Basically this is a hard drive cradle for Serial ATA (sata) hard drives. Kind of reminds me of popping in an old Atari cart. =) The beauty of this baby is that it has an eSATA connection. So you can throw files to the drive at basically the same speed as if the drive were physically an internal drive. (3 Gbit/s)

So the dock runs roughly $50 and then you can just load up on 1 terabyte drives from newegg, and back things up to your hearts content.  A 1TB drive is about $220 now.  Not too shabby. So for 1TB of data I am using 2 drives. That way I have 2 copies and then I will sepeate them so they don’t live in the same place. Just in case something happens.

I would encourage everyone to backup anything of importance in some way shape or form. Because it is inevitable that disaster will strike at some point. So use something… Time Machine, Mozy, something.  Also, Mozy Home just went from a beta to a 1.0 for mac users. great for home use!

Link for the Cradle.

Technorati Tags: SATA, eSATA, Backup, Time Machine, Mozy

Biggest problem I can see right now for implementing Lepord server in an enterprise environment is with PC’s using Outlook to manage calendar. (which are most) Outlook does not support CalDAV. Which is the open source protocol used by the OSX iCal server and which is endorsed by just about everybody under the sun. Except Microsoft of course.  So a PC user would have to use another app for calendar sync and sharing with the iCal Server.  Not a huge deal for some and there are rumors that Microsoft might bend and develop something for Outlook compatibility. But for now Mozilla has some nice apps out for both PC and MAC which play nicely with CalDAV. link

Everything else so far is pretty rad

• jabber server
• SMB & AFP mounts
• Open Directory rocks!
• VPN is cool
• Easy to use DNS, DHCP

I’ll post more later as I peel the layers off this thing.

First and foremost… AOL stinks. No seriously… I’m not harping on it just to harp on it. The fact that everything is proprietary and basically locked down so exporting it out to any other program is virtually impossible is awful. They definately need to adopt some standards. So here is what I did in order to fulfill the quest to get AOL content to our Exchange server.

First I had to go into AOL and change all of the email that was set as “saved on my computer” to saved on AOL. And of course you couldn’t do it! Horrible UI they have got going there. So I found this handy little app called Transend. It was well worth the $50. It couldn’t do calendar or contacts for AOL 9.0 but it was prefect for email. The program ran for about 5 hours. Thats not the apps fault. That just how many emails there were. Once it was done, every email and folder from the AOL inbox were sitting nicely right inside Outlook. It kept the attachments too.

Next was the task of Contacts. The way I did this was to use a service that most are already probably familiar with called Plaxo. Plaxo will now sync with an AIM address and pull your contacts from that AIM address into Plaxo. Then I was able to install the Outlook Plaxo client and import the contacts into outlook and then drag them over to Exchange. The only thing I wasn’t able to recover on the contacts side with distribution groups that had been setup in AOL. I couldn’t really see any way to yank those out of AOL. Basically they would all have to be recreated by hand.

The final thing was his calendar. Fortunately he kept his calendar on his phone only. So I didn’t have to worry about trying to rescue that from the clutches of AOL’s death grip. =) The next step was to format the computer and reinstall XP Pro. No Vista for this house, we got enough problems as it is now. =)

After getting everything reinstalled properly and back up and running, he was good to go. Now he’s managing his calendar, sharing calendars, checking email the right way and we even got him setup on a Motorola Q which syncs over the air with our exchange server. I think it’s all rocking his world now. =)

Technorati Tags: AOL, Exchange Server, Outlook, Transend, Plaxo, Email Migration

Our good buddy Andrew Mitry hit David Russell and I up a few days back about hosting an event here in DC. So were gonna kick it off here at Ebenezers Coffeehouse on Capitol Hill, May 24 at 12:00pm. We would love to have any and all join us for this geek-tech fest. =)

mark on your calendar.

Church IT Roundtable – DC
An open discussion of church IT professionals from around the DC metro area.
May 24 from 12:00 noon to 1:00 p.m. EST
Location: Ebenezers Coffeehouse (map)

What is the Church IT Roundtable? (from Tony Dye)

Temporary Official Site for CITRT-DC

Technorati Tags: citrt, church, it, roundtable, local, washington, dc, metro