Not updated here in a while, apologies. Have put aside a spare few minutes to update the readers on what's been going on down under.
Josh and Kate are fantastic, as ever. "Uncle Ste" got a tick in his 'looking after the kids' book the other day - I helped joshie pick out his pyjamas and get dressed. Add that to the other feats of childcare: making breakfast, putting a train set together, buckling and unbuckling the car seats, and fixing toys. Not yet been on toilet duty - am hoping that by the time it gets round to my turn, they'll both be old enough to look after themselves, heh heh..
Gordon and Collette are still great hosts, hats off to them for putting up with me for 6 months. Am still loving this house next to the racecourse, even if the online gambling is not yet making any profit. G+C are still happy with their 4wd - a Nissan Patrol. Now we have a UHF Radio which is great fun to listen on as anyone who knows me knows I love the whole two-way comms stuff. We've been on some pretty darned good off-roading jaunts. The favourite one at the moment is heading over to the quarry with the telescopes and Gordon's very fancy camera for some stargazing. Just far enough out of town to get away from the glare, and down in a big hole so all you can see is stars (and occasional shooting ones at that). Got quite comfy on a large tractor tyre looking up at the sky, only to get ridiculed when walking into the 24hr petrol station for a spring roll on the way back, as I was covered in black marks apparantly. Honestly, you'd think people would at least clean their old rubbish before throwing it in a quarry...
And now for some geeky stuff, if the folks at Agilisys/CCC are still reading here that is. The last 6 weeks or so has seen my time monopolised by a rather large server project. There's still a few things to iron out, but we can now consider ourselves at the end of the project.
Before: 3 separate, disjoined domains run by steam-powered boxes I wouldn't even use as a smoothwall host :)
After: 6 brand spanking new serv0rs spread over 3 sites with a WAN infrastructure to make Patty and the comms team extremely jealous.
The DC at the main site is windows 2008 64bit with exchange 2007, running DHCP, DNS etc. The file server is also 2008 64bit with a few terabytes of storage and an LTO-4 backup drive. There's also a couple of win2003R2 boxes- one running SQL, the other running ISA.
At each of the other two sites there's one Win 2008 64bit DC, joined and replicating to the same AD Domain as the DC at the main site. These boxes also have a few gigs of filing on there as well as the local site users' profiles.
Doesn't sound like much, but starting from scratch it's been quite a lot of work. We've had major fun with Server 2008 and Trend - lots of conversations with Microsoft & Trend Micro and plenty workarounds tried out by both parties, just to come to the conclusion that we can't backup the system state on a 2008 box with Trend installed. Boo for trend. We keep getting promised that a fix is around the corner, but we're still holding our breath on that one.
Still on an IT-related theme, I passed the first of my MCSA core exams last month. Am now studying for the second of eventually 5 exams to hopefully obtain MCSA status. 3 More windows 2003 exams, one exchange 2007 and probably ISA 2006 to finish off with. So that'll be eating up what little spare time we seem to get round here.
Not long now till the family will be visiting. Mum and Paul are heading over mid-October, and Dad and Shirl are coming over mid-December. Don't even think I'm prepared for the Australian summer heat yet and I've been here six months, so not sure what coming from the UK climate straight into 40+/30+ (max/min) temperatures is going to do to us pommies. We look forward to finding out though, tee hee :) Cold beer on standby, steaks on the barbie. It's hard life but someone's gotta do it.
Work has given me a new phone - well second-hand cos the previous owner left - but it's still new to me. Only thing is the camera's not brilliant so until I remember to take my Canon ixus I5 (thanks to Neilos for the recommendation in buying it - it's still great!) around with me, there's not too many new photo's to post. I bet you're getting sick of nice sunsets and sunny weather anyway. Or jealous? :)
Well, if you're still with me, reading this far, thanks for your attention. Not heard from many of you recently but I do still think about the happy days in the Northern Hemisphere - Lorne farm, Thomson St, Agilisys, Five Live Sport, Match of the Day. Oh, and (just to remind you Andeh) Hed Kandi and Pubwatch. Still a Fan :)
Steeevo, signing off.