DjMagra's stuff 'n' stuff

Disaster Recovery for Microsoft Exchange with Google Message Continuity

February 15, 2011 Daragh No comments

The recent spate of natural disasters here in Australia has had many of my clients talking to me (and in general) about Disaster Recovery in the cloud for their IT Infrastructure. DR to the cloud is an ideal first step for many businesses considering cloud computing, it allows for a inexpensive, scalable, offsite infrastructure that can be called upon to in the event of a disaster scenario arising.

With impeccable timing for those of us in Australia, Google has just introduced Google Message Continuity, a hosted DR solution for on-premise Microsoft Exchange mailservers.

Google Message Continuity is a robust, easy to implement Disaster Recovery Solution using their leading cloud computing infrastructure to compliment an existing Microsoft Exchange environment. Google Message Continuity provides dual delivery and message state synchronisation between users Outlook clients and Gmail, allowing users to continue to work in Gmail in the event of an outage / disaster scenario affecting the on-premise Microsoft Exchange environment.

Here is a short video overview of how GMC works:

If you’re interested in learning more about how GMC can be used in your organisation, please send me an email

Cloud Computing Cloud, Disaster Recover, Email, Exchange, Google, Infrastructure, Message Continuity, Postini

Queensland Floods – Jan 2011

January 15, 2011 Daragh No comments

This post has been put together more with my international audience in mind that those here in Australia, who are very much aware of the ongoing situation here.

Queensland, Australia is currently struggling to recover from a natural disaster of epic proportions that saw up to 80% of the state underwater at some stage over the past two weeks. To put that into perspective, 80% of Queensland equates to an area twice the size of Texas (largest state in the US), an area larger than France & Germany combined, or an area 6 times the size of the UK!

Through the crisis, 16 people are confirmed to have lost their lives, with over 20 people still missing. On top of this, tens of thousands of people have had their homes & businesses completely destroyed.

The flooding has affected regional Queensland as well as major urban centers such as my home city, Brisbane, with a population of over 2 million people. However, now that the water has started to recede, the mammoth task of cleaning up the state has begun. This has been an amazing experience that has brought out the best in everyone. The affected streets are literally packed full of people helping out those that were affected, cleaning, scrubbing and trying to repair. On top of that, other crazy cool initiatives have kicked off, such as #bakedrelief on Twitter, which has seen people get together to cook & bake for volunteers assisting with the cleanup efforts. It’s truly amazing and inspiring to see so much good happening around the place.

Every little bit that can be done to assist the recovery effort is most appreciated. If you are able to dig deep and donate to the Queensland Premier’s Disaster Relief Fund if would be very much appreciated by so many.

Finally, thankfully, I managed to escape any flood damage which puts me in a category of very lucky people (a relatively small group!). Yes, we may have gone without power for a few days and business around the city may be shut down and disrupted for several weeks, but in the overall scheme of things, it’s minor.

Below, I have included some further photos which I have taken over the past few days. There is a larger collection in this flickr set

Australia Australia, BNE, Brisbane, Flood, Flooding, Floods, Queensland

Installing SSD to 2010 model 15″ MacBook Pro

December 30, 2010 Daragh 1 comment

Ok, so I’m putting this blog post together for those of you who have a 2010 model 15″ MacBook Pro (Model Identifier MacBookPro6,2) - which is what my below experience has been with, however, I’m thinking that most MacBook’s will exhibit similar issues. I have spent a few hours more than planned today trying to get my new SSD to work with my Mac for various reasons.

I purchased myself a nice new OCZ Vertex 2 SSD as my Mac was due a rebuild and on the back of recently having bumped my memory up to 8GB RAM, it was an obvious choice to continue my quest for speed and performance out of my machine. Thinking the process would be relatively straightforward as I was planning a clean install, I ran a Time Machine backup of my original disk before replacing the old HDD with my new SSD.

Upon attempting booting from the retail version of the Snow Leopard DVD, I noticed that my mac was getting stuck on the grey Apple startup screen and going no further. I also noticed that the CPU was caught in a race condition and generating a lot of heat.

My next step led me to discover that macs like to see a disk created with a GUID as opposed to a MBR, so I connected my SSD to an external enclosure, booted into OS X from my original HDD and performed the following in Disk Utility:

Disk Utility > Disk > Partition Scheme > Assign Partition > Options > Set to GUID

From here, I replaced the SSD as the primary drive for the machine and proceeded with a reboot, from the Snow Leopard DVD. Again, I was presented with the same Grey Apple screen and CPU race.

Next, I attempted to boot from the OS Install DVD which came with my laptop (it features OS X 10.6.3 (as opposed to 10.6 on the retail DVD) and strangely enough, the machine began to work through the boot and install process without any problems.

I’m not sure of the fact that I had set the disk to a GUID system made any difference in the end, but certainly if you notice this type of behaviour whilst installing an SSD into you MacBook Pro, I would certainly suggest changing to GUID and also using a disk that has at least 10.6.3 on it.

I can also say that if you’re considering an SSD but unsure if you will really see the benefits from the upgrade, just go ahead and do it. The speed differential is very noticeable – and if you’re running an SSD in combination with a lot of RAM and 64 bit mode enabled you will be seriously impressed by the performance you see.

General, Technology apple, Mac, MacBook Pro, OS X, SSD, Technology, Tips, Troubleshooting

Enable 64 Bit mode for OS X (Snow Leopard)

October 21, 2010 Daragh 1 comment

I have been battling for quite some time with constantly running out of RAM on my MacBook Pro. Whilst I have 4GB of RAM – it’s just never enough (8GB upgrade going to be happening on my upcoming US trip methinks!).

However, I got tipped over the edge whilst trying to do some work today and decided to look for a quick fix. One of the suggestions I saw was to boot my OS into 64 bit mode. Given one of the key features of Snow Leopard Technology is the fact that it’s built as 64 bit from the ground up, it always puzzled me that they didn’t enable a 64 bit kernel by default. Of course, the reason behind this is to try and increase compatibility with non 64 bit hardware etc, but it still is a pain.

In order to enable a 64 bit kernel, you can approach this a few ways. The quickest and easiest way is to hold down the 6 and 4 keys just after you power up your Mac. This will boot you into 64 bit mode for that session only (ie. next time you reboot you will be back to 32 bit mode).

In order to verify that you have booted into 64 bit mode, go to Apple > About this Mac and click on Software, where you will see the 64 bit kernel flag set to yes, as per below:

But, it would be good if you could make this a more permanent fixture, right?! This can be done pretty easily by firing up Terminal and editing the following file:

/Library/Preferences/SystemConfiguration/com.apple.Boot.plist

In here, you will need to add the following kernel flag

arch=x86_64

Which should leave you with a file that looks like the following:

Once you have done this, you should notice a decent increase in performance and far better memory management

Technology 64 bit, apple, Geek, Mac, osx, Tech, Tweaking

Telstra’s (illegal?) Customer Service Fail

August 15, 2010 Daragh No comments

As we all well know, Apple’s iPhone 4 is the current must-have gadget. As a self confessed Apple ‘fan boy’, I’ve been looking forward to getting my hands on an iPhone 4 since it was first announced.

As I’m a Telstra Business customer, I have been patiently waiting for Telstra to allow for the iPhone 4 to be distributed amongst it’s business channel. For some reason, they have made the decision to release the phone only to their consumer channel first – and despite my having some pretty good contacts within Telstra itself, I have had to wait to get my hands on it.

I did try to purchase one in the Apple Store last week – but apparently they can only sell to Telstra’s non-business customers so I had no joy there!

So yesterday, as I was wandering around Brisbane CBD with some time to spare, I decided to try calling into the Telstra T-Life store to see if they have any in stock. I know from previous experience that they can in fact sell to business – even if they are likely to screw things up (again, have had that experience).

I was quite pleased and excited to hear that they did in fact have iPhones in stock – only to be cut down seconds later and explained that they are only prepared to sell these to new – and not existing customers!!

I was amazed! Talk about a blatant disregard for existing loyal customers. How many of these existing customers must Telstra be loosing every day who get disgruntled with this response and walk next door to a Vodafone / Optus store and buy from there?

I’m tempted to even look into the legality of this. Telstra are openly discriminating against a particular demographic and refusing to sell them a product that they have in stock. If anyone has an insight into this I would be very interested to hear.

General apple, Customer Service, iPhone, Telstra

Hosted (Cloud) Desktops – your thoughts?!

July 3, 2010 Daragh 1 comment

I’ve been doing a lot of thinking around the subject of hosted desktops recently. Anyone familiar with Cloud Computing concepts will be well aware of two main cloud computing areas – Software as a Service (something along the lines of Salesforce.com or Google Apps) or Infrastructure as a Service, which is generally considered server infrastructure as a service (think Amazon AWS). AWS is a really, really good IaaS platform, but it’s very server & storage centric. For example, all the standard Amazon AMI’s (machine images) are for server OS’s (Windows 2008 server and the likes).

People are comfortable and familiar with the concepts of having their email or server infrastructure in the cloud, but not so much with the concept of having a desktop in the cloud. What if you had your Windows 7 or Mac OSX instance running in the cloud, available and accessible to you everywhere? Do you see this as being a problem? Are you comfortable with the concept? The same types of questions will arise for cloud desktops as they do for cloud email / storage solutions, namely:

Is my data secure?
Who owns my data?
Can I get my data back / move it if I want to?
Where is it hosted?
Who has access to my data?

But, my question is, do you have other concerns about you desktop living in the cloud? All of the above questions I can easily address (and I do every single day!). I can think that network connectivity and latency will be key concerns. But what else? Method of access will be a concern, especially for corporates thinking of moving desktop infrastructure to the cloud. What do they do with all their existing hardware? What do they give their staff going forward, netbooks & thin clients?

And what about cost? In the past few weeks, I have spoken to several companies considering a move to hosted desktop solutions. But cost is a concern and this is something that I’m currently trying to evaluate and understand fully. Is a hosted desktop solution really cheaper in the long run than in-house infrastructure? Sure, you don’t need the capital outlay upfront that say an upgrade in desktop os, or hardware would be, you don’t need to pay for power and maintenance, but you do still need to pay for an access terminal.

And another key question – is hosted desktops really cloud computing? To cloud computing purists, the cloud revolves around SaaS as opposed to IaaS. Is hosted desktops something that is here to stay, or simply a stop gap measure for people until all relevant software can be packaged as a SaaS offering.

I will do a deeper dive into the technical aspects of hosted desktops in the near future, but for now I’m really interested in feedback via comments or email on peoples thoughts on this concept.

Cloud Computing, Technology Amazon AWS, Cloud Computing, Google Apps, Opinion, SaaS, Technology

MacBook Pro high res screen

July 3, 2010 Daragh No comments

I recently picked myself up a new 15″ MacBook Pro. Beautiful, beautiful machine. One of the pre-requisites that I had when buying this was that I got the High Res 1680 x 1050 screen with it. And oh my, am I glad that I did!

Some people may think that the extra $140 for a few extra pixels is overkill. However, I can assure you that once you start using it, you will agree that it’s not. This screen is so beautiful and such a joy to work with. I now notice that when I move to any other machine, be that my 24″ iMac or Kassie’s identical MacBook Pro (without the high res screen) that I think they look really pixelated and small.

If you are in the market for a new MBP, please, please do yourself the favour and buy this screen.

General, Mac apple, Mac, MacBook Pro, Tech

MacBook Trackpad Tips

June 21, 2010 Daragh No comments

I’ve been using a new model MacBook Pro quite a bit recently and I have finally figured out what all the hype is about the MacBook Glass Trackpad. There are so many different shortcuts and time saving tips that make this a true joy to work with and really does leave you scratching your head wondering what the hell every other laptop manufacturer out there is doing.

I thought I would share some of the tips I’ve picked up recently as I know that a lot of people aren’t aware of these features.

One finger is for regular movement of the cursor.
Two fingers in either an up-down or side-to-side motion functions like the scroll bar allowing for easy navigation within an application, on web pages and in other documents.
A turning of your fingers rotates objects such as photos while a pinching motion will zoom in or out on the page or object.
Three fingers swiping side-to-side works like as forward and backward navigation and is just outstanding for web browsing or even navigating around within the Finder.
A four-finger swipe side to-side brings up the application switcher, (similar to Cmd-Tab).
Four fingers swiping up clears the screen of all open windows for easy access to the desktop, while a swipe down opens up the Expose view of all open windows.

Technology apple, Features, Laptop, Mac, MacBook, Pro, Tips, Trackpad

Australian inflight WiFi

May 26, 2010 Daragh No comments

As someone who flies quiet a bit for both business and pleasure and is likely going to see that increase over the coming months, having to disconnect from my laptop / phone for the hour or two that I am in the air is a major hassle. Sure, I could read offline content or watch a tv show / movie, but that’s not really what I want to be doing. If I had the ability to continue to work, or communicate via Twitter / chat or stay updated with the news, it would make a massive difference.

Ask anyone who has flown across the US recently about the benefits of inflight WiFi and you will find almost everyone a fan. It’s also a service that people are more than happy to pay for and I too would be one of those. Given the current state of the airline industry globally, you would think that any revenue stream would be most welcome.

However, it would appear that neither of the big two Australian airlines Qantas or Virgin Blue have any concrete plans in place to provide inflight WiFi at any stage soon. I spoke to a friend of mine who is a Qantas engineer about this very topic last night and he confirmed that Qantas have looked at it using pico-cell technology and have even run a tial, but currently it is not on the priority list to deliver. His thoughts are that even when they do come to look into it, it’s likely to be on international flights before it hits the domestic market. This doesn’t make sense to me, surely the high volume domestic business traffic would be the best return on investment for the airlines?

Whilst the fact that they are looking into it is welcoming, the fact that they are investigating using pico-cell technology is disheartening. This is likely to lead to a slow and expensive sattelite based solution that is going to make media rich, content heavy use impossible. There are much better alternatives available, utilising existing mobile phone technology which is far more cost friendly and faster and in fact, it is this type of technology that is powering most of the US based inflight WiFi services.

There is a more indepth review of the airlines plans dating back to March this year in this article from The Australian.

I would be interested in hearing from anyone who has experience of the airlines plans, their thoughts and when we might expect to hear something.

General Australia, flying, Internet, qantas, Travel, virgin blue, Work

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Queensland Floods – Jan 2011

Installing SSD to 2010 model 15″ MacBook Pro

Enable 64 Bit mode for OS X (Snow Leopard)

Telstra’s (illegal?) Customer Service Fail

MacBook Pro high res screen

MacBook Trackpad Tips

Australian inflight WiFi

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