Paul Shadwell RTFM

New iPhone hack makes it easier

Thanks to work done by the iPhone Dev Team and Mark of www.hackthatphone.com it is now possible to hack the iPhone and unlock it at the same time in just over 5 minutes.

I performed the hack to update the phone to the latest version of the firmware which is 1.1.4.

The phone is now working nicely with the latest software.

iPhone SDK is here!

Finally it's arrived! The long awaited iPhone SDK is here and I have downloaded a copy and registered as an enterprise.

Even better news is the next release of the iPhone software v2.0 which is due out in June will have a host of enhancements, not least of which is the Microsoft Exchange Activesync support, which is fantastic news for those of us working in the enterprise. Activesync is the protocol used to communicate with mobile devices that support it. Most Nokia, Sony Ericsson and of course all Windows Mobile devices. Having the iPhone available as a corporate communication tool opens up a whole new way of providing data to and interacting with enterprise systems while on the road.

I am certainly looking forward to seeing the new version, hopefully it will be available in Switzerland or at least we can continue to use unlocked phones.

Oh! and this stuff will work with the iPod Touch as well!!

Finally getting rid of SBS 2003, I hope.

It's been a very long time in coming but finally I'm in a position to junk our SBS 2003 server and decommission it. It will be amazing not to have it continuously interfering in everything once it's gone. Both Exchange and Active Directory suffer from it's presence.

I now have Exchange 2007 edge server ready to take over the mail routing tasks.

Fingers crossed it should all run smoothly. Just have to wait for everyone to leave the office so I can start.

Back from VMworld

Last week I was in Cannes, in the south of France for the VMworld Europe 2008.

This was VMware's first conference hosted in Europe and with over 4000 registered attendees I would say it was a success.

There were many fascinating announcements and new products as well as hundreds of breakout sessions and hands-on labs.

I attended several sessions as well as looking around the vendor stands and talking to companies such as Dell/Equilogic about their iSCSI products, Veeam about their new backup and synchronisation tools and VMware about the new Site Recovery Manager software.

The breakout sessions I attended were of course specific to what I am interested in and the challenges I am facing at the moment, such as:

Virtualising Exchange 2007.
Active Directory in a virtual environment.
Disaster Recovery and Business Continuity.
ITIL and how VMware can help.

One of the sessions was about Virtual Desktop Infrastructure which is another new product from VMware. Virtualising the desktop is probably the next big thing that will be coming down the road, especially with very neat tools for the client side which can significantly reduce the overhead of not just the managment but also the cost of the hardware required at the user end of the system. www.chippc.com is an example of just how small you can make the client hardware go. It uses Windows CE to get the terminal service software running after that the virtual PC is running on a VMware server somewhere. The devices are managed totally via Group Policies in Active Directory. They can even drive up to 4 monitors and handle reasonable graphics loads.

I have a project for one of these devices so I hope I can get an evaluation kit to test.