Better late than never. I hope you all had a great Christmas and have a fun new year!

Christmas for me was a little different as I had a visit from one of my cousins from the UK on her way around Australia. There was much consumption of alcohol and a great time was had by all that night. Alas, with only the basic public holidays off this year, it’s a very busy time.

Work on the (until now) unmentioned project to trunk IP data between Melbourne, Sydney and Brisbane is well underway and have already signed up our first 50Mbit customer. If you need data transport between Melbourne, Sydney and Brisbane, drop me a line for a quote.

Be safe, and I’ll see you all in 2007!

EDIT: Oh, and my good mate Andrew Cameron that I’ve known ever since high school is getting married on the 30th. Cheers to him! :)</p>

I gave in. I purchased a Mac Pro. Clocking in with 2 x Dual Core 2.66Ghz CPUs, 2Gb RAM and the 512Mb ATI X1900 video card, it’s one hell of a machine. The first boot it ever did took around 18 seconds - very quick. Of course, the first thing I had to do to it was throw in a second 160Gb SATA HDD and throw Windows XP on there (for those all important games). I must say that I’m quite impressed with bootcamp (which allows you to boot Windows on the Intel Macs). The one thing that does annoy me is that it doesn’t give me the menu so I can pick which OS I want to boot to on startup - something I miss from other boot loaders such as grub.

I do have some hassle with the Logitech LLC drivers causing the mac to hang on shutdown, and even making the mouse buttons not work (however I can still move the pointer), however these have been reported to Logitech and I’m sure will be fixed soon.

All in all, a grunty as hell machine, and very nice to play games on ;)

One of the things you’ll notice quickly is that by default, Windows Vista will not map samba shares - nor can you use Samba as a PDC (Primary Domain Controller). This is due to the default security policy of Windows Vista only using NTLMv2 for authentication - something Samba doesn’t support as yet.

To fix this, run (Win+R) secpol.msc

Navicate to Local Policies -> Security Options

Change the value of the policy “Network Security: LAN Manager authentication level” from “NTVLM2 responses only” to “LM and NTLM - use NTLMv2 session security if negotiated”

This should now allow Windows Vista to both map network drives based on Samba servers, and use Samba as a PDC.

I’ve been looking at replacing my home desktop system with something a little newer. Gone are the days of AGP, DDR400 and HyperThreading. These days it’s all about the number of cores and PCI Express. The Mac Pros are a very tempting machine - being Intel based, you can still run Windows XP on there if required for all those important programs (such as Half Life and CounterStrike :)).

This is until you look under the hood a little. The majority of the hardware is fairly generic - until you get to the memory subsystem. Apple have chosen to go with FB-DIMM memory while the rest of the generic industry has gone with straight DDR RAM. This means that on average, the memory latency involved with the Mac Pro system can slow them down on CPU intensive things (like Half Life etc) by a whopping 10%. Add this to the expensive base price of the Mac Pro compared to generic hardware and things get a little dissapointing.

I am certainly hoping that Apple look at addressing this (no pun intended :)) and looks at removing the FB-DIMM based RAM on the Mac Pro and instantly giving their lineup a 10%+ speed gain - bringing it inline with the rest of the industry. Something I doubt will happen however :(

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