scandals of an ITian

A few thought below re the ACC increases for bikers.

A rider can only be on one bike at one time therefore the risk profile of any person cannot be raised regardless of the size and number of bikes he or she owns.

The ACC risk profile of bikers apparently includes those who race or who go on one of the many weekend off road races or gatherings and accidents on farms including 4×4s are included. None of these situations require machines to be are registered for the road. Take these out and the statistics begin to improve dramatically. We are currently expected to subsidise the above which is not right.

Add in the number of accidents caused by car drivers (around 60% I believe). If its user pays then car drivers are being subsidised by us not the other way around. This needs to be reversed.

Any ACC levies should be attached to the individual’s licence rather than each machine. We know 10% of the drunks and drug abusers cause 90% of the problems, recidivism is alive an well. Attach levies to those who are breaking the law e.g. 20 demerit points = $200 pro rata up to 95 points =$950 levy before you can register or warrant your car or bike  for road use. This would soon stop the dangerous people hitting us.

Put the levies into driver education and introduce a better graduated system such as in Japan.

Finally its rather obvious what this government is doing, we are not all stupid sheep as they may think.

The minister creates a huge issue by saying ACC is costing mega bucks, he then scares people into thinking they must pay very much more.

Once the higher levies are in place this then becomes attractive to insurance companies and he gets to sell off ACC.

Competition and choice is a catch-phrase or right wing governments without social conscience (like ours).

Hang on… ACC is the best and cheapest system in the world envied by many countries far more litigious than ours where lawyers cream a great living from other peoples loss and grief. Do we want to go there? ACC was set up as a service NOT a business and that’s actually OK.

Look what happened with railways  or power generation, distribution and supply – when it was GVT owned the infrastructure was in place. Introduce the profit motive and things are cheaper for a while then it all changes as profits go offshore and infrastructure is run down through lack of investment .

Come on Kiwis make your protest, put in your submission, see your MP. Lets not roll over and accept the lies and half truths we are being fed.

David Croft

About  the Author

David Croft works for Central TAS as a Programme Manager for the Regional Mental Health and Addiction Services Department. A keen motorbiker who would rather be riding along with his kids on a nice day in Wellington.

If you would like to get in touch with David you could email him @ david_croftATcentraltas.co.nz

Post Update by Aben Samuel

A new Video postsed on Youtube

ACC Shafts the little guy

The objective of this blog post is to give an inside tour of the EBS 2008 setup that I currently look after and also to kick start the EBS 2008 series of posts.

History:-

When I joined the firm that I currently work for about a year ago we were using:-

1. Lotus Notes for Email
2. Mail Marshall and Web Marshall for Anti-Spam and Proxy services.
3. Windows 2000 Domain
4. Several Windows 2003 servers performing several functionalities for the network.
5. Symantec Anti-Virus
6. Mix of XP SP1 and SP2 machines.

We were part of a domain forest that was maintained and looked after by a government entity down in New Zealand. So policies and procedures had to be followed based on a wider scale and was quite limited and not to the needs of our organization.

Finally towards the end of 2008, the management made a Strategic decision to move the whole infrastructure out of this forest and take complete ownership of the network. Search for a solution lead to EBS 2008.

Reasoning:-

1. Best and complete solution for Email, Security and Management for an SME size organization.
2. Affordable than buying the different applications separately for eg: Exchange server 2007, Windows 2008 Server, Forefront Threat Management.
3. Customized and optimized installation procedure.
4. Provided more functionality and features than SBS 2008.

Planning and Testing Phase:-

Due to the nature of the setup of the network, the EBS 2008 network had to be built completely separate from the existing infrastructure. This meant going out shopping for a couple of IBM blade servers, Cisco Router, SAN drives and a brand new ISP. I know paradise for an IT pro

The purchases were completed and work was started on the planning stages of EBS. EBS 2008 standard consists of 3 different servers and the premium version has an additional server. Since we had licenses for SQL Enterprise Edition the need to purchase Enterprise version of EBS did not suffice.

The standard version consists of the following:-

1. Management Server
2. Security Server
3. Messaging Server

And the enterprise version consists of all the above servers in addition to a Windows 2008 Standard Server with SQL server 2008 Standard. This blog post at this stage would only cover EBS 2008 Standard.

One of the initial problems that I faced at the initial planning stages was that I needed 3 different blades to host EBS 2008. I could only free 2 blades and would have been overkill with the amount of RAM. Even if I could come up with another blade I had issues assigning a second network card to any one of the blades to perform the functionalities of Security Server which requires 2 sets of Network cards.

Answer: Virtualization

I clearly remember that it was during that month that Citrix went on to releasing Citrix Hypervisor Version 5 for free with Enterprise features. With both the blades on Citrix Hypervisors I started to build the EBS 2008 test environment. (Install number 1). Ran into a lot of issues with I/O, networking and so forth (sorry it was quite a while back) and I was desperate for another solution. I had already implemented ESXI on some of the servers in the old network and so was comfortable with it. But I guess I was like a kid in a candy store when Citrix announced its release.

ESXI was easy in a lot of ways. It is a straight forward product for SME’s who want to get the benefits of virtualization but don’t want pay for the enterprise features of ESX. Yes there is a new player on the group and a post on Hyper V vs. Esxi deserves another day.

Installation of EBS 2008:-

This was happening in March 2009. There wasn’t much documentation available for EBS 2008. Got all the stuff from TechNet printed out and read it a few times over. There isn’t much information available in the documentation towards Clean new Installs and of course couple it with a lot of ignorance led to a few sleepless nights. But finally my test installation number 8, yep number EIGHT went smooth and I was happy with it.

Had a lot of help from these boys up on twitter who I would reckon are at this stage EBS 2008 guru’s @philippmuller , @PortlandITGuy , @michaelsainz , @nztechtweet , @LeonSodhi and I am sure I am missing a few more around here but at the end of the post will be a list of all the resources for EBS 2008 available on twitter.

Funny enough the final production installation for EBS 2008 was completed when I took a couple of days off and went to AKL to relax. Since our setup involved placing a router in front of the security server, meant that towards the end of the installation of the security server I had to do a couple of things

1. Replace the DHCP service from the router.
2. Change the IP address of the router so that it could be swapped with the internal IP address of the security server or the EBS 2008 LAN IP.

The above steps involved me talking with @kathrynwilson24 over the phone and getting her to copy paste a few pages of Cisco config. But finally the installation was stable and ready.

Since the ISO’s were all loaded up onto the Esxi Datastores meant that there was no need for physical proximity with the server room. This is quite the boon for SME’s who have maximum of 2 or 3 IT pro’s working for them. Since the ISO’s are always present on the server meant that the ability to do remote backup and restore of VM’s was quite simple and easy.

EBS installation though would seem like quite a straightforward process, is in fact not an easy one to tackle or at least it wasn’t one for me. But with each installation I grew more knowledgeable about what shouldn’t be done or how to fix some certain installation bug such as the .net sp3 installation just wouldn’t for the love of GOD install on its own. The trick around it was also quite neat though!

3^rd party software’s that’s used with EBS network

1. Shadow Protect for Backups
2. Trend Worry Free Business Security Advanced
3. Esxi Hypervisor
4. Twitter (lol)

I am currently writing posts on Shadow Protect and Trend and how they been with EBS 2008 but that is for later. Cut the story short they have been perfect and would recommend them with a blind eye.

Additional Information for EBS:-

There is a lot of information about what Essential Business Server 2008 available

EBS Homepage , EBS Team Blog , EBS Technical FAQ , Facebook Page

There is also a Yahoo user group focussing solely on EBS and SBS 2008 products. There are lot of posts on technical issues and solutions faced by several EBS users from around the world.

Folks to follow on Twitter who are nothing less than Guru’s on EBS 2008:-

@philippmuller , @PortlandITGuy , @michaelsainz , @nztechtweet , @LeonSodhi , @stevenabanks , @ababinchak , @thirdtier , @WindowsEBS , @markstan , @carlcs , @nking .

After an hour of scrutinizing I have finally fixed my sessions and quite happy with it. Few of them have double session since I wasn’t able to decide on them. Maybe towards the date I can…

Pretty tight schedule.