Dave Bailey

As the frequency of hangovers starts to return to normal after the festive season and a new year begins, I’d like to take you back to last year’s Consumer Electronics Show in Las Vegas. It was at this event that Bill Gates announced Windows Home Server, a product designed to provide “better ways to organise, share and protect digital content and information at home”.

I suspect that the thought of coming home after a hard day wrestling with Active Directory only to be grilled by the kids on the best way to set up Windows Home Server would fill most Windows server administrators with dread.

But Gates had a point. There is a real need for a better way to protect the data residing on home PCs. Just imagine how you would feel if you lost all the jpegs, MP3s and videos currently cluttering up your hard drive. And could your kids survive without all their files? Obviously not, so what’s the best way of backing it up? Posting 5MB .zip files to your Google email account?

It seems that the amount of IT kit appearing in homes is also leading to parents morphing into IT and network administrators. With wireless routers, network-attached storage (NAS) systems, webcams and VoIP clients all being pushed towards the domestic market, it won’t be long before network administration becomes a key section in every parenting handbook.

I’m sure there are already people out there with servers, storage area networks, intrusion prevention systems and optical fibre links tacked up all over the house. Some might dismiss such a person as being nothing more than a kind of digital age equivalent of a model railway enthusiast or CB radio nerd, but I think this may be downplaying their significance.

A recent report in the US scientific publication Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences entitled Recent Acceleration of Human Adaptive Evolution argued that the human race is evolving faster than was previously thought. With all the web services out there, such as online banking and identity management, you need to have fairly competent IT skills to protect your family from all the skulduggery going on in the online world. Lump this together with all the network kit appearing in homes everywhere, and we could be seeing the dawn of a new type of human: homo network administratus.

One can almost imagine happy parents looking into their newborn’s cot as their pride and joy checks the connectivity of an RJ-45 cable with the Fluke Networks handheld they were given as a christening present.

Happy new year.

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