We just went live this afternoon with a new website - a ground-up redesign and updated content. I'm quote proud of the outcome.

Check out the new face of Caveo Network Solutions.

Why did this sneak up on everyone? Cisco just released info on this a few days ago, and Microsoft still doesn't have all of the updates/tools available. I don't know about other vendors, but why did these two biggees wait until a few weeks before the change to make this information available? The law was passed in 2005!

DSTPatch.com
Cisco's page
Microsoft's page

And even more interesting (to me) is that the media hasn't picked this up. Yet....

I was thinking about comparative data speeds the other day as I was considering whether it's faster to backup to a local USB disk or a network NAS and I came across this gem:

How Fast is Your Data Traveling ?

There are lots of ways of quickly accessing control panels. Victor Laurie has an especially verbose page on this topic.

One thing I've always wanted is a quick way to bring up the Windows Components Wizard. The manual way is Start, Control Panels, Add/Remove Programs, Add/Remove Windows Components. Too slow! With a little help from Victor's page, I found the command:

control appwiz.cpl,@0,2

Goes right to the Windows Components Wizard - excellent!

I'm attempting to coin a new acronym for "in the event of a disaster."

If I had a dime (IIHAD?) for each time I've used that phrase in the past two months, I'd probably have a few dollars. But I've used it a lot!

I'm working on a disaster recovery plan and seem to start every question, every paragraph, and every comment with this phrase. So in an attempt to save a few keystrokes, I'm going to try to start using this acronym.

I think I'm pioneering new ground with this one. The full phrase "in the event of a disaster" yields about 484,000 hits on Google, whereas the acronym ITEOAD yields a meager 14, none of which have to do with disaster recovery planning.

I probably won't call my buddy at PTO, but let me know if you start hearing this term used. If anything this will be an interesting test of the origin of a term. :)

I was doing some research on DNS the other day, specifically on caching and TTL values. My current client has a DR site that needs to have functional names (e.g., www.domain.com, mail.domain.com) as quickly as possible. We were first under the impression that it would take 48-72 hours for DNS changes to propogate. I did some research and found some good articles on the topic:

• Wikipedia article on DNS
  
• Why DNS Based Global Server Load Balancing (GSLB) Doesn’t Work
  

I was also trying to query the DNS server for the TTL values, but was coming up short with the built-in nslookup. So I found a great little port of dig for Windows which works great. It also has some good info on DNS, caching, and TTL.