It was interesting to read Paul’s post on Panlibus regarding wireless internet access in Libraries. My own local library in Bridgnorth has just finished being refurbished and one of the new facilities includes wireless Internet access. This is great, Bridgnorth is just the sort of rural area that can benefit.

Paul goes on to say

I continue to be bemused by the number of commercial organisations that fail (unlike Talis!) to provide some form of network access to visitors. I could name a plethora of big organisations in London and elsewhere that set great store by their meeting facilities and the quality of their biscuits, yet fail to let visitors onto any sort of network for 'security' reasons.

On Thursday morning I experienced this first hand. I attended a Microsoft seminar at their campus in Reading. Once the session had completed I enquired at the reception desk if they had internet access for visitors. Her reply was a predictable "no, sorry", but I must admit their coffee and biscuits were first rate.

Technorati Tags: Libraries, Microsoft, Talis, Wireless

I thought it would be useful to provide a list of the Talis feeds that I think Talis customers should be subscribed to.

These are as follows;

General feeds

• Talis News
• Talis Forums
• The Talis Developer Network
• Talis Documentation
• Talis Solutions FAQs

• Panlibus
• Nodalities
• Infrablog
• Source

• Talking with Talis

While on the subject of RSS I'd like to recommend a few news readers/aggregators.

If you want to access your feeds via your web browser I'd suggest you try Bloglines. It's fast, free and gets round any restrictive Infrastructure policies.

If you want your RSS to be integrated with MS Outlook I'd recommend NewsGator. Feeds are devlivered straight into your Outlook folders allowing you to track all your emails and feeds in one place. The downside is that it costs $30, but its a small price to pay.

Finally, if you want a standalone application, you can't go far wrong with Snarfer as recommended by Colin Austin on the University of Worcesters ILS Matters Blog. It's a tiny download and is super quick. It's also free, although you'll have to put up with the occasional unobtrusive banner add.

Technorati Tags: RSS, OPML, Talis, Blogs, Forums, TDN, Podcasts, Bloglines, Newsgator, Snarfer

The humble IBM PC is twenty five years old. The IBM 5150 was released on the 12th of August 1981 and cost $1,565 with a tiny 16K of memory.

IBM used an Open architecture so that other manufacturers could build compatible machines and it was undoubtedly this move that caused the explosion of Personal Computers in our homes and offices.

Ten years later Tim Berners-Lee developed the World Wide Web, a technology that arguably could see the end of Personal computers as we know them.

As the number of Web 2.0 applications continue to grow as does the ability to access such apps from devices other than PCs. PDA's, mobile phones, televisions and consoles are increasingly Internet enabled.

At the current rate of growth it makes you wonder if the personal computer will be obsolete by the time it reaches thirty.

Technorati Tags: world wide web, IBM 5150,

The Anatomy of a(n ongoing) Disaster.. post is an good example of a company being honest and transparent about the problems that they face.

It makes for an interesting read particularly as we are planning to expand the products and services that Talis host in external hosting centres.

No doubt you’ll hear more on this soon.

Technorati Tags: hosting, talis, blogging

The obvious advantages are the less desk clutter, improved physical security and low power consumption. Whilst this environment wouldn't suit power users or PC gamers it strikes me as the ideal low cost platform for libraries, schools and Universities.

When I first started here more six years ago it was already on version 8 and the last major release was 12.5. That's good going for any piece of software.

Still time marches on and it has taken a significant amount of time and effort to gradually wean people off it and onto Talis Alto. I am sure that those who have now completed the switch won't regret it.

But I'll miss those monochrome screens, term servers and dumb terminals.

A fundamental part of these research projects is a concept known as Web 2.0, a term you'll hear more and more about over the coming months. To see what I mean just visit the blogs of Paul Miller or Ian Davis, two Talis employees who recently attended the Web 2.0 conference in San Francisco.

Now to get the point of my post, all this Web 2.0 stuff is very impressive and I'm sure we're only at the tip of the iceburg, but what really amazes me is that all these new web services, user interfaces and technologies are built on standards developed during the 1970's and 80s.

Take for example HTTP, the protocol by which web pages are delivered to your browser. Without it there would be no World Wide Web, and yet it's now almost 20 years old.

It's a sad fact that development is being hindered because we've reached the limits of some of these technologies. HTTP is essentially stateless and was never designed to handle interactivity or transactions and unfortunately these are fundamental parts of the web 2.0 philosophy.

I smiled when I read a recent quote from Don Box a Microsoft Architect who also co-authored SOAP. He said;

"If we continue to rely on HTTP we will melt the Internet"

Maybe he's right, but in the meantime there is still plenty that can be done with the likes of AJAX and by adding to and remixing what's already out there.

"Right" I commented out loud "What do I do now?" I had a look round the office and I realised that I left the lights on in the kitchen, and I thought it suitable to turn them off. I had no idea the amount of diesel in the tank - as I was unsure as to how long the generator had been run since the last time it was filled, although I know there is enough diesel to keep the company running for about 18 hours, but was that just the computer rooms or does that include lights, laptops, base units and monitors?

Again, being on my own gave me the ability to think out loud, "let's have a look to see whose left their monitor on" I began to count, turning them off as I found them 1, 2, 3, 4, 5 … I quickly lost count.

To my point, and I refer back to Jim’s previous blog "According to PC Pro an average 50-person business could shave £5,000 off its annual electricity bill by implementing a 'Switch IT Off' policy." – This has a greater relevance when it comes to services. I don’t know the exact maths, but just by turning off your monitor and base unit it could give the generator an extra couple of minutes running time which could mean the difference between running out of diesel and potentially losing core services (Unity Web, Talis Base, Talis.com, email, phones etc…) and giving our electricity provider a chance to power our building back up.

The quiet after the storm;

During the morning there was another power failure, and on inspection of the generator room, it gave the following metrics: Ran for 1 hour 4 minutes leaving approximately 17 hours of diesel – I have one further question - in light of the imminent fuel crisis; how do we refill our diesel tank?

I’ve been meaning to try Microsoft's new O/S for some time but I’ve been lacking a spare PC with sufficient grunt. So, having recently installed a copy of VMWare Workstation on my laptop I thought I’d try it in a Virtual Machine instead.

To my surprise the installation went reasonably well, the only problem being a 640x480 resolution with 4-bit colour and no network connectivity. This was cured following a bit of tinkering and installation of VMWare tools.

Internet Explorer 7.0 seems pretty stable, the tabbed browsing and support for RSS sorry Web Feeds is also welcome, but I still prefer Mozilla Firefox.

I thought it would be interesting to try some Talis apps. Talis Prism seems to work with no problems as does Talis List and Signpost.

I also tried Talis Alto, which seems to work fine, despite Vista failing the Alto compatibility Test.

All in all it's been a pretty successful experiment. Performance considering it's running in a Virtual Machine is impressive and so far I like what I've seen.

Finally, please excuse the bad pun in the title of this post. You can blame Adrian for that.

I spent Monday discussing among other things, the LUN design for a new SAN at a customer site, progress on our evolving disaster recovery plans and software licensing. I completed a Server build for another Talis customer, began developing and testing an inhouse podcasting environment and reviewed quotes for AV upgrades in our offices.

On Tuesday I finally got around to setting up a VMWare environment and registering my MSDN subscription. VMWare has come on in leaps and bounds since I last tried it in the dark old days of RedHat 5.x. In no time at all I had RedHat Enterprise 4.0 ES and Windows Sever 2003 running as Virtual machines on my laptop. I now have my own DNS, Active Directory and SQL Server 2000 in an isolated test environment. Next comes SharePoint Portal Server and Project Portal Server 2003. So far performance and stability has been pretty impressive and it compares well with MS Virtual PC.

On Wednesday I became embroiled in a couple of customer support issues, the worst of which being a corrupt Solaris kernel. We also rolled out MS Office 2003 to all members of staff and just to keep me on my toes we had a power outage just as I was leaving the building. Still it was a good test of our generator and UPS!

Thursday was an interesting day, not least because I had back to back meetings between 9.30am and 6pm. We met two suppliers to discuss future partnerships and various new technical initiatives. One of which involved a non-disclosure agreement so I can't talk about that just yet. Still both meetings went well and will certainly be keeping me busy over the next few months.

During the same week other members of the team have been looking at enhancing our Server monitoring, patching Servers as part of the Server Hardening Service, rolling out Windows Server Update Services (WSUS) and analysing initial results from Lyra Health checks.

We looked at authentication protocols including WEP and it was not too difficult to decide to use the 802.1x framework for our wireless LANs. With WEP all access points and client radio NICs on a particular wireless LAN must use the same encryption key. In order to use different keys, each access point and radio NIC must manually be configured. This might not be too much of a concern for smaller networks but the task of renewing keys on a network with over 100 clients seemed an administration nightmare. If keys are not updated often then an unauthorised person with a sniffing tool, such as AirSnort or WEPcrack, can monitor the network for less than a day and decode the encrypted messages.

The use of 802.1X offers us an effective framework for authenticating and controlling user traffic to a protected network, as well as dynamically varying encryption keys.

Thinking about cost savings further, what about the equipment you already own? I've recently read in PC Pro Magazine about a campaign they've started called Switch IT Off. The articles reveal some quite startling facts and figures regarding how much electricity is needlessly consumed every day.

For example a PC that spends most of its time idle will draw between 100W and 200W of power and could cost around £100 per year to run. If that same PC is running SETI@home or dare I say it the MARC21 conversion screen saver currently doing the rounds at Talis, the cost suddenly leaps to nearer £200.

The argument for staff turning their PCs off before they leave the office at night suddenly becomes quite compelling.

And it's not just PCs. Think about all those peripherals, the printers, the scanners, and the monitors all of which consuming needless electricity.

According to PC Pro an average 50-person business could shave £5,000 off its annual electricity bill by implementing a 'Switch IT Off' policy. I wonder how many Universities and County Councils have these policies in place?

At Talis nearly all staff now have laptops so that they are able to work flexibly at home, in the office or at customer sites. Laptops while being less powerful have the added advantage that they also draw less power.

I strongly recommend you read the articles for yourself, by implementing such a policy not only will you be saving money but you'll be helping the environment as well.

Visit the Switch IT Off website for more details.

After the ‘Mac mini experience’ i started to explore some of the other options to see if I could build my own small server as an alterative to the mini. For the project I had specific media streaming role in mind, and it needed to small quiet and be pretty cheap to make it worthwhile doing.

A short investigation revealed a number of low power options that are emerging in the market place, a couple of interesting platforms that I thought were worth noting are the CE/Xpe/linux based HP thin clients over at (http://www.hp.ca/products/static/thinclients/), and the Linux or Solaris based Jbox from Via/Sun (http://www.igojava.com/products.htm) it’s orange! not purple :-). Also a mention has to go to the ‘build you own’ custom pc’s over at http://www.mini-itx.com/ if you’ve got 5 take a look.

The various platforms all had there merits and worked out vastly cheaper than a typical ‘server’, offering a solution that would suit users that didn’t need all the bells and whistles, but in the end they offered a similar spec to the mini for a similar price.

That’s when I came across another option based on the open source project unslung (http://www.nslu2-linux.org/wiki/Unslung/HomePage). The base for the server is a Linksys NSLU2 box, this is sold to be a small NAS server, but using the unslung firmware is transformed into a self-contained mini Linux server with a 133Mhz cpu, 32Mb of memory, and twin usb for expansion.

I ordered the ‘Slug’ and as soon a it arrived set about upgrading it with the unslung linux distribution, unlocked the cpu to 266Mhz, added a couple of 256Mb thumb drives for storage, installed Gcc, Perl, SSH and the Slimserver (http://www.slimdevices.com/) media steaming software I wanted to use.

I have ended up with a tiny spec server, much smaller than the original Mac mini I had in mind, yet still capable of steaming mp3’s, various radio stations and pod casts around my home. It’s ¼ of physical the size of the mini, a fraction of the cost, completely silent and meets all the requirements I started out with perfectly. It servers as a good example of how little you can get away with, if you spend a little time to remove unnecessary services and configure a small server for a dedicated task.

So how much power do you really need? Obviously that depends on what you want to do, but if the majority of your day is spent with emails, web based applications and few basic office apps, you can probably get away with a lot less than you think.

I guess what I’m saying is, if you are ready for an upgrade don’t just opt for latest 3Ghz+ monster, have a look at the alternatives out there and make sure what your buying meets your actual needs, not just what you think you need.

If you only need to run one or two services for a small work group have a look to see what can be configured to make them more efficient and take a look at some of the lower power server options you could run them on.

Configured correctly you should be able to make a cost saving not only on the purchase costs, but the backup costs, maintenance costs, and even the electricity costs to run the things. It really is worth looking into.

So next time your out looking for new kit, just think how much ‘power’ do I really need.

When we moved to this building 324 days ago one of the first things we started was a complete review of our Business Continuity and Emergency Preparedness Procedures. This soon expanded to be a full review of all our business risks and procedures.

We followed the classical business continuity model of analyse your business, assess the risks, develop your strategy, develop your plan, rehearse your plan.

So armed with this model we started the process of scenario based risk assessments the “what happens ifs”. At each phase we found that there were many things that could be improved to eliminate risks from being realised and applying the “fix as we find” approach seamed like a good start. Little did I know about how much work both physical and mental this would involve and once you find a problem how much it plays on your mind until it is solved.

We started from the outside of the building and worked our way back to the core IT infrastructure. Whether this approach was right I am not sure, maybe starting at each end and meeting in the middle would have been better. But we are where we are and after introducing a whole new Health and Safety policy, the associated emergency procedures, safe systems of work, a planned preventative maintenance programme, a whole new IT policy framework, increasing the resilience of our servers, introducing service monitoring with preventative alerting, full physical perimeter security and surveillance, secure offsite storage of key paper based information (I could go on) we find ourselves far better equipped now than when we started. But we are not there yet and our next course of action will be to start collocating some of our core services in partnership with some market leading hosting companies (but that experience is for another blog entry).

However to get back to the point my experience has been that this process doesn’t and shouldn’t finish, Business Continuity might be the label but it probes in to all areas of the business and every physical nook and cranny contained within it. There are always things that can be done better and we can truly learn from every incident and investigation. But one of my strongest observations has been that unless you actually take the time to look, you never actually see the problems and can walk past, under or over them without even realising and the most common, harmless object can become an incident waiting to happen.

And finally be warned, as you start to look in detail at the risks, as if by magic those risks are woken from their slumber to be realised just before the work begins to remove then. In some cases I’m talking hours, they know you know!!! So plan for the expected and the un-expected.