Andy Kemp

Well I know I have been pretty quiet recently I have been training for the Rob Roy Challenge (http://www.robroychallenge.com). Any way, last week I renewed my contract with Virgin Mobile and got a Nokia XM 5800. Up until now I have been using my iPod touch for music and syncing with exchange and imap email, my Nokia 6300 for making calls and sending txts, and my Samsung Digimax i6 pmp digital camera for taking photo’s.

Well it could be that this is all about to change. Nokia designed this Touch screen smart phone as their answer to the iPhone.

The Nokia 5800 XM comes with mail for exchange as well as its own email client. which I thought was great as my touch would sync up with my exchange server in the office and my google mail via imap.

However it turns out that you can use the mail for exchange to sync your google calendar and contacts… so I pondered for a while and decided to go for that rather than sync up with my exchange, after all that is my work email, why would I want that email when I am not in the office, if they want me to access it then they can give me a phone!

Any way first things first, I managed to sync my Nokia 6300 contacts up to Google using the connectivity profiles. I then set up my XM 5800 to sync with Google and all my contacts and calendar appointments were downloaded

As that was the basics sorted out I then decided to play about with the GPS that was built in with the phone and again I was really amazed at what it could do. I downloaded Google Maps on to my phone and then using Google Latitude I could see on the internet where I was (and so could my friends on Google).

I then proceeded to download the Nokia Sports Tracker, this utilises the GPS whilst you are doing sport, ie walking, running or cycling. As I cycle to and from work I use this twice a day. Once I have finished my work out I then upload it on to the Nokia Sports Tracker site and it maps out my route and shows my distance, speeds, altitudes and if I had a blue tooth heart rate monitor my heart beat too.

Any way I have still got some play to do, but here is a list of all the applications that I now have installed on my 5800 XM:

1. Mail for Exchange
2. Google Maps
3. Nokia Sports Tracker
4. Mobbler – last.fm player
5. Facebook app
6. Paint PAd
7. Gravity (for twitter)
8. AccuWeather

I have to say there are a few things that I don’t like about it. I guess after using my iPod touch for the last year I have really got to like the OS that is used on it.

The 5800 XM Email does not support HTML which is a real downer.

The music side of things on the phone is good, but not as user friendly as the iPod touch again. browsing albums isn’t as nice and the feel just isn’t as smooth as the touch.

However the camera is a 3.2 megapixel camera with a flash wish takes some pretty good quality pictures. the Digital camera I have just now is ok, but its not all that great and I think that my new phone will be a good substitute when I am out and about and I do not have my camera on me.

If I had to give the phone a mark out of 10 I think that it would have to be about a 7.

Any watch this space for more posts about my phone. :)

Yesterday I attended a meeting hosted at another law firm on behalf of ILTA (International Legal Technology Association) aimed at legal firms on ISO 27001, it is something that I haven really looked at until now. I am sure that many of you have heard it being thrown about, along side BS7799. ISO 27001 is the replacement for the original document, BS7799-2. It is basically an Information Security Management Standard (from what I can gather).

Up until yesterday I thought that it was a based around IT security but I was wrong, it is about Information Security.

Now, most people will link information and data security to IT systems as they are there to house all your businesses information and data, but Information will be on any document that someone might leave lying around. I don’t know about you but in my companies line of business (legal) there is a heck of a lot of paper lying around the offices, boxes full of documents, print outs of emails, letters and much more. What use is it for us in the IT dept to strive to make sure that all the electronic data is secured when staff leave all these documents lying around free for anyone to see? Other things I did not know about ISO 27001 was that things like a simple ID’ing system can contribute to the accreditation of this standard.

From what I have learned so far this will be a long process and is something that we cannot just get over night, we will need to adhere to a robust audit and certification scheme and look at ways we can continually improve on our current level Information Security, which at the moment will not be hard as there is a lot that we could improve on internally.

The only reason I can see it being a benefit for us is if we will win large tenders because of having it, ie acting for large financial institutions and global corporations.

At the end of the day some of the requirements should be adhered to regardless of ISO 27001 I think, like tidy desk, not leaving any information laying around for anyone to see. It all comes down to data protection I guess, and how you value your clients/customers data.

I haven’t even looked at powershell yet with Windows Server 2008, that is next on my list, but i wanted to make it a bit easier to do things like rename my server, join it to a domain, and remove it from a domain, without having to always type netdom join %computername% /Domain:DomainName /UserD:DomainAdmin /PasswordD:* /REBoot or netdom renamecomputer %computername% /NewName:NewName etc…

so I decided to create 3 batch files that will do this for me and prompt you for the required info needed: Username, Domain Name, Computer Name and password.

The first batch file was called rensrv.bat and funnily enough it renames the server

the second is called joindomin.bat and, yes you guessed it it does exactly what it says on the “tin” it joins the domain

and the third is to remove the account from the domain removedomain.bat

the next step is to add these into a selection list I think so that I can run just one batch file and have a choice of what to do

I decided to install just the core or windows server 2008 Ent, the install was pretty quick even considering that it was on a virtual. Once it was installed I really wasn’t too sure on what to expect, I think that I was expecting a Unix/Linux like boot screen where you see a load of devices, drivers and services starting, however I had to admit I was some what disappointed as all you got was the server 2008 splash screen.

Once booted up it then prompted me to press ctrl+alt+del, huh! what’s all this about I thought that there was meant to be no GUI with it? well I pressed it and it prompted me for a password. So like Storage Server 2008 I had to do a Google for the default core password (which is blank, but of course it is!) and then set a new password.

Once I had done that I logged on…

it then said Applying settings etc… and then get this… Preparing your Desktop and that took a wee while to “Prepare” and what was it??? a Command Prompt on a blank desktop!

So now I have a Command Line Interface (CLI) to play around with, next step is to actually learn something useful to do with it!

I installed a virtual copy of Windows Server 2008 Ent Core last week and have been playing around with it recently, my only problem is that I cannot telnet to it, I can telnet to any server from it, but there is no way to install Telnet server on to it. Now I do not know if this is just me or if you just cannot do it?

any way I am planning to install Core onto a physical box in the next few days and I am slowly building up a list commands

the first commands I needed to use were:

• netdom renamecomputer /NewName:
• shutdown /r /t 0
• netdom join computername /domain: /userd:userID /PasswordD:* /REBoot

These are the basic commands to get the computer renamed and joined to the domain.

I am hoping to install HyperV on the physical server I am installing Core onto, and then connect it to my Shared Storage, and see where we go from there.

I am having to go through a huge learning curve here as I have never really had to do much in the way of CLI, so I might now feel like a REAL server admin! :)

I installed Storage Server basic last week and didn’t get very far with it, I then noticed that there was a 64 bit version available to download from TechNet so I kick that off and installed Windows Storage Server 2008 Standard on my test machine.

I then installed the tools that came with the download and I could then start providing virtual disks to my other test servers over my GB network.

All my test machines only have single NIC’s so I found a couple of spare NIC’s kicking around and installed them in the Storage server, and the two servers that are to be clustered, however these cards were not x64 compatible so I cannot install the device drivers for them :( as I was hoping to have its own private network to serve as the iSCSI infrastructure.

I have now got two x64 Server 2008 Ent test servers connected to the Storage Server so I can test clustering again.

The Windows failover cluster has now been setup, once Windows Update has been run I will then install SQL on this server and see how the goes.