What a whirlwind couple of weeks it's been! Relocating the office interstate, setting up colo'd servers in Sydney and Canberra, but it's all settling down now! We've got a couple of big beefy compaq boxes in Sydney, running vmware with a bunch of virtual machines on them, as well as our primary DNS, and our secondary is sitting in canberra. Next step is to start migrating services currently hosted in the US down into Sydney, and decomission our US boxes.

Of course there's some US services which will always stay there, such as email, as that just has WAY too much bandwidth overhead to be economical in aus, but the plan is to get all our webhosting servers migrated back here by the end of the year :) Our colo provider likes the sound of that too ;)

And of course, I'd always rather be putting my hosting money into .au business rather than overseas!

So I've just posted the last of the first batch of stuff I put up on ebay.. Not too bad, though i must have spent a good 15 hours photo'ing, and googling specs to build up the ads.. Still have an absolute bucketload of stuff, though most of it now is scsi cards, usb/firewire cards, scsi hdd's, and old 8x4.5 and 8.9gb raid cabinets.. Oh, and ram, and motherboards, and old 4RU ATX rackmount cases.. Will put that that stuff up when I get back from the christmas break.. Would be *really* good to have everything gone, and the garage/server room basically just containing the stuff I'm keeping, by the time I head up for Sharree's birthday at the end of jan..

Fingers crossed - there's a lot of work there :)

So just finished upgrading the Law Foundation's FirstClass server from 8.2 through 8.3 to 9.0. Seven and a half hours to back the bastich up (pointed out it needed a damned good defrag.. have fired that off..), then FIVE MINUTES to do the upgrade! Gotta say I was bloody impressed!!

Couple of hitches - most notable being it removed 'WWW Client' access from the 'All Users' group.. That would have caused a few hiccups, but sorted now.. Also, will be interesting, it remodelled all users desktops to force them to their group's model desktop layout... Will see if we get any complaints about that!

Gotta say I love the automatic client upgrade feature.. Finished the upgrade, and then logged in with my 8.2 client, and bingo, it goes 'you need to upgrade your client, click OK to continue', and voila, 5 mins later it's downloaded and upgraded me to V9.0!

You know, this month, it's 13 years since I first started using Firstclass - originally on version 2.6 on a 300 baud manuall-dial modem using the IEAust's EOL BBS!

Well she's all done (except the headlights/high beam takeoff, but that can wait for a week or so :) ), and road tested!!

Ok, the roof basket is on, and wired in (though the under-bonnet wiring still has to be done) - just have to align the lights tomorrow night once it's wired.. I've mounted my 45 degree corner lights, and run cables for them, and I've re-cabled the bumper-mounted driving lights.. Some pics :)

The bullbar, waiting for the paint to dry!

The 'quick-disconnect' I setup using a 7-pin trailer socket, so I can remove the roof basket if needed, without worrying too much about about wiring needing to be removed..

And shots of the car from the side and the front.. She's gonna look sweet once I get the roof lights aligned, and get my bullbar back on!!

So I just finished mounting up the 'offroad' (i.e. they aren't exactly adr compliant) driving lights to the roof basket.. They were a little larger than I'd judged.. Will have to add a couple of extra bits of steel to mount the side lights off!

Oh well ;).. The rear bullbar is basically done too.. Just put the final coat of chrome paint on it - tomorrow I'll drill and mount the reversing spotlights to it, and she'll be ready to mount back on the car.. Then the front bullbar has to come off ready for light and antenna mounts to be welded to it!

The rear bullbar undercoated and ready for spraying

And a closeup of one of the new mounting brackets for the reversing spots.. Kinda happy with the way they turned out!

Will post up a pic of it chromed tomorrow :)

Good lord, I'm almost done! Fuses went in, cutout switches were turned on, and everything works!. Some photos ;)

The rear power distribution box

The remote-mounted radios

The dash shelf from the left-hand side, showing the small jiffy box with the power supplies for the iPod, Navman, and my mobile phone

The dash shelf from the right-hand side

The AM CB, and a partial shot of all the switches for the lighting setup.. All on-off-on switches - up will be 'on when road legal' (i.e. driving lights come on with high beam, reversing lights come on with reverse, corner spots come on with indicators), down will be 'on' - with a 'master' switch for the 'on' position to the far left.. - the idea being that the ignition being on is not a requirement for 'on'.

So the shelf is done! head units installed, wiring run through the dash, and have pulled the cabling through under the carpet to the rear..

Man, pulling that cable through.. I ran:

• 1 x light flex - power for acc's on dash shelf
• 1x RG58 coax - antenna cable for handheld
• 2 x heavy flex - power for AM CB, and front accessories
• 2 x cat5 cables - for remote head on UHF CB, and for remote head of future HF rig
• 1 x FT8100 Remote head cable
• 2 x stereo 'amp feed' cable - for bringing audio back to front of cab (note to self: need to buy extension speakers for radios to put up front)

Woohoo!! Have been hassling myself over this one for days, as I did other bits, trying to figure out how to do it - now its done!!

From left to right, we've got:

1) hook for slipping the belt-hook for the TH-D7AG into
2) velco-backed mount for the ipod
3) future mount for something like an IC706MK2G
4) mount for the remote head for my TX3400, and FT-8100R

I still have to run cabling up, and make it all look nice - i've got the remote head cable for the FT-8100R, plus a cat5 cable for the TX3400.. Power supply and stereo cable for the iPod, and power/GPS/Antenna for the handheld...

So got a bit done in the last couple of days! The rear cab distributor is in (for some reason I havent' taken a photo of it yet.. will get one soon!), i have it connected to the power feed from the front, have an earth line from it to go to one of the rear seat mounting bolts, and also have pos and earth lines to run to the ute back. I also selastic'd up that annoying whistle in the roof, though got a surprise while doing it!

The bit causing the whistle - I thought it was just a small hole..

No probs, I'll just prise it up, fill it with silicone, and put it back on.. Hmm, must fix up those scratches sometime too. Now look wha I found when I removed that bit!

Yep, I was sure surprised! oh well, selastic to the max on the bit I'd removed, and put it back on, and it's all good - no more whistle! I also got the antenna cables (5 of) run from the front grille, to the rear of the cab.. Photo below shows both the power feed, and the 5 antenna cables (plus one cat-5 cable to go to the ute back for remote switching of things) in their respective protective spiral tubing:

And then an actual shot of the lines into and out of the rear cab, and into the ute tray:

And a shot of the ute tray.. That's supposedly 'royal blue' methinks the colour code matching book at supercheap is wrong...