Problems = Opportunities?

That's what the corporate suit trainers and life coaches would have you believe, any way.

Putting consideration of positive mental attitude to one side the move, nevertheless, has opened up some opportunities. For a start, the garage in the new house is detached from the house but has a good mains power supply. Best of all, I'm allowed to drill through the walls!!

So, job number 1 as part of the move was to run some trunking between the house and garage and install a pair of CAT6 cables to act as tie-lines between house and server farm. While I was at it, another CAT6 cable was run from my new ground-floor study up into the loft space and further lines run down from there to the room where Louise now has her study and the main bedroom. This allows the wireless (WiFi) access point and a small network switch to be sited in the loft - out of sight (and harm's way!) and - with high-gain antennae installed - to broadcast a strong 802.11g signal throughout the house.

As home networks go, this is close to nirvana. The computers in the house are mostly now on a gigabit backbone connection that ties to the similar setup in the garage. Hence, file transfers and backups now take place at lightning-fast speed. The laptops get a solid 54Mbps connection - and this without the repeater I was forced to deploy previously. It's been raining of late so I haven't tried to read my emails on the patio - yet. But, when I do, I'm pretty sure there'll be a solid connection there too - and if not, there's always the WiFi repeater now sitting in the cupboard to extend the range.

Who said moving was easy?

While on our U.S. trip, Louise and I had decided that it was pretty daft continuing to maintain two houses - especially as they were 30 miles apart and our weeks were spent driving up and down the A19 - one of England's less attractive trunk roads. So, a plan was hatched ...

I've been living in rented accommodation for the past two years so giving up "my" house was an easy decision to take. The problems started to appear as soon as we began thinking through how to squeeze two lots of possessions into one space. Thankfully, neither of us are particularly "precious" about most of our possessions and we are both extremely tolerant of the few things we each have that are held dear to our hearts.

But, where most people moving in together have the problems of wardrobe space and deciding whose furniture to keep, those considerations were just the starting point for us. In my case, I arrive with a whole lot more "baggage" than the norm: the cars, the computers, the recording gear ...

Two things quickly became clear: If we were to set up home together this side of Christmas, we would have to move into Louise's existing 4-bed house and all thoughts of (sensibly) looking for a new home big enough to hold all our stuff would have to wait and ... the move itself was going to be a major exercise requiring some careful planning - and not a little bit of luck!

The search for a garage-friendly Outlook replacement

This quest started innocently enough - a desire to ditch Exchange Server and increasing frustration with Outlook. Managing an Exchange Server environment is a big enough job inside an enterprise - even when you can employ someone to do it. Now that I no longer own an international software business, I no longer have someone to run the servers for me - which shouldn't be a problem as theory suggests that life should have become somewhat simpler.

Not so ...

... I have developed multiple personalities - not in the hearing-voices sense but in my professional and personal activities. I'm out of touch with "consultant-speak" but I'd probably be described as a "multi-presenced" individual these days, what with the (now doubled) Maserati role, my music recording and my personal and business roles. Outlook had served me well for many years while I ran my company so, when I became "company-less" it was going to be a big drag to move to a less functional environment.

So, my garage became home to a small Exchange Server environment, initially on NT then a couple of years ago migrated to Windows Server 2003. Running it - especially keeping on top of the patches needed to keep it safe - became what felt like a full time job. It became increasingly obvious that Exchange was not a garage-friendly product. I don't mind if you ask why it took me so long to realise - I'd like to know myself!

What really killed Exchange Server for me was the number of bugs and open exploit holes and the ever increasing cost of upgrading. When it came to a decision about upgrading to Exchange 2003 the cost was prohibitive for my (relatively) humble needs.

The trouble is, if Exchange gets dropped, what happens to Outlook? The answer is that a lot of its functionality disappears. Let me look at what I do and don't like about Outlook:

Things I like about Outlook:

1. It brings most of the info I need daily into one place: Email, Contacts, Calendar, ToDo and Notes
2. Synchronisation between desktop PC, laptop and PocketPC are (suppposed to be) simple
3. It's reliable - even when it doesn't do what it's supposed to it does so consistently!

Things I didn't/don't like about Outlook

1. It really needs an Exchange Server back-end to work as advertised
2. It doesn't handle multiple identities - I need to originate and respond to emails acording to the 'hat' I'm wearing - eg, people who contact me via the Maserati Resource Centre should get messages from my MRC address.
3. I never did get it to integrate all its functions properly - not within itself let alone the rest of the MS Office suite. Even simple tasks (such as dragging an email to a ToDo list or calendar entry) never worked and as for being able to click on a contact to write a letter in Word with the address already copied across ... I gave up writing and editing the macros and VBA to do that after about the fifth change-of-mind within Microsoft.
4. It has no way to easily group tasks and ToDos into projects or sub-headings to cope with the way I work

Without Exchange Server, Outlook loses most of its - increasingly slender -appeal. While email can be stored on just about any server these days using IMAP to leave copies on the server and handle filing and archiving for later use, the same isn't true of contacts, calendar/diary, notes etc. In a non-Exchange environment, Outlook still offers these facilities but stores the data locally on the host workstation PC. Synchronising this data to a laptop and a Pocket PC becomes a royal PITA if you travel as often as I do.

Especially after having been used to it all just sort of happening.

A simple home network

Call me an old white-bearded geek but I continue to run a small cluster of servers at home - one main (Win2k3) server that provides LAN services and storage, another that acts as the mail and web development server here, another that runs Asterisk for the phone system, another NAS box that all the PCs here back up to. That's four if you're counting - all sitting in a nice rack powered by a big UPS.

Then there are the workstations: my lovingly crafted, SILENT workstation here in the study, the two in the recording studio, the laptops, the Sony VAIO Media Centre in the lounge (subject of another post before too long, I'm sure) the IPAQ pocket PC ... the media players ...

Networking this little lot is a bit of a problem as I'm currently (for a few more weeks at least) in a rented house so can't drill holes to run network cables between house and garage or between floors. I'm also stuck with the location where the phone line - and hence the broadband ADSL - comes into the building, in my study.

So the servers that talk to each other on their gigabit-LAN connect to the rest of the machines via a mains-borne network that is advertised to run at 85Mbps but actually runs at around 25Mbps on a good day. This mains-borne segment also has to carry the Internet traffic to and from the servers - including the phone traffic to the Asterisk box. The study has its own mini gigabit-LAN for the firewall, my main workstation, printers, the various IP phone devices etc. Finally, there's a WiFI segment driven off a Linksys WRT54GS with upgraded, open source firmware with a repeater to help cover the upper floor - that provides connection to the laptops and the machines in the music recording room upstairs.

Arriving at this mixed-bag approach to the network here took quite a while. The big problem is the connection between the house and garage. For practical reasons (noise, space) the server rack has to sit in the attached garage and there's no way to run a network cable between the two without causing problems with the landlord. My initial attempt used wireless links with a router in the house transmitting through the wall to the garage. Signal quality was appalling, however - maybe the wall has been lined with metal mesh or similar as the link was repeatedly dropped.

I went through several expensive antennae supposed to boost the signal along with equally expensive extension cables to locate the antennae as close to each other as possible with just that wall separating them - all to no avail. The link would still occasionally drop for no apparent reason.

Dropped links are not a good thing on the most critical segment of your network.

I stumbled across mains-borne networking while trawling the 'net looking for a solution to this problem. The units I bought came from Solwise (http://www.solwise.co.uk/net-powerline.htm) who have proved to be a nice company to deal with - one I'd heartily recommend - they quickly replaced one of the (now four) units I've bought from them when it stopped working.

So, are power line devices the networking panacea for the cable-free home or office?

Not quite. Apart from the hardware reliability (my one failed device might be an exception but the build quality of the plug-top units isn't that impressive) it's almost impossible to predict the actual throughput that can be achieved. In my case, I now have one of the units in the study that acts as the master and three slaves. I'll list them and their data rates as reported from the master unit:

• Garage - server farm - 27Mbps
• Lounge - media centre - 9Mbps
• Kitchen - WiFi router - 53Mbps
  

Note that none of the links is achieving the claimed 85Mbps transfer rate - the best rate is to the kitchen only about 20 feet of mains wiring away, while the garage (that sits on another mains ring the other side of the distribution panel) just manages half that - and less than a third of the claimed rate.

The stand-out oddity in the list is the lounge. As far as I can tell, this is on the same mains ring as the master but suffers interference from one of the PSUs that power some of the boxes surrounding the media centre or something else I haven't yet been able to track down.

It's interesting to note that even when plugged side-by-side, these units only manage about 60Mbps. I'd need to research the technology better to be certain about this but it seems to work on similar mechanisms to WiFi - only using the mains cable as its medium rather than radio waves. Of course, the carrier frequencies needed to carry network traffic at these rates has to be very high (in the GHz range, I suspect) so the mains wiring is surely acting as a very large radiator of UHF interference to the neighbourhood and, it would appear from the poor performance of the unit in the lounge here, the coupling of the power-line unit to the mains wiring is pretty critical.

Conclusions - if there are any from this?

• surprise, surprise - WiFi doesn't travel well through walls
  
• mains-borne networking can be a life saver - my garage link has proven reliable apart from the one hardware failure
• neither of these technologies replace a good old copper network cable

Solwise have been advertising a powerline device that's claimed to provide 200Mbps over mains cabling. Initially listed for release this summer, their web site now promises delivery some time in October. Had these devices been available earlier I would certainly have tried at least one pair on the garage link but as I'm hoping to move out of this rented place before too long, the £150 cost will go a long way toward a drum of CAT-6 cable and some fascia outlets.

Of printers

Last week also saw me finally install the new Xerox Phaser 6100 colour laser printer I had ordered before leaving for the States. Bought as an end-of-run bargain complete with extra paper tray this machine replaces the venerable HP5100 mono whose noise and smell finally got the better of me (donated to a local school where it will, I'm sure, continue to do sterling work for years to come) and the HP4500 colour laser recently recovered from my ex-wife in non-working condition.

I had initially hoped that the HP4500 would become my main work-horse printer after I'd got it working again with a thorough clean, removal of the jammed paper that was wrapped many, many times round the fuser(!) and replacement of a couple of cartridges but it was not to be. Just days after I'd started to use it, the machine demanded a new set of imaging belt etc. and the cost of these items for what remains an oldish device - and one that may yet have thrown up further problems - swung me into looking for a replacement. The offer of the Phaser 6100 at a price just a few pounds more than the cost of the replacement parts for the HP made the decision easy.

So far, I have to say I'm extremely pleased with the Xerox machine. It warms up faster than the old HP, produces very acceptable print quality for my needs (mainly general office printing and correspondence) prints duplex to save paper and doesn't smell. Best of all - in power-save mode it is SILENT.

Bliss!

Back home (can I go away again ... please?)

Back from the USA and, after a brief, hectic but most pleasant interlude entertaining and being entertained by Aussie friends it's back to the grindstone. I have a mountain of letters, emails and phone calls to write / make / do following the U.S. trip and the small matter of a magazine to put together over the next few weeks.

I returned from the States to find that one of the hard disks in one of the servers here had crashed, losing the entire content of my software repository. No biggie - all the machines here are backed up at least nightly to the big NAS server so the task involved no more than installing a replacement hard drive and restoring from the backup. A new 320GB drive was duly ordered and installed and (thanks to Acronis) with just a little bit of fiddling with Windows drive letters all the data (about 150GB) was back on the server in pretty quick order - though it could have been quicker had I installed the gigabit ethernet cards I had intended to buy a while ago - a job for later this month, methinks, especially as the network switch in the garage has now been upgraded to gigabit - thanks to a special offer that couldn't be turned down.

Before installing the new drive I had checked on the current inventory of drives installed in the machine which now runs Win2K3 - an odd mix due to the historic nature of ths particular beast thast started life as the primary LAN server here running good old NT (hah!). The error that was being reported for the faulty drive was "unable to read MFT". In my experience, the loss of the MFT (master file table) on an NTFS drive is more likely to be due to some form of software driven corruption than hardware so I left the old drive in the machine and, once the data was restored, told Windows to delete and recreate its partition. Bingo, the drive sprang into life without a problem and, diagnostics report no errors.

This leaves me with the worrying question of just how the data was lost while I was away and (in theory at least) the machine was inactive apart from servicing the occasional DHCP and DNS request for the network. A thorough check with anti-virus and anti-spyware software revealed no nasties present so it may just get written off as one of those questions that never gets answered.

I don't like those questions but I may just have to play wait-and-see with the machine to see if it happens again.

In the mean time, another example of how important it is to back up regularly. Without the backup, this would have proved - if not quite a disaster - a major upset and time taker. Later in the week, another example had me giving thanks to backups in even bigger style after a planned upgrade to the mail server caused a system fault that saw the complete machine become unusable.

Redwood Forest

Redwood Forest
Originally uploaded by eqdynamics.

Although standing no more than a hundred yards or so from Highway 101, the sense of quiet and peacefulness among the redwood groves is almost over-powering.

This is the best of several shots I took trying to capture the magic of the place.

Sadly, we had to leave (though I'd be sorely tempted to come back and make my home amongst the trees and mountains of Northern California) as the afternoon wore on and the 260 mile drive to San Francisco and our hotel for the night was yet to be tackled.

These things are BIG!

These things are BIG!
Originally uploaded by eqdynamics.

Thursday and time to head back south in preparation for the homeward flight in two days time. About 30 minutes south of Eureka on Hwy-101 finds the start of "The Avenue of the Giants" - as it turns out no misnomer or idle boast.

This scenic road winds through some of the surviving groves of giant redwood trees. Stunning, majestic, gigantic, humbling - all words that have been used before but words you may not fully appreciate until you have stood among these ancient trees - some of which have been here since Egyptian times.

The scenic route is supposed to add just 30 minutes to a journey but we lingered far longer, stopping repeatedly to take photos or just take in the feeling of being there.

One stop we made was when, out of the corner of my eye, I saw a fallen tree a little way off the road. It looked big from the car - up close ... well, you can see for yourself. Louise took this photo of me standing inside the fallen trunk - about 25 feet across I think!

Stink hole

Stink hole
Originally uploaded by eqdynamics.

On the descent through Lassen Volcano National Park you reach this stinky hole - actually one of several - marking an old natural sulphur works. Yes, the place stinks of rotten eggs (it's hydrogen sulphide steam escaping from the rocks) and signs warn of not stepping off the paved areas as burns are likely.

Quite likely if the boiling noises that can be clearly heard emanating from the steam-holes is any guide.

By the time we were out of the park, it was after 3pm and still had the (now) almost 200 mile drive to Eureka to cover.

That drive (over Hwy-299) across the Coastal Range of mountains was also stunning. This is one of the best driving roads I have discovered in the USA - mile after mile of twisting, roller-coaster roads - almost entirely smooth surfaced and a complete contrast to the pot-hole ridden farm tracks they call roads further south in the state.

We stopped at a town about half-way across for coffee and to top up the essential travel supplies (GatorAid and M&Ms! :) ) but didn't stop to take any photos - we were too busy enjoying the drive and the scenery.

Managed to stay awake long enough to find yet another Red Lion Hotel and crashed into bed around 9pm.

Volcanoes as far as ...

Volcanoes as far as ...
Originally uploaded by eqdynamics.

The road through Lassen Volcano National Park gets up to about 8,500 feet above sea level. Even in late August, snow lies on the ground here and seems impervious even to direct sunlight.

My blue period

My blue period
Originally uploaded by eqdynamics.

Taken at around 8,000 feet ... amazing scenery in every direction. I love the way the shades of blue band up through this shot.

Upper Meadow

Upper Meadow
Originally uploaded by eqdynamics.

Up around the 7,000 foot level lies the Upper Meadow ... peace and tranquility next to the harshness of the volcanic peak.

Torrent

Torrent
Originally uploaded by eqdynamics.

A cliched blurred water shot, I know but an abiding memory of Kings Creek - a beautiful part of the park as we drove through. This creek crosses the Upper Meadow then tumbles over some rocks as it falls - eventually (I think) forming an impressive waterfall that we saw as we descended the mountain.

Framed

Framed
Originally uploaded by eqdynamics.

Driving through the 31 miles of Lassen Volcano National Park it seemed that every turn of the road brought a new vista. We had planned to spend no more than an hour in the park but spent a whole morning and would - had time permitted - have spent a day or two exploring it.

The main peak here last erupted in 1915 and seems stable enough ... for now!

Looking across the park as the road (Hwy 89) traverses it, the number of smaller volcanic peaks is obvious.

Volcano

Volcano
Originally uploaded by eqdynamics.

Spent Monday in Sacramento, just lazing about after the hectic weekend, washing clothes etc. Tuesday morning was much of the same, added to the panic of packing everything into bags for the journey (eventually) homeward.

On Tuesday afternoon, we drove north as far as Redding and stayed in the Red Lion Hotel again. I say again, because it is the same chain I stayed at in Winemucca several years ago. More of a multi-storey motel, the rooms are nonetheless, clean, large and have coffee and wi-fi.

Had we started out earlier, my plan was to swing east on the way to Redding through the Lassen Volcano National Park. Time (and tiredness) being against that on Tuesday, a little overnight route planning (thank you Autoroute) told me we could just manage the trip before heading west that night. It was looking like a long day in prospect as there was nowhere but campgrounds and "bring your own sheets" cabins to stay over the 140 mile mountain road between Redding and Eureka on the coast.

I am SO very glad we made the trip through the park. To say that Lassen's scenery is stunning is a major understatement. Personally (as someone whoe prefers to do his sight-seeing within 50 yards of his car) Lassen is much more beautiful than Yosemite or other American parks I have visited.

California coast

California coast
Originally uploaded by eqdynamics.

I got a few good shots of the coastline along Highway 1

Hail fellow, well met!

Hail fellow, well met!
Originally uploaded by eqdynamics.

Sunday morning - throat still sore but feeling a bit better thanks to a mix of medicines so we decided to take a drive down the famous - and stunningly beautiful - Highway 1 south from Carmel toward Big Sur.

Stopped at Hurricane Point to take some photos of the coastline and who should pull in behind us but Steve Garran from the Denver Maserati crowd. We'd seen Steve a couple of times over the weekend - he'd driven his Lancia Scorpion (known as the Monte Carlo in Europe) from Denver to Monterey for the Lancia 100th Anniversary celebration at Concorso and was now on his way to L.A. for business next week.

It was the right time for lunch so we stopped at a place called Nepenthe that had been recommended. Situated on a promontory overlooking Big Sur the view from the dining terrace was magnificent. The food was ... OK.

Chat went on covering Bora rebuilds, the provenance of historic racing Maseratis and life in general ... till we realised how much time had passed. Steve needed to be on his way to L.A. and our plan to drive further south before heading across the mountains to pick up Hwy-25 north to Hollister had flown out the window so we hurriedly retraced our tracks to Monterey and joined the traffic heading out of the peninsula.

Four hours later we were back in Sacramento with just enough energy to eat an ordered-in pizza and crash into a warm and, for the first time in over a week, comfy bed.

"THE" Red Bora

"THE" Red Bora
Originally uploaded by eqdynamics.

Not even a concours entrant but the old girl got many an admiring glance nonetheless as she sat shining in the sunlight on the Concorso green.

More importantly, "my" red Bora (I've driven more miles in it than Paul has these past few years) got me safely around another 700 mile trip without incident or mishap.

Concorso Italiano

IMG_3725
Originally uploaded by eqdynamics.

Friday is, of course, Concorso day over the Monterey weekend and the show is bigger than it used to be when at Quail Lodge (which now holds its own, competing event)

Great to meet up with everyone again and see plenty of Maseratis standing on the greens - about half new cars.

We left the event around 4pm to get back for an hour's sleep before the TMC dinner at Tarpy's Roadhouse Grill ... an odd name for what turned out to be a very good restaurant in true California style.

I ate the buffalo!

Saturday was the turn of the MCI awards dinner which was again very pleasant - great to put faces to names I'd only spoken to over the Internet - Harry Garschagen and Elliot Siegel among others.

On Sunday, I had planned to go into Pebble Beach early (the crowds make it impossible to get near the place after about 8am - despite the public opening not being till 10) but a feverish sore throat and respiratory infection meant I stayed in bed until the medicine took effect :(

Reflected glory

Reflected glory
Originally uploaded by eqdynamics.

... or, come to that, this stunning Alfa Romeo