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Showing posts from October, 2013

ownCloud - your in house cloud file service

As usual, a client of mine requires something out to of the ordinary - they love Dropbox and Drive, using them extensively at home, and now want something for themselves at work. The catch is - the work they do requires their data to be housed in Australia. Some legal requirement I gather for their funding. After searching through the archives in the mailing lists for SAGE-AU ( www.sage-au.org.au ) for wisdom and nuggets of gold I stumbled across ownCloud. Several of their members expressed an admiration for this software so I thought I'd check it out. You can find out a lot more about ownCloud on their website - www.owncloud.org but here is a brief overview of my experiences using this application. Firstly I installed it on a spare PC I had, after first putting Ubuntu 12.04 LTS on there. Installation was straightforward, securing it a bit less so - there's a bit of work to be done there but it's reasonably well documented and then I installed the application on my Win

Goodbye Cisco SRP527 and hello... what?

Recently I learned the SRP527 was being End Of Life'd. This is a sad moment - we started using the Netgear DG834's to provide a low cost VPN solution between two sites, then graduated to the double the price Cisco and now I'm on the hunt again. The issue we have is so many of our clients only need a single VPN tunnel between ADSL enabled sites. Cisco 800 series routers are too expensive and provide far more bang than the client usually needs or wants. Currently we are investigating the Draytek range of routers. I've ordered two and I'll review them in my next post. The SRP527's have been quite a reasonable unit for us. I've found that the wireless connectivity, particularly to Apple devices is a bit hit and miss, but it's generally provided us with a stable connection that has been 1Mb/s faster than other ADSL2+ devices I've used. Bring on the next challenger!