I have created a new blog over on my test web site that I will be using for Rants of a more personal nature. If you want to see what is going on in my world and the thoughts that I share visit:
Feel free to agree or disagree with what I say, but this is just my forum for venting!
Stephen
Currently there is a debate raging on the yahoo small business server mailing list about what is better for servers, backing up to tape or backing up to USB Hard Drives. Like all situations there is positives and negatives to both sides.
Our views
We have been using both types of backups for our clients but lately have been making the move to USB Hard Drive most often. Lower end tape drives (Travan) have not kept up to the ever expanding size of hard drives and I have found can sometimes be unreliable. Higher end tap drives with the proper capacity are expensive and the media is very expensive (Drives cost between 1000 to 5000 dollars CAN, and media is 100.00 – 200.00 CAN per tape). The largest two advantages of a tape system however is that the media is portable and easy to store offsite and you can add additional tapes to archive data over a longer period of time.
USB Hard Drives on the other hand are very inexpensive and often you can get 4 or 5 300 GB drives in enclosures for the cost of 1 lower end tape drive. There are a couple of problems that can occur with USB hard drives. The drives are more fragile than tape media. Dropping the enclosure can result in significant damage that renders the backups on it useless. The drives are bulkier than tape media. As well if a part of a backup set get’s corrupted due to bad media, the whole backup set may be useless, whereas with a tape the corrupted part of the media could still be skipped and the rest of the backup files restored. The biggest advantages are that they are fast (USB 2), they can hold much more data than a tape and they are inexpensive!
What have we been doing for our clients? Currently for Small business we are recommending a minimum of 2 USB Hard Drives in a rotation at minimum. Ideally 3 or 4 would be better. 1 Drive backs up 1 week and is rotated out and stored off site, and then the other drive is substitued. With a 3 or 4 drive system one drive could be used for archiving monthly backups. In addition with the cost of external hard drives dropping on a regular basis a new drive could be added every 5 to 6 months to store and archive backups.
Off site storage and archiving is very important. Many things can happen to a physical location (Fires, Theft, Flooding) and if there is no backup taken off site, important company data could be lost. For companies that are publicly traded and operating in the US, Sarbannes Oxley regulations force them to maintain archives of 7 years of all their data and email. Think to yourself. What would happen to my business if all of our data was wiped out today? A well planned, maintained and tested disaster recovery plan is well worth any cost in implementing!
We would be happy to discuss backup solutions with any of our exisiting clients or new clients. Soon we will be contacting everyone for a review of their existing disaster recover plans and where shortfalls may lie.
To the same affect most home users should also implement some sort of backup system. Often we work on PCs where there is a failure of either physical components or software issues where we attempt (and are usually successful) at recovering data, however this can become very expensive and time consuming.
There is an old IT expression that states “you are only as good as your last backup!” So true!
Stephen
A big whoops over to the people at CA (Computer Associates). In late August they released a virus signature package to their E Trust products that mistakenly flags the required LSASS.exe system file as a trojan horse/ Virus and the real time scanner would delete the file. Upon reboot the server would freeze at a grey screen. This was discovered fairly early but in some cases the damage was already done. You can read more about this error at this blog
http://blogs.technet.com/sbs/archive/2006/09/01/453504.aspx
I have checked the servers of Sysguy clients that have CA ETrust 8 AV on them and all appeared to have notbeen affected by this signature update problem. However I would ask that all Sysguy Clients running this software please contact us before rebooting their servers so that we can be on standby to fix any problems.
Stephen
I have the latest RC of Internet Explorer 7 loaded on my laptop… With Beta 3 ( I skipped 2 because I was having problems), everything worked fine. After I installed RC1, I started gettting errors everytime I closed the browser, and if there are multiple tabs open I would get the error after every tab closed. Digging a little into it I discovered the problem is related to the Stumbleupon toolbar (mentioned in another post of mine). Turning off the toolbar makes the problem go away. I hope the folks at stumbleupon.com know of the issue as I enjoy “stumbling” once in a while!
I like the new release of IE, especially the tabbed browsing and the RSS feeds. Altough I use a dedicated RSS reader I may one day switch to this as well. You can download and try it out here.
http://www.microsoft.com/windows/ie/downloads/default.mspx
One thing that I have heard is that IE7 when it is released will be installed automatically as a critical update to your Operating system. Microsoft has made a blocking tool available for system administrators to stop the automatic upgrade until the browser is fully tested.
Stephen
Got my email this weekend that Windows Vista RC1 has been released to the Consumer Preview Program. If you registered for the program you should be able to download and install the latest release. From what I understand this code is very close to what will be the Gold Released to Manufacturing Version. I haven’t had a chance to install the RC yet but will probably get to it in the next little while.
Stephen
I have just posted three shots I took of the moon. All three were taken Sept 8th between 12 and 1:30 AM through my Celestron C6SGT and with my Canon Digital Rebel XT. I am pretty proud of these as this was the first time I used the Rebel XT on that scope. Two are taken just directly through the scope, (the top half and the bottom half images) and the other was taken using an Antares 6.3 Focal Reducer (Full moon shot). Have a look. They can be seen in my gallery at the following location.
It has been a while since I last used the services of mail2web.com, but I was recently reminded about how good of a service it is. And once again the price is right!
I recently forgot all about one of my spam accounts on my other domain and after about 2 months of not checking there was a ton of emails there (over 2000). I tried downloading everthing off of the server but Outlook Express would hit about message 600 and fail. I left it for a while to see if it would work and it ended up trying and failing several times. The problem with Outlook Express is that if it doesn’t get all the messages and fails the next time it starts, it tries to download all of the messages again. After a few hours I can back to my system to see about 12000 new emails there and it was still trying. No big deal I will log in to webmail and delete them that way.
So I logged into the webmail cient (Uebimiau) which is a great php based webmail program i offer my hosting clients. Unfortnately it would continually time out and fail as well. Even when it is working it’s best it is a touch slow.
Next step was to try Thunderbird. Set up the account and it would fail as the others but at least it deletes messages as soon as it pulls them down (unless you have the flag set). In the meantime I had contacted my server support to see about getting the whole email box deleted and they suggested trying to mail2web.com. Â
I used to use this great free service all the time before I had a webmail client on my servers, and had forgotten about them. I went to the site, put in my email address and the account password and boom I got in. I was then able with 1 click to delete all the emails that were sitting there!
While there I looked around at some of the services that they offer for free and was impressed. While they offer the Pop to Web email interface, they also offer the same service to make your email available on your mobile phone or pda. Now they have added a personalized home page so you can see all your email addresses from the same spot (including your own media blog) and have also added a free email services based on MIcrosoft Exchange 2003 and Outlook Web Access! With OWA you can keep your contacts in one spot as well as your email and acces it from there. The only word of warning is that your email address will be at mail2web.com
Like I said I forgot all about this service and it was great to go back and see what was there again. I would highly recommend that if you wish to check your email from a PC you can use this easy system if you don’t have or don’t like your web based client
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Stephen
Ever want to watch the big game but are caught away from hme and away from your TV? Well worry no more with the new SlingBox from Slingmedia http://www.slingmedia.com The Slingbox usually sells for about 249 CAN but I have seen it on sale (and picked my own up for 199.00).
How dows it work? You hook up your Slingbox to the device you wish (Cable, Satellite Dish Receiver, PVR or DVD player). In the box you will find a couple of the cables you need as well as the IR blaster that you attach over the IR port on the device to control it. For now I just have my box connected to a standard cable feed. You plug the device into your home network, load the software on a PC or laptop. Run the initial configuration and set up a free finder service account (necessary for Internet Connectivity) and away you go.
When you want to watch TV all you have to do is find an internet connection. Start the Slingplayer software select the device you want to watch, change the channel and soon you will have your TV streaming to you. Using their proprietary software and streaming codec, the Slingbox and player constantly adjust the quality to give you the best quaity streaming you can get based on your high speed connection.
There are two disadvantages that I have seen so far, only one person can connect to the Slingbox at a time, and if someone is watching the device they will have to watch what you watch (the exception being a basic cable feed as the Slingbox has it’s own built in tuner).
What can you do with the Slingbox? So far I have used mine around the house on my wireless laptop to watch TV in other locations in the house. I have connected from hotels in various cities and watched shows. Another cool little trick is that I have copied the Slingplayer software to an USB Key and have used that. Simply plug the key into an Internet connected pc, start the softwre connect and away you go. I recently did this at my parents place to watch a football game while there house is under renovations and they didn’t have a TV set up.
I recently saw someone using the new slingplayer for mobile devices watching a golf tournament from a club while his kids were doing their activities!
Sony offers their own package called location free TV but it is also 150.00 more but does allow multiple users to connect at the same time.
The Slingplayer is ideal for travellers and sports fan you want to watch local TV while they are away from home. I give it a big thumbs up!
We are proud to have recently acheived our Microsoft Small Business Specialist Designation. This designation shows that we are proficient in evaluating the needs and requirements of small businesses and to design and build computer networks and solutions specifically for small businesses.
Contact us to have a free technical assesment done of your small business and see if can implement a solution to make your office more productive.
Another great free tool that I have found and use on a regular basis is found at http://www.logmein.com
They offer a free service that allows you to remotely access your PC securely from anywhere on the internet. While Windows XP Pro has remote desktop, one of the really great things about this tool is it allows you to set up multiple pcs behind a router without having to open a port on your firewall for everyone. It works on XP Pro, as well as home and windows 2000. I also use it to access pcs that are on networks for monitoring the network itself. The best thing about it is that it is a free product. No gimmicks.
If you need to access your pc or multiple pcs on your network I would suggest downloading this product and give it a try.
Stephen