Michael McNamara

technology, networking, virtualization and IP telephony

Home Desktop Upgrade 2012

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It was that time again for yet another upgrade to the old home desktop.

There’s been quite a few desktop upgrades in the time I’ve been blogging. The first was back in October of 2007, then again in December 2007 I added some accessories, in January 2008 I had a hard disk die, in December of 2008 I replaced the motherboard and CPU,  in July 2010 I upgraded to Windows 7 64bit leaving Windows Vista behind, and most recently in October 2011 I upgraded my video card and replaced a dying power supply.

While I was potentially looking at building an entirely new desktop (Intel Core i5-3570K Ivy Bridge 3.4GHz) I decided to hold off for now and instead take the leap into SSDs, replacing my trusty  Western Digital Raptor X WD1500AHFD 150GB 10,000 RPM with a SAMSUNG 830 Series MZ-7PC128D/AM 2.5″ 128GB SATA III MLC Internal SSD.

The choir of migrating the data was pretty painless although it did take quite sometime to run through the backups (you always make backups just in case) and then copy the partitions using Norton Ghost. When all the bits were done moving around I just unplugged the Raptor and plugged in the Samsung. Windows 7 booted right up and announced it had discovered new hardware and asked me to reboot. That was it… my desktop went from taking about 100-120 seconds to boot to taking about 30 seconds to boot.

I’ll give credit to NewEgg once again… they shipped in one day from New Jersey to Pennsylvania.

Here’s what I’m running these days?

  • Intel Core 2 Quad Q9550 @2.99Ghz
  • 8GB G.Skill PC2-6400 DDR2 memory (4 sticks)
  • Gigabyte EP45-UD3P motherboard
  • MSI R6950 Twin Frozr II OC Radeon HD 6950 2GB
  • 128GB Samsung 830 SSD
  • 1TB Western Digital SATA II hard disk
  • 2TB Seagate Barracuda Green (5900RPM)
  • Antec P180 case
  • Rosewill RX750 power supply
  • Logitech G15 keyboard
  • Logitech G5 mouse
  • Logitech C910 webcam
  • 2 x ASUS 27″ LCD display

Cheers!

Wiring Closets – Done Right!

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I’m actively involved in a few different greenfield network builds right now. While one is a new Data Center another is a new business office where we’ll have more than a few power users – including yours truly.

We’ve been using stackable switches, specifically Avaya Ethernet Routing Switch 5520s, for quite a few years now but it’s only been in the past 2-3 years that we realized we could make things much neater in the closet if we actually put the switches in between the patch panels and utilized 1′ patch cables. In this configuration you can easily accommodate a 2:1 or 1.5:1 or even 1:1 ratio between data jacks and switch ports. You can easily trace cables and you can leave space for future expansion or to help ease the burden of replacing a faulty/failed switch.

The Good

The Bad

The Ugly

I’ve provided a few different example pictures here… and since I’m a big Clint Eastwood fan I’ve aptly named them the Good, the Bad and the Ugly. We no longer place servers in wiring closets, isn’t that why we have server rooms and data centers? You’ll be challenged to actually find the switch in the last picture (there’s a few behind that mass of cables).

Feel free to share your pictures.

Cheers!

NCAA March Madness – How’s your Internet link handling the madness?

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It’s March again, a time for putting down fertilizer on the lawn, a time for celebrating St. Patrick’s Day, and a time to watch your Internet utilization spike through the roof.

I’m a Blue Coat ProxySG and Websense customer so I have some options at my disposal to help stem the flood from both my public/guest (WiFi) networks and my internal networks. However, even with those tools available it can be a real challenge these days to try and filter just the unwanted content out of the network, especially if you’re charged with only blocking the streaming content of the site and you are required to keep basic site access working. So there’s no blocking ncaa.com/* because that would block basic site access.

I currently have about 15,000 devices on my internal network and I average around 3,000 public devices daily on my public/guest networks. The public/guest networks routinely consume around 50Mbps of Internet traffic and the bulk of the public/guest networks are setup on our internal 802.11b/g wireless networks. So I need to be concerned about the performance of the wireless networks themselves and not just the Internet gateway/firewall.

I’m sure there are going to be dozens if not hundreds of different ways for users to find the content. I’ve already spotted a few users trying to connect via Slingbox and there are multiple apps on Google Play and the Apple Store that offer to stream the games to your mobile device over WiFi (our public/guest networks).

Here are the list of URLs that I’m starting with. I’m hoping this should help curb 50%-75% of the traffic, I’ll need to evaluate whether it will be worth the effort to go looking for the remaining 25%.

  • *.turner.ncaa.com
  • www.ncaa.com/mml

If you are a smaller organization you might want to have a look at OpenDNS. It’s very easy to implement and is very cost effective.

I’m curious what other people are doing, if anything? Do you already have your network locked down so this isn’t an issue? If you have a public/guest network do you allow access? Do you have any challenges based on the size of your network?

Cheers!

State of the Blog 2011

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1039006_38582413It’s that time of year again… where I review the overall success and cost of running this blog (and forums) and I post some general thoughts about the past year and try to solicit new ideas for the future. I’m totally amazed when I think that it’s been 4 years now since I started blogging back in October 2007 on Blogger. Technology has come a long way in those 4 years as have I both professionally and personally.

Content

While I haven’t been winning any awards for my journalist talent it has been rewarding to hear the feedback from all the wonderful people that I’ve met either on my blog or in the discussion forums. I’m hoping to round up some guest bloggers in the future and try broadening the topics I generally cover. If you’ve got a knack for technical writing and you’d like to see your name in lights please drop me a line.

Forums

The forums have been a pretty big success in my opinion although there’s still a lot more I’d like to see us achieve. I’ve had a lot of help which I need to acknowledge here from Flintstone, Dominik, Paul and Artur. Without these guys the forums wouldn’t be half the place they are today. Thanks guys!

The forums have grown tremendously over the past year, we’ve seen a 359% increase in overall traffic with some 51,116 unique visitors to the forums generating some 81,766 visits and 239,651 pageviews in total. We have a total of 681 registered users with 421 users have made at least one post or more. Over the past year we’ve had visitors from 125 different countries.

1380007_75870024Finances

The financials are pretty straight forward. In calendar year 2010 I paid out around $378.42 to GoDaddy, and RIMU for domain names, hosting, etc. I collected around $367.41 in advertising revenue which came from Google Adsense and a few direct advertising sales. So while we were in the red again this year I was only down $11.01 which made my wife quite happy.

Let me say “Thank you” to the sponsors and all those that take the time and effort to follow my blog.

Blog Traffic

There’s been a slow but stead increase in blog traffic over the past 12 months. Looking at some of the Google Analytics data I can see that there has been approximately a 94% increase in visits (23,633), unique visitors (17,944) and pageviews (44,489) comparing the June-July 2011 timeframe to the same timeframe in 2010. Over the past year there were some 159,872 unique visitors to the blog generating some 232,498 visits and 440,725 pageviews in total.

The traffic increase has been steady enough that I’ve had to investigate CDN solutions and deploy caching plug-ins such as W3TC in an effort to keep up with all the traffic. In January we received a free upgrade from RIMU that we applied to the VPS and increased our memory from 480MB to 740MB. With the upgrade we were able to increase the number of web clients we can support concurrently. We were also able to install APC to help with PHP caching and increase the amount of caching within MySQL all in an effort to boost the servers overall performance and decrease the time which it takes to serve up the content to you the user.

Future

I’m not sure what the future holds. The global economy has been all over the place this past year and the uncertainty ways on everyone as people try to “do more with less”. You’ll probably find me here again next year blogging away. Perhaps I’ll make good on my last years claim to start making some screencasts.

What would you like to see?

Cheers!

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