Woohoo! I finally finished my New Year’s resolution for 2009 in the nick of time; Get my MCSE. So I’m finally a Microsoft Certified Systems Engineer : Messaging Specialist. Pretty stoked, the last exam (70-297) was a walk in the park to, I though the answers were blatantly obvious; hardly needed to view the reference material for most questions…guess I know the “Microsoft way” now.

My servers, including Email, have been down for about a week due to me moving house. They are all back up and running again now, so if you sent me something and it bounced; send it on through again and I’ll receive it now.

It’s been a busy past few months, thus the lack of updating. I’ve been working on a new office for work which was a mammoth job, but we got there in the end. Staff moved in last Wednesday and it went pretty well, only a few hiccups. A big problem I am having is with our Distributed File System servers running Windows 2003…now I’ve moved the server to the new site it’s not syncing up anymore, got to trouble shoot that one next week.

We installed LG Nortel’s IPecs VOIP phone system at the new site, which we are also putting in at head office this week. Pretty awesome system, but haven’t had much time to play with it yet. I’ll definitely post my thoughts on that in a few weeks after using it: http://www.lgnortel.com/

Well today being 09/09/09, I’m sure the Apocalypse is going to come at some stage during the day. Why you ask? Turn it upside down and you shall find the answer…..666! *insert suspensful horror music*

It is my prediction that the Interwebz will fail, well maybe just Twitter! Or maybe a massive meteor will crash into earth, or maybe a plague of sorts. Well, what ever happens, I hope it’s after I have my morning coffee and toastie.

I wonder if the time this post was posted is coincidence….or conspiracy!?

Man I love this TV! It’s fantastic, LED backlit, slim, sexy, super high contrast ratio and it just looks damn sexy! While it can kick out an absolutely amazing picture, the stock settings it has when you take it out of the box are nothing but below average. It is setup with super high contrast for in-store displays as well as other stock settings which just wash images out and make everything look unnatural.

Here are the settings I have found best for normal TV viewing. This should give you a good baseline to start from as you should tune your TV for the lighting in your room, picture source (remember you need to reconfigure it for any devices plugged in – PS3/Blue Ray/DVD, they all have their own individual profiles). If you can get your hands on a TV tuning DVD that is always a good start too (although I only use them to get to a baseline and then continue tweaking “too eye” from there).

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I’ve been using a Windows Server 2008 R2 RC test server at work for about a month or 2 now, although I haven’t really tested out any features at all on that. I purely installed it to setup our development (will eventually be live) Microsoft Office Sharepoint Server 2007 Enterprise, which is running as a VM on top of Hyper-V. This is because we will be implementing Windows 2008 R2 (and Hyper-V Server 2008 R2) as our hyper-visor, purely based on financial reasons. If you purchase Windows 2008 R2 Enterprise, you can run it as the hyper-visor and 4 fully licensed versions of itself as Virtual Machines on top. As we are a 100% Microsoft Environment, it works out to be more cost effective than even running an alternative free hyper-visor (although you can also get Hyper-V Server 2008 R2 for free!).

So after server 2008 R2 reached RTM a couple of weeks ago, I upgraded my home server with a Intel Q9550 CPU, 8GB of Memory and set the 3 WD 640GB Caviar Black HDDs to a Raid 0 stripe (with an eSata drive to backup the array regularly of course!). I installed 2008 R2 Enterprise on there with no hiccups what so ever, I was impressed as it is a “white box” server with all consumer grade parts.

I’m using the main server purely as a hyper-visor currently, so I then setup my basic network infrastructure with VMs. I really must do a post solely on that, the way the network actually all works with the VM’s and my setup is pretty impressive, even if I do so say so myself! But it definitely needs some diagrams to make sense. None-the-less, here are the main VMs I setup:

• Windows Server 2003 R2 Router – Running Bandwidth Controller Enterprise, all traffic from the local network > internet passes through here for QoS prioritisation and throttling. This also acts as a secondary DNS server.
• Windows Server 2008 R2 – Domain Controller, with DNS & DHCP
• Windows Server 2008 R2 – This is my “Power Server”, it gets the majority of CPU, Mem and HDD resources. It runs Exchange 2007 SP1, File Server, Media Server, Remote Desktop Services, Windows Deployment Services.

So far I’ve been very impressed with 2008 R2, the performance has been fantastic and everything has been very reliable. Previously (as I run all Windows 7 clients on my network) I had some issues with Server 2003 R2 crashing with DNS and File Access issues, as well as slow performance with Windows 7. These issues are now a thing of the past, with everything being rock solid thus far.

Promoting a member server to a Domain Controller is easier than ever; dcpromo.exe took care of everything in the world, you don’t even need to have DNS enabled etc like with 2003, it will just do it all for you.

I’ve also been playing around with Windows Deployment Services to deploy Windows 7 over the network. This was very simple to setup and I was deploying images in around 5-10 minutes without any prior experience with WDS. I’m now playing around with adding in driver packages as well as creating custom images. It has been great so far and I plan to use the feature a lot, as it will be an important skill set to have at work.

So overall, I haven’t delved particularly deep into Windows Server 2008 R2, but have played around with most of the features. So far it has performed flawlessly for me and I have nothing bad to report…well except for my Exchange 2007 SP1 install, but that’s really a downfall of the Exchange installer and not Server 2008 R2. I’ll be sure to post up some tutorials on any speed bumps I encounter and how to tackle them.

Just picked up myself on of these bad boys and I have to say I am over the moon with it! I had pretty much decided on getting a Sony Bravia, either a W or Z series, it was just a matter of which one. I hadn’t even considered LEDs as most of them start around the $4k mark. That was until a Retravision catalogue rocked up in my letter box advertising these TVs for under $3k pegging them at the same point as a Z series Bravia. Plus you get a free 22″ LCD TV with them as well…needless to say I was pretty sold.

So on Thursday night I popped into JB Hifi and spend a good 30-45 minutes just standing there looking at the Bravias next to the Samsung. The Samsung definitely had the better picture (in my opinion!), so that was that…decision made. So I headed off home…but dropped my chain at about 45 kmh and have buggered both my knees. So I figured if I am going to be chilling on the couch all weekend, I may as well get the new TV a couple of weeks earlier than intended and had Retravision deliver it late Friday afternoon! Happy days…let’s hope these knees heal themselves up quickly.