of it will end up in the really big skip outside.
- One of our servers had a problem. We have a “next day on-site support/repair” contract. A bloke called Dean arrived on-site, the next day, to provide support and to repair the server (replacement motherboard). Does Exactly What It Says On The Tin (TM) 🙂
Welcome back!
I hope that new firewall isn’t a PIX – I am so frustrated with Cisco and their claims of superiority – there is such better equipment on the market, Check Point just announced their NGX platform and Network Computing has a nice review of firewalls.
Is Star Wars III drawing any kind of crowd in your part of the world?
Cheers!
PermalinkThe firewall is a roll-your-own iptables with Debian … I’m much happier having proper control over it, and not trusting a ‘black box’ to do this.
Star Wars III is getting plenty of attention – I think it opened here officially yesterday, although I haven’t seen it yet…
Permalinkiptables are just fine – we usually move toward commercial software and appliances due to the higher cost of managing and maintaining in a large enterprise. Basic filtering can be done easily enough but the need for a variety of reports, aggregated monitoring across multiple systems, multi-level access, spiffy new features like layer 7 threat protection make roll-your-own less appealing.
PermalinkStar Wars III is a lark – but most (IT) guys here haven’t seen it yet and aren’t sure after feeling burned the last two films…
PIX was always the firewall ‘joke’ on the firewalls email list a few years ago.
It’s better now, but still has problems when trying to combine with MPLS based networks from what I here.
Don’t use it myself, and don’t really want to as my other vendor supplied solution works well. And no I’m telling who it is 😉
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