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May 25, 2005
Is it time to upgrade your hardware?
Hands up how many customers are running on Sun hardware more than 3 years old? If you own an E-450, E-250, Ultra 10 or *shudder* something older like an Ultra 1, 2 or Sparc 20 then listen up. It's time to replace your kit.
Take the example of an E-250 which can cost almost £2000 per year on maintenance, over 3 years you're looking at a bill for £6000. Couple that with the fact that since the hardware's getting older, it's failing more regularly, it's running out of disk space, backups are less reliable and performance is gradually getting worse.
Do you have the capacity for MARC 21 and ISBN-13? What about future application upgrades; Talis Alto, Talis Prism, Solaris 10, Sybase 12.5. What about tools such as dump2disk?
The argument for a replacement server suddenly becomes quite compelling.
For as little as £10000 you can get a brand new Sunfire V250 with 3 years maintenance, this price includes all build costs and data migration as well as the Server Hardening Service.
Suns hardware range has improved significantly over the last couple of years. A typical Sunfire v250 LMS Server will have 2x 1.28Ghz UltraSPARC IIIi CPUs, 2-4gb memory and 72gb disks by comparison an E-250 typically has 400Mhz UltraSPARC II CPUs, 1gb memory and 8gb disks. The performance and capacity benefits are obvious.
Many of you have already got the message and our build area is full to bursting with new Sun Servers and Dell boxes. Make sure you don't get left behind.
Posted by jimprince at 11:47 AM | Comments (0) | TrackBack
May 24, 2005
Essential Wireless Questions
We began by defining the requirements of our wireless network and some of the following questions were asked.
- How many users require mobility and where?
- What user applications will run over the WLAN?
Listing the applications required by our users helped us determine minimum bandwidth requirements. Often it is over looked that wireless is a shared medium, not a switched medium. Although most applications work over a shared WLAN, it’s not necessarily appropriate for all applications.
Understanding users and their application requirements helps define coverage areas that don’t waste money or compromise security – by sending signals beyond the intended areas.
You can discuss wireless networking in the Infrastructure Forum.
Posted by Saheed Akhtar at 03:38 PM | Comments (0) | TrackBack
May 06, 2005
TDN Database Analyser
The Talis Developer Network has a very useful new download.
Talis Database Analyser is a software utility that will report on the structure of your Talis database. Assuming you have Talis Alto installed you just point the software at your Alto DataSource.dat file and it documents all the tables, views, stored procedures and Talis datatypes from the selected database.
This is a genuinely useful tool for System Managers, IT Staff and Developers.
If you haven't already done so you can register for the Talis Developer Network here.
Posted by jimprince at 03:07 PM | Comments (0) | TrackBack
May 04, 2005
The Cost Of 3G
For the last year or so I’ve had gprs data card for my laptop, it was on the orange network, kinda worked, but was painfully slow for most tasks, still it got me out a hole once or twice when there were no landlines about.
More recently we’ve been involved with a push to update our mobile technology at Talis, and as part of this we’ve implemented a number of advances in our infrastructure, with Soft phones and VPN’s for home working, Web mail access for mobile users, Instant messaging etc and an ongoing evaluation of more portable kit, lightweight laptops, PDA’s, smart phones, combined with wireless and 3G data connections.
No so long back the old Orange card got replaced with a shiny new Vodafone 3G mobile connect data card, still made by the same manufacturer (Option), but definitely an improvement on the older card.
The drive for getting the cards was mainly to improve the available mobile communications for our roaming staff, but also evaluate the performance of products such as Alto over 3G VPN connections, which could have possible applications for mobile libraries etc.
Funnily enough the Vodafone card seems to have 3G coverage problems at our offices, and drops back to gprs, but back home (about 4 miles outside of Birmingham), I get a 2 bar 3G signal with a 384kb connection, which is fine.
Connection to the office is easy enough, just like any other dial up, add another couple clicks, then you’re on the VPN with access to all the usual resources. After proving everything worked, and zipped along at pretty impressive speed compared to the old Gprs, I thought I’d try a few other things.
The phone exchange at Talis is based on Voice Over Ip (VoIP), and we can make calls via a soft phones on or laptops, Hmmm, I wonder if that will work… (Phone calls with all the economy of having the heating and air conditioning on along with windows open). :-)
On a technical level, it was great to see everything working, Digital voice being transmitted over the 3G network though a VPN tunnel to the exchange off to the outside world, but then you’ve got to look at the costs of such an over engineered conversation…
On a typical low user tariff, it costs about £2 per megabyte for 3G data, and the voice conversation was running at about 400k / minute (with the VPN overhead), so that works out roughly at about 80p min... hmmmmm. Things can work out cheaper if you can find a WiFi hotspot at about £3 for each half hour block, but when you compare this to just using the mobile instead which would cost less than 10p min, and a land line cheaper again, its show how mobile data is still relatively expensive.
Ok, it was a bit of geeky test, and no doubt data on mobile networks will get cheaper over time. However, right now reasonably quick mobile data comes at a premium, and you'll be surprised how quickly you eat those megabytes with modern web content. Certainly the ever increasing number wireless hotspots and mobile networks will drive prices down, and the push to bring such technologies as Instant Messaging and VoIP clients to the mobiles will increase the demand for mobile data, lets just hope the prices start falling sooner rather than later…
Posted by Adrian Mackey at 08:47 PM | Comments (1) | TrackBack
Talis Solutions FAQs via RSS
I've been working on a new addition to Talis Solutions. Currently you can view all 994 solutions from the Talis Solutions database via www.talis.com/solutions or you can search for them via the Talis Knowledgebase. You can also view the Top 10 FAQs from the support section of our website.
I've now setup a page that allows you to view the 10 most recently added FAQs. From this page you can also syndicate the results via your RSS reader. This means that new FAQs can be pushed to you as and when they are published. There's now no excuse for logging a support call that has already been documented as an FAQ!
This is very much a work in progress so if you spot any problems or have any comments let me know.
Posted by jimprince at 02:28 PM | Comments (2) | TrackBack
May 03, 2005
Prism Station Portable?
Well not quite yet :-), still it has been an interesting experiment never the less.
Recently I got my hands on Sony's latest gizmo for the masses, the Play Station Portable (PSP). You may of heard of it as they have been out in Japan and the USA for a while now, and yes they are primarily gaming devices. However, a quick search on your friend google reveals they can do so much more, as Sony promotes the games, movies, music etc. but also the various hacks out there that allow other content such as eBooks, news clips, web pages etc to be viewed.
This alternative use of the PSP opens up a number of interesting futures for the device, there is already a development community emerging and add-on tools have started turning up supporting the conversion of digital content over to jpegs providing basic eBook content on the move, and with the backing of Sony this development community will hopefully grow in to something special.
Currently the limited web browsing functions of the PSP are provided by a hidden feature in one of the first games available, but using this and the built in wireless connection, I thought it would be worth giving one of the many Talis Prism sites out there a bash.
The basic set up is to fool the PSP into thinking that it is talking to Sony then use your own web portal to redirect the request to the outside world, then like magic your where you want to be...
Here's a quick snap I took with my phone of Surrey's prism.
As far as the prism experience goes, it was much better than I really expected from a limited browser in a device designed for games, entering the initial url takes a while ( similar to an mobile phone interface ), but once there navigation is straight forward, enter your search term, get an entry point and then you can zip around the results no problem...
Don't get me wrong, I'm not suggesting everyone should rush out an buy a PSP for prism on the go, it's just not ready for that (yet). However the OS (firmware) on the PSP is upgradeable via updates from Sony, and with the popularity of the eBook and web portal content, hopefully Sony will see the potential for a fully featured browser and include one in a future release, and they already have a toe in the water of the eBook market in Japan, with the Librie
If the PSP is as successful as Sony hopes then these things will be all over towns and campus' by the end of the year, and with the ever increasing coverage of publicly accessible wireless networks, the handheld gaming device is certainly one to be included with the PDA and smart phone for digital content delivery in the not too distant future..... so watch this space.
Posted by Adrian Mackey at 11:09 PM | Comments (0) | TrackBack
Wireless Experience
We were recently tasked with looking into setting up wireless network access in our offices so that both staff and visitors could access network resources in meetings rooms and breakout areas more easily.
As Ateeq and I are the security guys at Talis and responsible for the security service that Talis offer we were naturally concerned about the security of wireless networks. This made Ateeq wrap up the static WEP based Wireless Access Point (WAP) and take it home – or was it just because he wanted another toy that week?
Talking about toys it wasn’t long before Ateeq added wireless sniffer tools to his PDA and drove into work after reading warnings on woeful wi-fi security on the BBC website. I was quite impressed with the large screen on his PDA but what I found even more impressive was how many pages of wireless access points we picked up on a 10-mile drive. Only half of these seemed to have any security at all, we didn’t try cracking them on this run, which I’m sure if we tried it would not be too difficult dispelling the myth of wireless security. It’s one thing to read about it but it doesn’t really hit home until you experience it.
In our next few blogs we’ll talk about some of the issues we faced including speed, security, standards, compatibility, interoperability, and even signal interference with other devices.
Oh and by the way we are building up the motivation to visit the libraries near us and "learn" about their "secure" wireless implementation.
Posted by Saheed Akhtar at 03:12 PM | Comments (2) | TrackBack
