New Beginnings

So, here we are - new addition to the blogosphere which no doubt is severely unwanted and unnecessary.  I suppose I should intorduce myself first: I'm Niall Mac Ghillie Aindreas (Neil Anderson in English ;)) and I work as a security consultant for a major security MSP.  I hold a number of certifications from different vendors, but I'm always trying to learn more about networks and computing in general.

The blog is mostly supposed to be a place for me to put my notes while I learn more about networking and security.  Hopefully some of what I put up here will be of use to others.  You'll find a heavy Cisco and Linux bias in the posts as these are the technologies I'm most familiar with.

So, for my first post, I'm going to talk about the new laptop that's just been dropped off by a very pauchled courier - must have been all the stairs.  I've got a new laptop because my flat got burgled a couple of weeks ago, and by a happy chance, the thieviing scumbags took a load of old laptops away along with some more valuable stuff (my wife's laptop and the xbox - sob!).  This gave me the perfect opportunity to buy myself a new lappy which I'm now writing on - happy days!

I went with a Dell Studio 1557 from the Dell Outlet store.  For those who don't know, the Dell Outlet is a site which allows Dell to dispose of any items that may have been returned by users or which have been damaged in some way.  My model has a couple of very minor scratches and was sold as "Scratch or Dent".  It also has a slightly older graphics card in it compared to the main site version.

Overall, I'm very impressed with it so far.  It came with Win7 Home Premium pre-installed, which is a minor annoyance.  I'd much rather the box had come without an OS so I could have installed Linux or used my own Win7 licenses, but never mind.  Build quality is excellent and I'm looking forward to installing all my usual apps (although Firefox is already on!).  I was kind of hoping that it would come with the backlit keyboard, but no dice sadly.  The keyboard is excellent for typing on, with a really nice action.

My 1557 came with 4Gb of RAM and a Core i7 processor which should be more than enough for most of its day-to-day tasks.  The hard drive was sold as 320Gb, but shows up in Explorer as a 287 Gb drive - not sure where all the extra space has gone (maybe Win7 hides space used for the OS?) but it should be more than enough for my purposes.  I'm looking forward to seeing what this machine can do with OpenSuSE on it!

So that's my first impressions of the 1557.  Today I'm working on some IPv6 stuff at home, which I'll post later and getting ready for a client site deployment later in the week.  No doubt, posts will come from these activities later.

Slainte Mhath,
Niall