Wednesday 24 November 2010

Extending a wireless access point with DD-WRT

Extending a wireless access point with DD-WRT


I have had some Netgear WG602 -v4 access points at work for a while.

They seemed to struggle a bit with some XP clients but have been good as gold with Windows 7 clients.

However, I wanted to extend their functionality a little and I used DD-WRT for this. This is a downloadable open source ROM to replace the OS on the access point. I used the V24 SP2 micro build.

Installation can be a little tricky and differs for every device so I will not cover this here.

Wednesday 17 November 2010

Spiceworks

Spiceworks


Spiceworks is something that every IT manager should investigate.

Its a free (paid for by advertising) service which will provide: network mapping, inventory, alerting, etc network wide: without pushing out any agents.

It has a vibrant community attached and a great set of forums which are a tremendous reference tool.

Sametime 8.5

Sametime 8.5


We have deployed the latest version of sametime (in its basic form) at work.

I have to say: from a support point of view its a bit of a nightmare. It has taken around a month to get it anywhere near working properly: via a host of undocumented ini file switches. Getting it working on our iNotes site (lotus notes web interaface) has been even more time consuming. Even now: because our sametime server does not have its own certificate it still causes errors in Internet Explorer.