IT Legends – Tech in Connecticut

So I have this great 32″ LCD HD TV from Vizio in my office at work.  So my partner and I decide to buy a mini computer and turn it into a streaming video machine.  I thought I’d try hulu.com on it. Burn Notice doesn’t look so good – very choppy even at full buffering.  Just to check to make sure the PC can handle the 1920 x 1080 resolution on the TV, I decided to try and watch some Daily Show clips off Comedy Central.  They are not choppy at all – the resolution leaves something to be desired, but the playback experience as a whole on the Daily Show was a lot better than on hulu.com.  I’ll update to see if different shows on hulu.com from different producers looks any better, but I am beginning to think that hulu.com just won’t be what I want it to be because the content makers are hampering it (it’s not a hulu.com technical difficulty – its just that the content providers still don’t get it).

Let’s call Sunday backup day.  Its not a new concept, I stole it from Leo Laporte, The Tech Guy (great show if you like technology, not overly geeky unlike the other shows I listen to).  So, how do you backup?  Backing up really menas that you have more than 1 copy of a file.  2 is good, 3 is better.  What I recommend is a 2nd copy on some external hard drive.  They are relatively cheap, I usually buy the LaCie Rugged USB drives – mainly because I need to carry them around a lot.  If you don’t need to carry them around, you could go for more capacity at a cheaper price.  PC users check out Microsoft’s Sync Toy 2.0 (free!), Mac users check out SuperDuper (free trial link is at the bottom of the page, less than $30 purchase one time).

For a 3rd copy, you could get an additional drive, but the real benefit of a 3rd copy is to store it at a different location in case some disaster occurs that ruins the 2 copies you already have (burglary, fire, earthquake…).  So you could store this drive offsite at a family member’s place or a safety deposit box.  You could mail DVDs to someone across the country (or world).  Or, you could backup to the cloud.  There are a few services I’ve checked out and they are all well-priced for home use.  I recommend MozyHome – give them a try for free with 2GB of backup space (perfect for students wanting to backup their school work).  Courtesy of the Geek Miser (that’s me).  Other services you may want to check out include Carbonite, JungleDisk, and LogMeIn Backup.

OK, so I installed the Windows 7 Release Candidate (RC) on my mighty ThinkPad today.  I have heard that it’s "Vista fixed".  Well, it installed and actually runs fairly well on my 2GB RAM, 1.5 GHz processor.  I had to fudge around ot get the video to work properly (ATI doesn’t provide drivers for a lot of their laptop chipsets, and Lenovo isn’t writing any new drivers for their older laptops for Vista/7).  The sound also didn’t work when I first turned it on, but Windows Update fixed that.  So far, so good.  My video drivers are the biggest issue I have.  I can’t full screen Flash video and it gives me a Blue Screen of Death (BSOD) when shutting down, but I can have dual-monitor display which is what I really want.  I’m going to try a product like wubi to make sure I can still run Linux.

If I can’t get better video support as it is, I may try to install XP Professional freshly with all the correct drivers, then upgrade to Windows 7.  This might allow me to do what I want with full-screen flash video and the like.  Before I try that I might try Lenovo’s XP drivers for this video adapter (I ended up using the Omega Drivers for ATI which has support for the Mobility 7500).

So I’ve been to two VMware Virtualization Forums now (2008 in Boston, 2009 in DC).  These are free events where they talk to you about implementing the various technologies they have to offer.  I have also been to a couple of local VMware User Group (VMUG – very nice coffee cup that I seem to have lost).  All of the breakout sessions, key notes, case studies, etc are all for big business, enterprise-level implementations.  They are talking about hundreds or thousands of virtual machines from servers to desktops.  Data centers that used to have 800 physical machines reduced to a mere 300 with virtualization technology.  Hello green computing and lower implementation costs.

However, I represent the small and medium business (SMB) market.  I’m one of them myself and I use VMware products.  I use free versions and pay-for versions.  The presentations that I see at all of these events are not for the small and medium businesses.  They talk about using SANs, fibre channel networks, high availability/redundant data centers and more.  Nothing that the small and medium business can relate to.

VMware has a lot of products that will work for SMBs.  They could use a few lower-impact management tools.  They even have nice introductory packages so smaller companies can get started using their products.  What they don’t do is have conventions and user groups about them.  They barely market to the SMB space at all.  I guess they aren’t done plumbing the gold mine of the enterprise markets.

VMware, I challenge you to ramp up your support of the SMBs of the world.  I’ll go to a convention, I might even help and sponsor an event.  I’ll even set it up and just get some of your engineers and marketing people there.  SMB can benefit from virtualization, too!  (many of my clients do already)

OK, so I use a nice VPN solution that works through every public WiFi I’ve ever encountered.  Great – no problem (which one you ask?  My Astaro Security Gateway…  but its implementing OpenVPN which is open source so anyone could set their own up withour the UTM).  So I’m not too concerned about running my Virtual Desktop (Windows XP Pro, virtualized onto VMware Server 2.0) because the connection from my laptop to the Virtual Desktop is encrypted.  So when using non-encrypted public WiFi, the traffic that others can see freely is encrypted.

Enter the All Ways On Wireless at the Ronald Reagan International Trade Center in Washington, DC.  Its a pay-for public WiFi, I’m not against paying for it.  Its actually running quite nicely and the regular, non-VPN enabled all-day pass works just fine with my VPN (another reason I like OpenVPN).  However, when I went to purchase my day of access, it led me to a non-encrypted web page to type in my credit card details.  Seeing as the radio frequency traffic between my laptop and the wireless access point is not encrypted and completely open to anyone that knows how to look, I essentially broadcast my credit card details out for that potential someone to steal.

Be wary of public wifi access spots that make you enter credit card details without leading you to a secure web page (that’s when you see https:// in the address bar, or that little padlock in the status bar of your browser).  I don’t think my details are now in the hands of some nefarious identity theif, but its a lot more possible now that I’ve given them out over unencrypted radio transfer.  Someone taking this information wouldn’t even be recorded as a data breach in the All Ways On Wireless financial system – since essentially they didn’t hack into their database they just listened to the freely broadcast, unencrypted traffic.

When will companies start taking security of information more seriously?  I tried to go to their website (www.allwayson.net) but strangely enough, you can’t even get to their website from their own public wifi gateway.  I wonder if its even up anymore, or if it changed and noone set up any forwarding address.