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Just a quick heads up about Windows PowerShell. Looks a really neat way to automate a lot of dull, repetitive admin tasks.

Windows PowerShell version 1 has now been released and is available as a free download for Windows XP and beyond.

The server consolidation is continuing apace. Three more sites were moved into our nice shiny new hardened server. The switch-over happened over last weekend and should have fully propagated by now. The old servers are still there…we need to wait for the search engines to pick up the IP address changes. We will switch all of the redundant servers off in a week or so.

You guys shouldn’t have noticed anything. Please let us know if anything isn’t working as it should. Next weekend will see the end of the server consolidation…just one site to go 😄

Why is agent less network monitoring called agent less? An agent is required! Pretty confusing really. I don’t suppose non-proprietary agent has quite the same ring to it.

What agent less really means is proprietary agent less. Not quite the same thing 😄

So, if you are using SNMP or WMI or whatever then you are performing agent less monitoring.

The main benefit to not using proprietary agents are that lots of different tools can talk SNMP/WMI etc but the chances are that only the proprietary vendor supports their own agent. Also, chances are the proprietary agent may or may not be as rigorously tested as the standards based agents like net-snmp for instance.

I was quite amused by a story about a potential Vista voice recognition security hole.

It got me thinking that perhaps in the future I’ll be able to perform some maintenance tasks on my Mother’s PC by sending her a MP3 file of me instructing her computer what to do. Perhaps, I could give her a range of files for performing those little jobs like rebooting her wireless router which I have to do from time to time.

If you buy a computer, you can find yourself paying for a Windows licence even though you don’t want it and aren’t going to use it. If you ever find yourself in this situation and decide that you have the time and the energy to get a refund Serge Wroclawski can show you how. He tried and eventually succeeded in obtaining a refund from Dell and shares his experience at Linux.com… he also stirred up some impassioned comments!

If you are involved in IT in the education sector in the UK you may find the EduGeek website to be of interest. Looks like a good place to join your fellow professionals for a good chin wag.

Oh, and the founder is also a fan of the Test-Um Validator too!

As was mentioned on a previous post, the Test-Um Tri-Porter is now available. It has now been added to our e-commerce system so it can now be purchased online.

I hope nobody noticed but we had some infrastructure changes over the weekend 😄

We scrapped one of our servers. Yippee! Not only does this save us a lot of money each month, it also means that we don’t have to endlessly patch the old server either.

Over the weekend the mail server was redirected to our new server and a number of websites too. Everything went well save for a minor snafu with a couple of parked domains. All was fixed on Monday morning.

I am happy to announce that the Test-Um Tri-Porter (IVT600) has arrived.

First impressions: absolutely brilliant! Three testers (voice, data & video) all in a single solid unit. Oh, and you get a tone tracer too.

It isn’t in the on-line shop yet, so please bear with us. It will be available early next week as soon as we have the images and web copy sorted out.

I am happy to announce that the Test-Um Tri-Porter (IVT600) has arrived.

First impressions: absolutely brilliant! Three testers (voice, data & video) all in a single solid unit. Oh, and you get a tone tracer too.

It isn’t in the on-line shop yet, so please bear with us. It will be available early next week as soon as we have the images and web copy sorted out.