The essential Windows setup

Although my home environment has only a single Windows machine (T's desktop), I occasionally get involved in the support of other people's PCs and laptops. Over the time, the list of things that I do on these machines has evolved. This is what I do with new PCs (August 2008 edition :-))

Get a broadband router

I always recommend a router instead of an ADSL modem. This provides the security of a hardware firewall as well as the ability to have multiple machines connecting and wireless access. My preferred model is the Netgear DG834G which fulfills all the requirements. I'm sure there are equally good models out there, but this is cheap and works reliably. It's the model we recommend for our users at work and it's the same model I've deployed to almost all my users.

Operating System choices

Despite the fact that Vista has been given a battering for being resource intensive, with enough memory (2GB minimum), it can do a pretty decent job for the average user. I always make sure the machine can handle Aero Glass (if it can't, then it's too underspec to consider).

I'd like to be able to recommend a Mac or Linux, but for most of my users, it's easier to go the Vista route.


Remove the bloat

The first step is to remove the "value add" software and trial software. First culprit is usually the evil Norton Internet Security. By removing these unasked for applications, and tidying up the URL shortcuts to various ISPs, Ebay etc. can speed the boot time up considerably.

Create a rescue CD

If the machine does not come with OS media or a "Recovery Disc", it is essential to create one. This usually involves the creation of a set of disks that copy the data on a resuce partition to DVD. Keep these safe in case the hard drive dies.

Fix the default IE page

Set it to about:blank and not the advert infested mess that the manufacturer points you to. It's worth doing for those rare times when IE is a necessity.

Install Firefox

Although IE7 was an improvement over IE6, Firefox is my favoured browser and one I recommend to all my users. This typically requires the additional download of the Flash plugin afterwards in order to allow access to YouTube etc.

Install some Anti-Virus Software

I used to recommend the free version of AVG, but found recently that Microsoft OneCare is pretty decent for the price. It's fairly unintrusive and can be installed on several machines using the same licence. It's since become my recommended AV solution and the one that I have been installing on my users' machines.

Recommend an external hard drive

I'll always recommend an external hard drive for users to backup their data. People often put so much data onto their machines that it's folly not to have some form of backup. Then it's a matter of configuring the backup to run(!), using either the Vista backup or letting OneCare handle it.

Limited user rights

This can be tricky to deploy and depends largely on the needs of the users, but if possible configure the main login to be a normal, non-administrative user. This can drastically reduce the amount of spyware that gets on the machine. (This doesn't always work as the daughter of one family managed to guess the admin password and escalated herself to an administrator. She then proceeded to download all sorts of malware).

Remote Admin

I only do this on a few machines, and always with the consent of the owner. An install of VNC running as a service, and the appropriate firewall forwarding rule has allowed me to manage some machines remotely (mostly family). This often requires the router to be configured to use dyndns.org (which the Netgear does) so I can connect via hostname, even when their ISP uses DHCP.

Summary

Although there is nothing here that is rocket science, the result is a nice, quickly booting machine that isn't loaded up with crap and is a nice setup for most users.

The iPhone 3G: First Impressions

After a 50 minute queue at the local O2 store, and the problems of actually getting an activated iPhone, I managed to walk away with on Friday, and after a busy 24 hours, I've finally got around to setting it up and having a play.

First impressions?

This is completely unlike any mobile phone I have ever used. The iPhone is awesome!

What's there to like?

1) I can access all my mail accounts - personal IMAP server, Google Mail and Yahoo Mail.
2) Safari is completely usable and supports multiple pages being active - a real "wow" moment when I found this.
3) It has picked up my iCal calendars, including my Google Calendars.
4) The Maps GPS location is very cool.
5) The App Store makes adding applications a breeze. So far, I've only tried one (the Bible), but will have a proper hunt later
6) Predictive text with spell correction is very cool and I'm starting to get used to the virtual keyboard.

No negatives yet (although I'm sure there will be some).

Summary: Best. Phone. Ever.

Is OneNote a Cul de Sac?

There has been a lot of buzz around the office recently about Microsoft OneNote 2007. For the uninitiated, this application is basically a collection of notebooks for jotting down information. Notebooks (e.g., Work, Personal) have sections (imagine dividers in a traditional notebook) which contain pages. It's possible to create free form text, drag and drop image, links etc.

All in all, a very nice application that I'm looking forward to getting stuck in with.

My only reservation is that it uses a proprietary file format to store the notebooks, and it appears to be very single-user focused. There are ways of sharing notebooks, but these seem to be limited to placing them on file shares.

In some ways, it's a bit like SharePoint - easy to setup and load stuff into, but more difficult to untangle yourself from should you decide to migrate away from Microsoft. Perhaps that's the plan...

Zoho has a Notebook application on the cloud which is very advanced, but I'd be more reluctant to trust a small company with my data than managing it myself.

If only someone could come up with an application that does everything OneNote can do, but in a true client/server model, with offline capabilities, web access, and an open source licence. Any takers?

A week of interesting technology

Last week I had the opportunity to use a number of interesting technologies and applications. I've already blogged about the Cisco Network Assistant, but that was only the beginning.

We were running a VMware Server virtual machine that was not performing correctly. The physical hardware was not up to the job, so we wanted to migrate the VM to our ESX server. The VM was configured to use a virtual IDE disk which prevented us from importing it directly into ESX. Enter VMware Converter. This piece of software allowed us to step through a wizard where we selected the source VM files, and then entered the server name we wanted to save the machine. A few other options later (selecting the destination datastore and similar), and the conversion process started. Twenty five minutes later it was all done. The converted VM had been streamed into place and was ready to go. Really simple and worked first time. I was impressed!

The end of the week gave me the opportunity to experiment with Sun Logical Domains (LDOMs). This hypervisor based VM technology can be found on the Coolthreads range (using the new sun4v architecture). Unlike Containers, LDOMs allow different Solaris versions to be installed. We're testing the performance of the machine to run as an Ingres server, so I'll most probably update the blog later this week with more information.

This week looks equally promising - Apple's WWDC was yesterday, although I haven't watched the keynote yet. The 3G iPhone isn't unexpected, but is now quite tempting, even with a £35/month contract as I can't think of a better mobile web browsing device. And then there is the announcement of "MobileMe" (aka, "Exchange for the rest of us"). It's certainly something to look into to...

A day with Cisco Network Assistant

Today I spent a significant amount of time using the freely available Cisco Network Assistant. This tool allows you to probe your [Cisco] LAN and identify the topology. This proved very useful as although I had a rough idea of how the network was wired, the software highlighted a couple of issues that I need to resolve. Once identified, you can directly interact with the devices, renaming switches, creating VLANs, enabling and disabling ports. Really, really nice - especially for the price.

The reason I'm doing this is that I want to get the topology accurately mapped before starting my Nagios deployment for network monitoring.

The only downside was discovering the SFP modules we bought for server interlinking were not "Cisco Compatible", so we'll have to spend double to get the same thing!

Sun Certified System Administrator

Today I took the Sun Certified System Administrator for the Solaris 10 Operating System Upgrade Exam (snappy title huh?). I passed - but only just.

To aid me in my revision, I used the "Sun Certified System Administrator for Solaris 10 Study Guide" by Paul Sanghera published by Osborne, and "Exam Prep Solaris 10 System Administration" by Bill Calkins published by Que. This is on top of using Solaris on a daily basis for the last eight years.

After revising from both these books and taking the test questions, I was consistently getting over 80% from both books. Considering the passmark is 60% for the upgrade, it looked pretty good.

So imagine my surprise when I sat down in the exam and was confronted by a number of questions that are not covered in either book! The confidentiality agreement prevents me from detailing too much about the content, but I was also surprised to find that the questions were based on a small subset of topics.

This is apparently because Sun have upgraded the exams earlier this year and the books are not yet updated. Calkins has a update on his website detailing the changes (which I've only just found!).

So beware if you want to revise this certification! It's not a walk in the park and make sure you know your Flash from your Grub...!

Wireless EEE problems

Although I've used the EEE PC on a number of different wireless networks, I could not get it to connect to my Netgear DG834G at home. It would see the network, but would not connect and obtain a DHCP address.

To cut a *very* long story short, the problem was that I had configured access lists on the router so that only specified MAC addresses could connect. This was denying the EEE PC access before it even got as far as authenticating.

I added the EEE to the list of allowed addresses and a minute later was happily connected to the web using WPA encrypted wireless.

Nice.