I have been supporting users with IT for about 8 years and have been using IT for the past 20 years, my first personal computer was an IBM AT which I got back in 1994 it came with MS-DOS 2 and had a 286 processor 1MB of RAM and had a 10MB hard drive. About a year later I built my first computer which had a 486 DX66 processor and an 80MB hard drive.

My first IT job was a voluntary position supporting Crewe and Nantwich Voluntary Action [CNVA] I have been supporting them since 2002 and I have implemented the following solutions for them:-

April 2002

When I first started started volunteering for CNVA the Computers were not networked and they had no virus protection. The version of Windows they were using was Windows 95,

I built a custom computer and installed Windows 2000 Server and created a new Domain with DHCP and DNS and simple PPTP VPN, and created a server share for all users to access and networked all the client machines and I started to replace/upgrade the computers to Windows XP.

June 2007

CNVA required a more up-to-date server as the charity had moved on since I first started to volunteer and they had some funding which was allocated to IT so we located a reasonably priced HP Proliant server and purchased it.

I then installed Windows Server 2003 on the new HP Proliant machine and added the new Windows as Secondary Domain Controller and once the data had replicated we demoted the old Server.

I then replaced the PPTP with a more secure L2TP VPN and created a VPN installer package which helped to reduce help desk calls as they simply installed the VPN installer software package so the end user doesn't need to configure IP addresses.

August 2008

CNVA wanted a group calendar and also a more reliable email system as they were currently relying on a outlook express POP3 facility, I had been experimenting for a while with free messaging solutions as I wanted to find an email solution which I could easily role out to the charities for free and I found all these features in the community edition of Scalix.

I then turned the old Windows 2000 Server into a Linux Scalix Messaging Server and setup the users Outlook to pickup and deliver email to the Scalix Server and its still running today.

June 2009

CNVA needed extra servers but they didn't want to have to purchase another physical server -

I decided to look at virtualisation and I virtualised the existing Windows 2003 Server and then installed VMware ESXi onto the HP Proliant Server [which originally had Windows 2003 Server on] I then restored the Virtual image of 2003 Server.

This then allowed me to create Several Linux and Windows machines.