2011-03-22

TEC 2011 Apr 17-20 - The Exchange event of the year.

This is the one Exchange event of the year that you won't want to miss. Small conference. No marketing. 3 days with the people who have built Exchange from day one, and the experts who have shaped the market since the beginning. You won't find this many high calibre Exchange speakers in any other event. Nothing comes close. Until the next TEC, that is.

April 17-20, 2011. Red Rock Casino, Nevada.

Virtually every speaker has worked with Exchange since its inception. The names speak for themselves:
  • Tony Redmond
  • Kevin Allison
  • Paul Bowden
  • Ross Smith IV
  • Scott Schnoll
  • Greg Taylor
  • Michael Atalla
  • Jim Lucey
  • Lee Mackey
  • Dmitry Gavrilov
  • Keri Farrell
  • Nic Blank
  • Jerry Camel
  • Michael B Smith
Register here today: http://www.theexpertsconference.com/us/2011/

Don't miss it. This isn't a typical conference or summit. This is TEC. Networking. Learning. Hard core.

Be there.

David Sengupta
Conference Chair

2011-01-10

Dropbox LAN Sync

One of the programs I love to use is Dropbox ... provides great sync of files across multiple devices, and into the cloud. Dropbox recently added support for Selective Sync, meaning I can throw a bunch of files into the cloud and only sync down the stuff I want onto each device ... so for example Dad can have all his hockey pics, without having to carry Mom's teaching files around on his laptop ... and so on. One of the features in Dropbox is called "LAN sync". The way this works is that if you've got multiple PCs installed, Dropbox will find out that you're on a LAN and will sync directly between PCs, without the intermediary hop to the cloud. There are pros and cons to this. The key pro is that sync is very fast on your local LAN ... if I modify a file on one laptop it shows up on the other laptop in seconds. Makes for a great poor-man's DR solution in that if my laptop dies, I have all my files synched on a second machine within seconds. Nice. But the caveat of LAN sync is that to achieve this, every machine running Dropbox sends a broadcast across your LAN every few seconds. For example, if I look at a packet capture for my LAN I see "[source IP] 255.255.2555.255 DB-LSP-Dropbox LAN Sync Discovery Protocol" every few seconds. Some of you won't care, but this adds a fair bit of traffic on your network and will degrade performance, especially if you have multiple computers set to use LAN sync. To disable, just right-click Dropbox in your system tray, choose the General tab, and de-select "Enable LAN Sync". It would be nice if Dropbox allowed some tuning of this feature, or even provided a mechanism to manually 'tell' Dropbox where the other Dropbox-enabled machines were on a given network. On a related note, I'd be interested in hearing whether any of you are using Dropbox for PST synch. I've heard claims from some Dropbox forum members that this works well, but I'm skeptical. Haven't tried yet, and suspect PSTs would become corrupt over time. Has anyone tried?