May 2011

IRLP

This is an early image of the amateur radio IRLP station that Roger G3PVU and I are making. It will be located near Lincoln city center and be available on the 70cms repeater GB3LS.

LSWC IRLP Station
LSWC IRLP Station

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Lightweight Camping

I took a few days off from work this week to try out some of my light weight kit – which eventually will make up the kit I will use on future backpacking trips.

Coleman Bedrock 2
Coleman Bedrock 2

Although I had the car I limited what I took. It gave me a chance to try the tent, food ideas and stoves I plan to use. I probably will not be carrying the folding stool on my backpacking trips.

The tent is a bit heavy for backpacking – but at £17.50 in a sale the price was right. It weighed 2.5kgs but by changing the steel pegs with titanium ones and not using the stuff sacks the weight drops to under 2kgs. It is also large enough for two (at a squeeze with rucksacks) but for one it gives that extra bit of space and comfort. I can sit up in it and cook outside the door easily or look at view whilst drinking tea. The window panels in the fly sheet doors adds some weight but this allows you to look out at the view even when it is raining!

I camped at the Camping and Caravan Club site on the outskirts of Scarborough. It is well placed so I could just walk out to the cliff top footpath, without having to use the car.

Map Clip
Camping and Caravan Club Site
Cliff top view
Cliff top view
Cliff top view
Cliff top view
Sunset from my tent
Sunset from my tent

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Probably the Best Server Backup in the World

Last Christmas we had a real problem recovering a server, following a serious crash. Although we had a series of tape backup, using only the best quality tape, a Sony tape drive and BackupExec, when we came to move the tape drive to a new server to recover the all important data we could not find a driver for the drive. Neither the native drivers or the BackupExec driver would work. The skills of one of my engineers saved the day with the use of a PE type boot CD in the failed server with allowed him to access the one of the raided drives and copy the data to a USB portable hard drive.

So we have been looking for a better solution.

In conjunction with Basic Business Systems (http://www.basic.co.uk/) with now use CA ARCserve D2D for backing up servers, first to NAS devices and then we copy this to either USB protable HDD or across the internet to remote storage. Backing up is fine – but the real strength is its speed of recovery. The Bear Metal Recovery simply speeds up the time to recover a server. It is also practical to test the recovery process and several of our clients who are now using this software are going to have a Disaster Recovery practice – we will go in on a Saturday with a spare black server, turn off the working box and recover ti to the spare using only the D2D files. If it works great, but if we do have any issues we will be able to solve them, whennot under pressure of a real crash.

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