News from Exmos

Is your business XXX rated?

2011-09-06T21:36:00.001+01:00

This weekend presents a bit of a milestone in the domain naming world as the .XXX domain finally makes an appearance. Its intended use needs little explanation.

For most businesses (or certainly the ones we have as customers), the owners might, at the very most, raise an eyebrow at the news. There’s certainly no need for them to contemplate such a registration, or is there?

We’re starting to see a school of thought forming, that although most businesses will have no need for such a domain suffix, there is perhaps a “lock out” benefit in registering them. After all, do you really want to find a legitimate adult-entertainment site is trading using the .xxx version of your domain name?

It will be interesting to see over the coming few weeks where companies with registered trade marks start snapping up these domains with no intention of using them.

Fortunately there is a process for companies to register their trademarks and indicate they have no intention of hosting a live web site at that domain. Anyone accessing the domain will be automatically redirected to a blocked page which is apparently going to be managed by the registry.

It also appears that some 15,000 names have been pre-blocked. Many of those relate to celebrities.

Interestingly, Wikipedia states the internet registry is expected to make around $200m per year from the registrations, many of which will be in the form of blocking registrations which will never be used!

So will it all be worth it? It would seem, probably not. Any expectation that blocking access to *.xxx will remove access to all pornography sites is just not the case. Registration is voluntary and many sites are expected to continue to use their existing .com domain names. At the end of the day, it may all be a waste of time.

It should be faster, but it’s slower

2011-08-29T16:51:00.001+01:00

This afternoon my laptop is slowly grinding itself into oblivion with the CPU banging up to almost 100% every second or so. This is no slouch of a laptop – Dell Precision with 8Gb RAM. However, it’s no match for a rogue bit of software.

Task manager was sufficient to get a quick handle on it being the Search Indexer (SearchIndexer.exe) process. A bit of digging later using some of the Sysinternals tools and it turns out to be a mammoth indexing exercise on my outlook.ost file.

Now that sort of makes sense.

This morning I moved a some very large chunks of e-mail out of my inbox and into some archive folders (still within my Exchange mailbox). I archive my e-mail into a yearly folder rather than splitting it up by groups like customers, suppliers etc.

So my efforts this morning to make things quicker (as Outlook struggles more with the volume of messages rather than the size) has made my afternoon worse.

It’s cool to know it’s hot

2011-08-29T11:33:00.001+01:00

One of the things we monitor is temperature, which we can pick up from a number of different places. Some equipment will provide us with internal temperature and then sometimes we have external sensors available (e.g. from a UPS).

One of our customer’s was having problems with their air conditioning unit, which we were able to detect. Having had the maintenance company out, things dropped back to normal.

However, this morning we’ve had another alert, from an external sensor which sits in the cool airstream coming out of the aircon unit. A quick call to the site and someone is able to confirm the room is transitioning from air conditioned server room to sauna.

Another quick call, this time to the maintenance company, and someone is re-visiting the site to have another look.

As we move more towards the lights-out style of operating where we can’t even rely on the daily visit by someone changing the tapes, this sort of issue could easily sit unnoticed until it starts causing equipment failures.

JCB doesn’t have a look in

2011-05-31T21:07:00.001+01:00

When we talk about comms lines (phones, broadband, leased lines etc), the discussion always at some point touches on the man in his JCB digger (or backhoe if you are from across the water) going through the cables.

Well, it seems we should be revising our views on what can cause a catastrophic line failure…

In the UK there seems to be ever increasing occurrences of cable theft! This is where people are stealing BT and the other telco’s cables for the copper and presumably head off down to the local scrap merchant to make a quick buck.

Last year there were a reported 400 arrests for cable theft.

Whatever next?

DDD Scotland

2011-05-15T22:40:00.001+01:00

Last Saturday the entire development team attended “Developer Developer Developer (Scotland)” at the Glasgow Caledonian University.

This takes the form of a series of talks (on development, of course) lasting about an hour each, starting first thing in the morning and finishing at 5pm.

Attendance for the Exmos team is entirely voluntary, so it was great to see everyone there. By all accounts, it was a thumbs up all round.

The session topics are pretty varied and some of them pretty wild and very much “out there” rather than mainstream. The attendees are a pretty hardcore bunch, as are those doing the talks.

Let’s face it - you need to be pretty “into” your development to want to spend your whole Saturday with a bunch of (fellow) geeks, many of whom follow the “must look like a programmer” fashion. Thankfully, none of the Exmos people fall into this fashion category(?) and there’s an equal amount of “normal” looking people there as well.

We try to split ourselves over sessions that are new and interesting as well as some that are directly related and beneficial to the work we do. Invariably, due to the way the timetable works, you end up in at least one session that will leave you scratching your head in bamboozlement. That’s the great thing about programming – no matter how many years you work at it, you can always find someone who can make you feel like a novice when you see what they are doing. For me personally, it’s a call to try and become even better. Sometimes you catch just a snippet of something from this sort of talk that you can factor into your own applications.

This week on “The Apprentice” they had the mobile phone app challenge. Part of that involved a presentation to a bunch of gamer geeks, who also seem to follow “programmer fashion” by the looks of them. Someone said to me “tell me you don’t go to anything like that?”.

“Last Saturday!” I said - “Last Saturday I was at one… and it was awesome.” :-)

Some photos…

http://www.flickr.com/photos/henrikniemann/sets/72157626555877493/with/5702963196/

http://www.flickr.com/photos/henrikniemann/5702963196/in/set-72157626555877493

Word for Windowz or Windows?

2011-03-27T11:27:00.001+01:00

I’ve been using Microsoft Word for Windows since the early 90’s. These early Windows versions had a very annoying bug where they would often forget the default paper size of A4 (for the UK) and keep reverting back to Letter (the US default). Back then we didn’t have the automatic resize between A4/Letter that the operating system and some printers are able to do. Instead you had to keep jumping over to the printer to confirm it should just print on A4 and ignore the request for Letter size paper.

Jump forward nearly 20 years and thankfully, that “anomaly” is a dim and distant memory.

Unfortunately, it’s been replaced with something else, which is equally annoying.

Word 2010 seems to have a real habit of hanging on for grim death to “English (U.S.)”. I don’t have it installed as a language in Word and it’s therefore not available for proofing. However, I find it constantly making an appearance and worse still, taking precedence over the default I have selected.

Check the screenshot below. Word started off by kindly doing an autocorrect on Ruggedised to Ruggedized. Having corrected it myself and then right clicked the wiggly red-line, I get the “correct” spelling being offered. Checking the language settings, my default is “English (U.K.)” and my “U.S.” option makes an appearance despite not being configured.

Better still, the Microsoft tool I’m using to write this article seems to have the same issues.

Smartphones–brilliance and a nightmare all in one.

2011-03-18T15:12:00.001Z

This year is looking to truly be the year of the Smartphone. Sure, they’ve been around for a while now, but really came into their own with the launch of the iPhone. Now we have Google with their Android OS taking a major stance on the playing field and HTC manufactured Android phones really taking the lead. In fact, we’ve seen a number of customers who were early Smartphone adopters recently switch from iPhone to HTC Android devices. This year we also have Windows Phone 7 making an appearance.

The Blackberry, that mainstay of business mobile e-mail, is starting to get pushed into the background.

However, with all this brilliance comes a true nightmare – “APPS”. Apps (or “Applications”) are rapidly becoming the bane of the IT Department’s life. IT has spent probably the last 10 years fighting the installation of non-company approved software. Sure, it still goes on, but through technology and written policy, it’s now much harder for the perpetrator and much easier for IT to identify.

Suddenly however, we’ve re-lit the fire for these people who almost couldn’t help themselves when it came to installing rogue software on their laptops. We give them a Smartphone, an almost unlimited amount of the most crazy software conceivable and no rules, policies or even guidelines as to what is acceptable.

With the iPhone and Apple, the biggest worries were just time wasting and over-use of data. Apple have a very stringent vetting process for every application in the App Store. It’s probably only a matter of time before someone manages to get some malware in there, but it’s going to be pretty hard. To install Apple apps without the App Store needs some relatively complex hackery to jail-break the phone.

At the other end of the scale we have Google – all open and laid back. Pretty much anyone can put an application into their Marketplace and there’s no checking. When someone downloads an application, it can tell them what data it might request access to on the phone. However, it generally doesn’t matter that it reports it will have access to almost every facet of the phone – people just click “OK”. To download apps outside of the Marketplace just needs a box to be ticked – because Google trusts us to be grown-up and safe about these things. Ha Ha.

The IT Department has no methods to control the app element of the Smartphone. Apple’s AppStore has over 350,000 apps. Android is gaining fast with over 250,000 while Microsoft with Windows Phone 7 have just surpassed the 10,000 level and Blackberry sit at 20,000. Still, that’s over half a million applications at the disposal of the Smartphone owner.

This really came home to roost just last month when the Google Marketplace managed to acquire around 50 or so virus laden apps. Google removed them quickly once the issue was spotted, but still over 200,000 downloads took place before that happened.

The mobile phone virus isn’t a new arrival, but using these readily available apps to carry them is. Unfortunately peoples’ uncontrollable desire for apps and their gullibility will allow this new type of malware to spread easily.

It’s only a matter of time until someone is reporting that all their corporate e-mail, confidential documents or photos of their new product have been hi-jacked off their phone by some innocent app they were “just having a quick look at”. Start to factor in the data costs the company incurs (especially when data roaming abroad) and the nightmare starts to become a bit clearer.

Right now, the only reasonable way to control this is through IT Policy, employee education and some vetting of apps for corporate approval.

Sure, there will be people who will revolt big-time and do their damnedest to still play with the apps and hopefully not get caught. At the other extreme, there will be people who will take this on-board, appreciate the education and the understand the possible impact of not following the policy.

For the full-time and part-time road warriors, mobile communications give them a staggering amount of capability in a very small and easy to use package. Provided the “apps” nightmare can be managed, that should continue to be the case.

Taking the PBX to a new level

2011-02-17T13:35:00.000Z

Exmos provides 24x7 support for one of its customer’s, covering sites in both the UK and throughout Europe. Using our 3CX VOIP phone system, the customer has a single number to call regardless of the time of day.

During working hours, any calls are simply routed to a ring group which comprises the support engineers. Out of hours handling is where it starts to get interesting.

During the week, cover is mostly handled by one engineer per night, but they rotate on a daily basis. At the weekend, the schedule also rotates, but the switch-over time is different from the weekdays.

We wanted a way to ensure that the divert to mobile process always reflects the correct support engineer, while also avoiding the hassle of someone having to login to the office to reprogram the phone switch.

The 3CX system has an API (Application Programming Interface) which allows us to write software (in this case, .NET C# code) which can drive the PBX and modify its configuration. In other words, pretty much exactly what we love doing! Our system works as follows…

The on-call rota is planned and entered into a SQL Server database. The on-call application then monitors that database looking for the next rota change. At the appropriate time, it then instructs the PBX to place a phone call to the person next in the rota. When they answer, they are played a message informing them they are now on-call. Having detected that the call has been answered, the application then re-programs the diverts on the PBX to re-route our support number to the mobile of the engineer who has just come on-call.

The whole process is completely hands-off once the schedule has been planned. Any changes to the schedule are merely entered into the database and no-one has to remember to make hand-over calls or to reprogram the PBX.

The telephone switch has evolved into something radical. We believe it has truly moved away from the domain of the telecoms company and squarely into the computing/IT environment.

This just represents a sample of what Exmos is doing with 3CX and we’ll be aiming to describe some of the other “special” things in subsequent blog posts.

Faster VPN

2011-02-17T13:31:00.000Z

Our Systems Technical Director has been working on some configuration “tweaks” for our Stonegate VPN links. Our goal was to see if we could improve the performance while not impacting the security. The initial tests are proving positive, with a throughput increase of around 10-15%. This configuration has now been rolled out across all our customers’ firewalls (from the centralised Stonegate Management Console of course!)
All too often we see equipment and solutions being installed with the default/minimum configuration. They are then left like this on the basis of “it is what it is”. At Exmos we tend to go for “working reliably” to start with. However, for most things, once they are in and settled, there’s always some scope to improve on the speed/performance. The trick, of course, is to find that balance point between outright performance and acceptable reliability.

You got a parcel? No, but you're about to get some MALWARE...

2010-12-02T23:04:00.001Z

There's a pile of these scam e-mails flying around this evening. They seem to resurrect themselves every once in a while and with Xmas just round the corner, this is an ideal time to catch people out. This one below arrived from "UPS Shipments (tracking@ups.com)" which seems legitimate enough. In fact, I'm awaiting some equipment being uplifted from a customer site by UPS, so the targetting sort of works.

What's particularly clever, is the tracking number is actually a legitimate one and in this case going to somewhere in Florida. It even has a proof-of-delivery confirmation. The first link is a legitimate URL to the tracking pages for UPS.

At this point, the social engineering kicks in and you want to look at the invoice as you're no doubt thinking "what screw up has happened that I'm being invoiced for sending something to Florida".

However, the actual link embedded in the text you click doesn't go to the UPS web site invoice download section. If you right click the hyperlink and select "Copy Hyperlink", you can then paste the result into notepad.

When we do this, we can see the link actually looks like this:

This is actually a download for a file called invoice.scr, which might on the face of it seem plausible. If we select the link, we get a download box.

A lot of people will automatically pick "Run" and that's when the trouble starts.

This file has already been spotted by our preferred AV supplier, but it appears to have only surfaced earlier today.

So, be careful - everything is not always as it seems and if in doubt, DON'T CLICK!

Mighty Word

2010-06-21T15:44:00.001+01:00

Last week I had what I estimated to be a quick, one hour exercise to do in Word (2010 in this case). This was to format up our legal Ts&Cs so they could be pasted, format intact, into any of our proposal documents or contracts. The original has been through many hands and was littered with automatically created styles.

Now I've been using Word since Word v2, prior to that WordPerfect (DOS) and my first word processing experience goes back to roughly 1986. Excel says - 24 years (I started young).

I also have a somewhat inflated opinion of my word processing skills - my documents are created "properly" - styles, usually zero hard page breaks and all the text flows nicely up/down the document as text is added/removed.

I don't meet many people who embrace this "proper" word processing and for the most part, I understand. It takes a reasonable (OK massive) degree of geekness to want to be good at word processing. On the other hand, if it's one of the tools of your trade, there's good reason to want to be always on the improvement treadmill.

I've done a fair amount of Word automated numbering over the years, but I was completely unprepared for the complexity required to get a legal numbering (1, 1.1, 1.2, 2, 2.1, 2.11, 2.12 etc) properly configured and styled.

The Internet is awash with web sites giving work arounds, tips and techniques to make this work. It's fraught with pitfalls and it would appear that a document with many different automatic numbering blocks in it is akin to a game of Jenga - constantly waiting to fall in a mass of incorrectly re-numbered paragraphs.

In the end, one hour estimated become nearly four hours of frustration and about half way through, became a battle of "I will not be beaten". Sure, I could have thrown in the towel and just manually fixed the problem, but that would have created many more problems down the line with badly formatted documents.

Now it's working, it's rather sweet (tm) to see the text properly copy and paste from one document into another and retain all its formatting, indentation and numbering intact.

I suppose the final goal is to have that as a linked document - just as soon as I've got another four hours to spare!

Stonegate in the Real World

2010-01-21T13:49:00.000Z

Recently we had another example of how well the Stonegate firewall functions in the real world.

The customer has two sites, each with two ADSL lines and a Stonegate firewall at each location. Links are load balanced, traffic shaped and we have a mesh VPN between the sites.

One of the sites was migrating one of their broadband lines to another ISP. That all went smoothly without a single hitch.

However, about a week after the migration, the link went down. We started getting e-mail from the previous ISP about their account having been reactivated and the MAC not used.

Basically, both ISPs believed they had the line. That was resolved, but the line remained down. Neither ISP could find any fault and needless to say, BT sat in the middle blaming the ISPs.

The usual diagnostics were run, routers swapped etc and finally BT accepted they had screwed up. Apparently someone had been in the exchange and a link had been incorrectly jumpered. However, it would be a couple of days before BT could get an engineer back to the exchange to fix the problem.

By this point, the customer's line had been down for the best part of two weeks.

It may come as a surprise, but they were not really at all phased by the loss of the line. The Stonegate continued to handle traffic for the Internet and the traffic shaping ensured all the different types of traffic were properly controlled and the data kept flowing. The VPN was unaffected due to the traffic shaping and the mesh. All in, things were a little slower due to the missing bandwidth, but everything continued to run and we had zero downtime.

The customer's final comment on the matter:

"Thank goodness for the 2nd broadband line and the Stonegate equipment, a good example of risk management!"

Last but not least - special recognition to the BT engineer who just happened to be driving past the exchange that same afternoon BT told us it would take them a couple of days. He saw the call, realised it was a simple fix and "popped-in" to make the change. Line back and operational!

Webmail Phishing

2009-12-30T10:46:00.002Z

By now, most people are familiar with the term “Phishing” and that it represents an attempt to acquire a password for one of their services – typically something like Internet Banking, Paypal etc.

However, there’s a new kid on the block – much more targeted and trying to get network login details.

This one sends in the typical e-mail asking the recipient to click a link to update their e-mail account. The link then takes them to an Outlook web login page, which is fake. Having attempted to then logon, the phishers now have access to that person’s company account. If that person has VPN access, then typically the VPN logon will be the same as the webmail account.

Now so far, the reports of this have been related to some colleges, universities and a religious faith site in the USA. However, as the technology gets better a catching these phishing e-mails, so the people doing the phishing become ever more devious.

So the bottom line remains the same – if you receive an e-mail asking you to go and update some account details and that e-mail is unexpected, you would be wise to ignore it. You should also read this posting on the importance of having different passwords.

Baggage Theft at Airports on the Rise

2009-12-18T08:43:00.000Z

Seems the thieving going on at airports and especially around the baggage collection areas is on the increase.

Full story at the Wall Street Journal

What's the use for all those hacked passwords

2009-12-17T10:29:00.000Z

Just as a follow-on to the article about why passwords should be different and then the update about the 32 million passwords hacked.

There's quite a lot of chatter on the web about the hack, but this blog posting has some interesting points:

30% of websites store their passwords in plain, readable text. This is mostly so the staff can read your password. From their perspective, they probably don't see your data as confidential. They might just be running a discussion forum.

If the hacker checks those 30 million passwords against Paypal and say 10% actually have Paypal accounts with the same password and he takes £10 from each...

Why passwords must be kept different

2009-12-14T21:21:00.004Z

We're often to be heard explaining to people why good password security is essential. While the majority of people take it onboard willingly, others take it onboard because that's what the system enforces through policy. Generally though, we pretty much get everyone one way or another.

However, where that often falls down is having figured out a nice, secure password, many people use that same password everywhere - on all the various websites they might have logons. The username for these websites will either be their e-mail address, or their e-mail address will be held somewhere against their profile.

So, why is this such an issue? Surely all that information is held in a highly secure, encrypted manner? Unfortunately.... not.

There were reports recently of a dating website being hacked and the hackers getting access to the members user accounts. Big deal. Except, most of these people had used their "standard" password and their e-mail address was also stored. From there, the hackers started hacking Facebook accounts and supposedly posting some fairly inappropriate comments and pictures to the friends of the person being hacked. Some people might find the comments funny, while others probably found them distressing. All in though, you are probably thinking "big deal".

However, it's not a quantum leap to start thinking about all the other websites where the same e-mail address/password combination might be used. What about your Amazon account where your credit card details are stored. What about your credit card account itself? What about your remote access into your company network - work e-mail address and same password? Think about the implications of that being hacked - all in your name!

Banks should be mostly OK as they usually have additional levels of security, but why make it any easier than it needs to be?

You should have different logins if possible and certainly different passwords for all the services you use. Rather than writing these down, the web is full of free password safe/vault applications, most of which will generate long, cryptic passwords for you, which you can copy/paste into the login fields. We regularly use http://passwordsafe.sourceforge.net/

So, as well as the usual new year resolutions of gym, diet etc - why not add "be more Internet secure for 2010" to your list. If nothing else, it's a lot easier to stick to than the usual suspects and you don't even need to leave your chair!

Update (16 Dec): This article describes how a company was hacked and has had 32 million passwords stolen. None of them were encrypted and they are concerned that the passwords people have used are probably the same for some or all of the other services they use. Some of the hacked details were posted on a website.

This was announced just yesterday.

VMware Scales

2009-08-31T22:57:00.002+01:00

Ever wondered how big you could scale a VMware system?

Here's a short (speeded up) video from VMworld 2009 showing them building the data center for the show.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aOnNpBkRam0

776 VMware ESX Hosts with 8 CPU Cores and 48Gb RAM Per host
37Tb RAM in total
6208 CPU Cores
348Tb Disk Storage
37,248 virtualised servers!

37,248 real, physical servers would have consumed 25,329KW of electricity. Their mere 776 servers consumed only 528KW of electricity.

Instead of needing space for 2,483 server racks, they only needed 28.

Win7 Subtle UI Changes

2009-08-31T20:55:00.003+01:00

So here’s the first of the very subtle but annoying changes to the User Interface in Win7.

In Vista (and XP) you could right click a running task on the task bar and almost as soon as you had right clicked, press “C” on the keyboard to close the task. If you had a chunk of tasks to close, you quickly got a little sequence running and they would be gone in a flash.

With Win7, now you right click, have to wait a little bit, then press “C” (the timing change is mildly annoying) and it selects the “close” option on the menu. But then you have to press enter/return to action the selection – and that’s away across the other side of the keyboard. You could maybe thumb the enter key on the numeric pad, but that interrupts the flow of the mouse movements.

Sometimes these are the most annoying bits of a major update to Windows (and to other big apps like Office to a similar extent). It’s just these little bits of technique that you get used to and use efficiently – then one day they are gone and the world slows down just a touch.

There will no doubt be others lurking around...

Perfect computer desk?

2009-08-30T15:27:00.002+01:00

http://www.thev1chair.com/visionmain/flagship.jpg

Apparently the chair is from a real Porsche car.

UPDATE (Dec 09): Unfortunately the site that did these chairs seems to be down. You can still find pictures on Google Images

Jumping to Windows 7

2009-08-29T22:08:00.002+01:00

Installing a new version of Windows on a working machine is always a worrying process. While we have both a desire and obligation to be running these new versions before our clients, there is a big difference between running on a test machine and running for real in a day to day working environment. We thought it might be interesting to describe how we went about this process for Windows 7, particularly because it presented a new option for testing compatibility.

Some of our machines have particularly large and complex software installations – especially our development machines. Building one of these from scratch can easily be two to three days of software installs, patching and configuration. We have a few development machines which run Vista x64 and with the x64 operating systems, it’s all drivers, drivers, drivers. Finding x64 drivers is definitely becoming easier. Finding good, robust, reliable ones can still be a bit hit or miss.

So, the test was – “How to install the final version of Windows 7 Ultimate on an x64 Dell laptop currently running Vista Ultimate x64”. This is a development machine, so we don’t want to end up doing any rebuilds. We basically need to get a Win 7 install on the machine to ensure all the key drivers (primarily Video and Networking) are OK. We want to do this without resorting to removing the hard drive and booting from a fresh one.

Firstly, an image was taken of the drive using Acronis True Image. Some drive space was cleared to give around 30Gb free space.

The following steps describe the install. If you decide to follow them, you do so at your own risk!

The machine was restarted and booted from the Win 7 DVD. At the welcome screen SHIFT-F10 is pressed which opens up a command prompt. The following commands were entered:

diskpart

create vdisk file=c:\win7.vhd type=fixed maximum=20000

sel vdisk file=c:\win7.vhd

attach vdisk

exit

So, what does all that do? Well, it takes advantage of the fact that we already have a functional, NTFS formatted partition in the machine with plenty of free disk space. We then create a virtual disk partition (from the Microsoft VM technology) on our main partition, 20Gb in size. This partition is all held inside a single file (win7.vhd) which we placed in the root of the c: drive.

Having returned to the installer, we then select our 20Gb virtual partition for the install (ignoring the error about not being able to install on this type of partition) and proceed with the installation process. The installation is a NEW one, not an upgrade.

Once completed, we will have a completely new Win 7 installation which can dual-boot with our existing Vista installation. The new install has no applications or data – it’s just a plain, brand new installation. However, from this we can then test drivers, install drivers and generally not worry about breaking the main, live installation.

Even better – the files from the main installation’s partition are available as drive D:. This way files can be copied from the main install if they are needed. In this case, it was updated Win 7 video drivers which had been downloaded before the test was started.

Having ascertained everything was working to an acceptable level, the real upgrade was then carried out on the machine.

Interestingly, the fresh installation took around 25-30 minutes as most people describe. The upgrade took nearly 2 hours to complete! At several times it appeared to stall, but it was left alone (as some googling suggested) and it eventually restarted. Unfortunately there are other people describing how they left their stalled upgrade for many hours (and in one case, for 2 weeks) and it didn’t complete. These are the joys of being in there at the start!

So we now have our first laptop running Win 7 for real. Time will tell over the coming weeks whether it’s the solution to Vista as many are touting.

Initial impressions are that the eye-candy and time wasting type new features are not as in your face as Vista was. We are praying for speed and stability. Anything else is either a bonus or irrelevant.

We do know that there are some applications that require upgrades/patches to make them work properly (e.g. SQL Server 2008) and some applications still require investigation or possibly workarounds to get them functioning (e.g. vSphere client).

Oh - and less buggy multi-monitor support would just be the icing on the cake. That will be the subject of another topic though.

Interesting times ahead...

780,000,000

2009-08-25T09:45:00.001+01:00

A big number indeed. Stick a $ sign on it and it becomes an enviable number.

According to a recent study by Kaspersky Lab, this is how much the spammers made in income from sending spam last year.

Now you know why they bother!

Here's another big number: 74,115,721,081

According to MessageLabs, that's how many spam e-mails the largest of all the botnets sent in June 2009 - PER DAY! The total across all botnets per day - 134 billion spam messages.

USB Key Encryption - Windows 7

2009-08-24T15:49:00.001+01:00

With Windows 7 just around the corner, it's now worth looking at some of the opinions on what's new, what's good and what's, well, not really worth the time of day.

One of the most interesting components is the new "Bit-Locker to Go" feature. This allows for the encryption of USB keys - something that is long overdue.

In some ways it will be hugely beneficial. Being able to put data on a USB key and ship it, safe in the knowledge that if it goes missing you won't be labelled along with various government departments will be useful. Until someone figures out how to crack the security of course.

In other ways, it could be very damaging. Trying to retrieve an ex-employee's work data from their USB drive only to discover it's encrypted could be a problem.

Fortunately, it would seem that there's an option to automatically decrypt when it is plugged into the machine where the initial encryption was performed. That will be OK provided that machine is available of course.

We'll be taking a look to see what options there are for centralised key-recovery when working with a full Active Directory domain.

The most awaited features from our perspective are the improved performance and stability. Vista has been a bit of a disappointment to say the least - some good features (desktop search is probably #1) marred by poor performance.

We don't expect to see many customers jumping on Windows 7 as soon as it launches. However, we're apparently just a few days away from receiving our licenses for the release version, so it will be interesting to see how well the nerves hold up when we start to figure out how best to deploy it. There's been a lot of comments about having to wipe machines and start from scratch, so we'll finally find out how many of these rumours are true.

Internet Down - better e-mail someone?

2009-08-23T14:38:00.001+01:00

We used to see this quite a lot. The internet would be down at a customer site and when it eventually came back online, we'd receive a number of e-mails from people saying "the Internet's broken – can you take a look at it please". Duh!

It's the high-tech equivalent of a power-cut at home. You get the candles and torches out and resign yourself to the fact there's no TV. As boredom sets in you then think "might as well sit and have a cup of tea". Then the penny drops as you realise the kettle is electric.

In the last couple of weeks we've seen an unusually high number of broadband problems. One ISP was having network issues, one area of the country had problems in their BT exchange, someone else had a failed router.

We never received a single e-mail informing us the Internet was broken.

Now this isn't anything to do with people getting smarter, but rather due to all these sites running Stonegate firewalls with multiple broadband connections and traffic prioritisation. Not a single person realised that they had lost one of their broadband connections until we contacted them (by e-mail of course!) to let them know we were working on the problem.

You can of course solve the problem at home with the kettle if you have gas as well as electricity, or maybe you are super efficient and you go cook by camp fire.

Thankfully, making Internet connectivity in the office always available is much easier - thanks to the Stonegate firewalls!

The Power of SQL Backups

2008-02-14T15:01:00.001Z

It's quite amazing how often we find SQL Server installations where the power of the backup capabilities in the product are being under utilised.

SQL Server can be backed up whilest online and being used. It can do a full database dump, or it can do a transactional log dump. The latter dumps to file all transactions that have been recorded since the last transaction or full database dump.

There's a balancing act as to how often you can execute these backup tasks without impacting performance and the frequency of full versus transaction dumps. An example probably helps...

We have a customer with an SQL based accounting system. The database is relatively small by SQL Server standards - around 500Mb. We take a full database backup at 07:30 and again at 12:30 and 19:30. In between these times, we dump the transaction logs every 15 minutes. The perfomance impact is negligible and nobody notices a thing.

Today we had to recover that system from a fault (caused by the application rather than the SQL Server engine). The fault happened just before 1pm after a morning of posting transactions.

With a "normal" backup routine, we would have been recovering from last night's backup and they would have ended up having to re-post a morning's work - not easy to do when we no longer have "paper copies" to refer to.

We restored the full database backup from 12:30 followed by the transaction log at 12:45. Total loss of work - around 10 minutes!

Failover Internet Connections - a real world experience

2007-12-05T16:02:00.001Z

Last week, mid afternoon, we lost our Internet connection. Turned out there was a BT fault, which by the time we'd called our ISP, BT already had a fault ticket logged on their system. This was about 2:30pm and BT were reckoning the line would be back operational by 17:22:36. Nothing to beat a supplier which can give you an accurate time for a repair to be completed!

So, the response in the office to having lost a broadband connection? Little more than a collective of raised eyebrows.

We had received an e-mail from our firewall indicating that one of the WAN links was down. The others continued to function as normal. E-mail came and went, browsers browsed and we had data flowing up and down the VPN tunnels.

Our load balance / fail over Stonegate firewall had worked exactly as it should.

If we'd had just a single broadband connection, we would have ended up twiddling our thumbs for the remainder of afternoon. Needless to say, the link was still down early into the evening, although it was back operational the next morning.

Personally, we don't believe anyone should be running a business these days without multiple connections to the Internet. Take the test - how long from unplugging your Internet connection does it take for things to grind to a halt and then how long can you sit holding your breath like that in anticpation of things returning to normal?

Want to cover your bases even more - what about a wireless/mobile connection to sit alongside these wired connections. Watch this space...

Adaptive Backup

2007-10-04T14:18:00.001+01:00

Grangemouth, October 2007 - Exmos announces the launch of Adaptive Backup, an alternative to Microsoft Offline Files technology.

Adaptive Backup is a backup tool aimed primarily at laptop users and the backing up of their My Documents folder to the server. Importantly, it is able to dynamically reconfigure itself based on the speed and quality of the connection to the server. As the laptop user moves out of the office and is connecting over WAN links or VPN back to the server, Adaptive Backup will selectively reduce the size of files it will attempt to back up and throttle back the rate at which these files are copied. It can also be used to replicate files from the server down to the laptop, such as template files.

The application runs within the tray space, so while indicating visually to the user which mode it is currently operating in, at the same time it is unobtrusive.

Gordon Coulter, Director of Systems commented "For a number of years, Exmos has watched the employees of various companies battle with My Documents synchronisation. They end up out of the office with no files, or battle with Offline Files insisting the file has to come from the server rather than the laptop because the laptop can see the server over the (slow) VPN link. The worst case is when they cannot get back online to the server to lift some files because their My Documents has to be synchronised, but the amount of data that they now have to push to the server makes that task impossible. It is not uncommon for a user to end up saturating a VPN connection due to Offline Files doing its thing. The people using this find the whole thing a truly frustrating experience. At Exmos, we have most definitely shared in their pain."

Exmos has been running Adaptive Backup internally since the development was completed some three months ago. A number of employees at Exmos' customers have also been trialling the software and the feedback has been both positive and silent (which is indicative of how unobtrusive the application is).

Gordon Coulter also blogged about the problems with Offline Files in his personal blog at http://gordoncoulter.blogspot.com/ as well as participating in a discussion on a Microsoft blog at http://blogs.msdn.com/jonathanh/archive/2004/10/06/239025.aspx).

For more information or to arrange a trial or quotation, call Exmos on +44 (0)1324 486844 or e-mail network@exmos.com

Exmos Partners with Stonesoft

2007-09-24T10:33:00.001+01:00

Grangemouth, May 2007 - Exmos has signed a partnership agreement to sell the Stonesoft range of security appliances, including the Stonegate firewall.

Stonesoft were selected as a result of an investigation into finding a firewall appliance which could handle multiple WAN connections to the Internet and importantly, in a clever fashion. While many firewalls will offer the ability to support two connections, this often comes with only very basic modes of operation. Typically this is an active-passive fail-over, activate when utilisation on the main link reaches a threshold or round robin across both lines.

Gordon Coulter, Director of Systems, commented "Broadband has gone from being hugely exciting to frustrating, difficult to manage and a nightmare when it's down. We also regularly see links that are permanently saturated with no method to control traffic. Everything is back to being slow again."

"Recognising that companies have now become reliant on broadband, but are at the mercy of a single point of failure, Exmos wanted a device that could load balance intelligently across not only two lines, but any number of lines, regardless of the type and the ISP."

"Stonesoft not only met that requirement, but exceeded it with their multi-link VPN offering and QoS traffic shaping capability. This allows the automatic creation of a mesh VPN with intelligent load balancing across the links. Factor in the ability to then cluster the appliances in an active-active load balanced configuration and you have a seriously capable device at your disosal."

Exmos evaluated and tested the Stonegate firewall appliance in its own live network for a period of nine months. During that time, the Exmos network engineers were able to properly understand its operation in the real-world, dealing with real network problems as they arose. Stonesoft not only provided direct support and assistance during this period, which was a refreshing experience, but continue to do so.

By the time Exmos came to install its first customer sites, it had a considerable amount of experience already under its belt. There was no fear of that first customer deployment.

Stonesoft commented "Stonesoft is delighted Exmos has agreed to sell our advanced network security platform and integrated appliances."

"At Stonesoft we only work with a limited number of ambitious partners like Exmos, who are able to share our commitment to solid business strategies as well as long term commercial success."

"We are entirely confident that the StoneGate technology will quickly meet and exceed the real-life challenges faced by Exmos' customers seeking to secure their information flow and future business continuity."

For more information or to arrange a trial or quotation, call Exmos on +44 (0)1324 486844 or e-mail network@exmos.com

Exmos Launches Communitext SMS Portal

2007-09-13T23:11:00.000+01:00

Exmos has released its Communitext SMS Portal, a mobile messaging platform that can be used as the basis for building a mobile business, or for mobile-enabling an existing business or software product.

The Communitext SMS Portal is based on technology that has been in use in Exmos for several years and is now being made available to the market, allowing a wide range of businesses to generate recurring revenue from SMS messaging.

The conventional model for this type of technology is to develop it in-house and then retain it exclusively for internal use. However, based on the vast range of opportunities that still exist for using SMS messaging, Exmos believe that there is a significant opportunity for this type of system being available as a product.

Exmos say that the multi-company architecture of the system effectively allows any business to set itself up as an SMS aggregator. They believe that it will be of interest to companies involved in mobile services, advertising and PR, OEM software development and web hosting, as well as companies who simply require control over their SMS messaging.

All communication with the mobile networks is through the industry-standard SMPP protocol, meaning that users can connect directly to network operators SMSCs. This eliminates the need to use third-party SMS aggregators.

Administration is carried out through a web interface, built using ASP.NET. The portal owner has a Companies view that shows all companies that have an account on the portal. Associated with each company is a Users view which shows the list of users in each company who are authorised to access the system.

A major advantage of the Communitext SMS Portal that distinguishes it from competing products is that it comes with a range of user applications which can be licensed under a variety of models. These include an MS Outlook plug-in that allows users to send and receive text messages from within Outlook and which integrates with Active Directory. The availability of user applications means that the system can be rapidly deployed, without the need to develop a custom user interface for customers. The availability of a re-branding service means that the user applications can be integrated fully into a company’s business identity.

For more information, e-mail mobile@exmos.com

Why is there so much SPAM?

2007-09-10T22:19:00.001+01:00

Our customers regularly ask "why do people keep sending out all this spam - surely no-one actually buys from these people?"

Unfortunately, the simple answer seems to be "surprisingly, they do!" This it would seem, is the real crux of spam - as long as people continue to buy, the spammers will continue to send. Combined with the people who fall for the Phishing scams, the spammers are obviously making enough money to warrant the efforts they go to in order to find their customers.

Some people are commenting that it is the nature of what is being advertised by spam that makes it compelling for people to acquire it via this route. Most of the stuff is plain embarrassing to read about, let alone walk into a shop, use a reputable online site or go discuss it with your Doctor. Many people would probably not even consider browsing the web for these products, so the fact the spammers are delivering the supplier details right to the inbox is clearly a plus.

There are no accurate figures for what percentage of people buy as a direct result of the spam they receive. Mostly this revolves around the definition of spam. If you are not in the market for Viagra, then these messages are clearly spam. If you want to buy Viagra, then it's clearly a well targeted marketing message. Reports tend to vary from 8% up to as high as 40% of people who have received spam then went onto purchase from it. Even at 8%, that's a staggering number of people.

By February 2007, an estimated 90 billion spam messages were being sent every day!

Wikipedia has an interesting, if somewhat lengthy, article on spam.

Exmos Partners with Postini

2007-08-23T16:24:00.001+01:00

Grangemouth, July 2007 - Exmos has taken on a partnership and reseller agreement with Postini, a world leader in Managed Security Services for e-mail, web access and instant messaging (IM).

As part of a regular review process, Exmos have carried out another extensive investigation and evaluation process of the current market place. The server processing requirements for anti-spam and anti-virus are constantly increasing and the software is becoming ever more complex. At the same time, with the externally hosted ("in the cloud") services really coming into their own, Postini turned out to be an obvious winner.

Exmos considered the per-user quarantine management to be a key element of the solution it offered. Many of the hosted solutions dump all the SPAM into a single quarantine, which is then supposed to be managed centrally. This is such a soul destroying task, it would quickly fall by the way, or be done in a hap-hazard fashion. One person's SPAM might be the sales person's next big order - so clearly the best person to handle the quarantine is the person the e-mail belongs to.

Gordon Coulter, Director of Systems at Exmos, commented "The Postini solution has proven to be refreshing in the constant battle against SPAM. Postini's Blatant SPAM Blocking, which deletes e-mail which is very obviously SPAM has proven to be a big help. The more e-mail you process, the more easily you can ascertain how obvious something is SPAM. With Postini processing some 1.6 billion messages daily, more than any other service on the planet, they clearly have a better indication than anyone what can comfortably be deleted. This in turn leaves the recipient with a much reduced amount of e-mail to manage in their quarantine. Coupled with the fact these messages no longer need to be carried into the LAN to be processed, the Internet connection traffic is also reduced. All in, it's a win-win solution."

For more information or a quotation, call Exmos on +44 (0)1324 486844

2007-08-23T16:21:00.000+01:00

The new Exmos news blog has been launched!