After having been scared away by prices of Cisco solutions, watchguard firewall, and the likes Shane asked of I could do this with some open source software; Of course I said yes !

So now I manage the office security velocity networks, plus network management for cafenet (a wireless network around Hamilton) and do the odd systems job when the need it.

There is lots of things we do for Velocity Networks

• Network design
• Network security
• Network management
• VPN design, configuration, and management

All sorts of things.

This is a typical “I’ve been abandoned by my web designer
“ so they tracked me down for my WordPress skills.

I spent sometime identifying what was good and what was bad, formed a list of remedial work. and set to it.

Understanding WordPress is key to any efficient remedial work,

This project was an assembly of premium theme work, custom imagery / design, and some content management. The site is a custom design based on a purchased theme, and adjusted to suit.

Netcore is all original design work (about 4 solid days working on the logo) original colours, a customised premium theme,.

I also was responsible for the:

• Car sign writing
• Business cards
• Letter head

as well as the business functions; Market segmentation, and SWOT / PEST / Exit plan.

In January 2011 I saw that maybe there could be some room on the internet for someone who gives away games. I’m a big fan of steam games (sometimes too big) and I figured maybe I could share the love.

With this project I decided to go with a new commercial forum software xenforo.

I’ve had to learn all new forum software as I’ve written a couple of plugins. The home page as an example is custom built, designed to pull content from elsewhere in the forum (both private posts, and public posts) to dynamically build a home page of monthly give aways.

Thanks to Velocity Networks for providing the network connection, and bandwidth.

The second largest jabber server in New Zealand is also run in Hamilton; I wonder what that means?

We have a history of building and maintaining winning communities at netenterprises, so why not help where we can. This is hosted in USA; both the virtual machine and network provided by Oregon State University Open Source Labs (osuosl.org)

So it started in 2002. Paul Willard (paul a.k.a TerminalAddict) and Mark Ryan (Cannonfodder), and a few others took over where Tom Berger had left off. The board has gained semi-official status from Remi Mathieu, and Gael Duval (both from Mandriva S.A); support from the Open Source Labs at Oregon State University (osuosl.org); and links to non-English speaking Mandriva specfic websites. We’ve gone from strength to strength, and are now the largest unofficial Mandriva support forum in the world.
At the time of writing this article MandrivaUsers.org has more than 20,000 members.

“yo” they said, “We’d like our own place on the internet to call our own”.

“funny you should mention that” I said, “I’ve just bought this cool domain name mcrides.co.nz”. and a partnership was born. The forum uses commercial invision power board software, and has a custom theme, and logo work by us.

Great; plus there was a need for a community website for the 300 other TiVo owners of New Zealand to share info.

This site is now just a news collection site, as TiVo launched officially in New Zealand in 2010 (I bought one the day they were launched) and as such TiVo “hacker” numbers are dwindling.