LANcom Technology Blog

If no one purchased stolen goods the burglary rate would crash to almost zero.

Spammers send tens of millions of e-mails to find the desperate one-in-10-million schmuck who actually believes that providence has sent him an anonymous stock tip so good he must buy it now or that member enlargement can be sent through the post.

If they didn’t buy you and I wouldn’t get Spam - period. I am not sure what direct steps could be taken to stop the Spam equivalent of ‘receiving stolen goods’ but we should start thinking about it.

New Zealand’s largest ISP Xtra now blocks inbound Port 25 traffic by default when you set up an ADSL account with them. So, unless you specifically ask them to open this port, your mail server will not be able to receive email from other mail servers.

Like a lot of the actions Telecom (Xtra’s parent company) takes this is one part crass commercial exploitation and one part showmanship. It makes using Xtra’s own mail server the path of least resistance and this adds to Xtra’s revenues. It is also a token gesture against Spammers.

Xtra blocking inbound mail has some irony for us as Xtra’s network is a source of a huge amount of Spam to our customers. They have, to date, shown little energy to remedy this.

I had a meeting today with a customer of 16 years and he brought up that we should be telling him more about what we are doing for him. That we should keep him informed about our SPAM service upgrade and the like. I was disappointed that he didn’t know about many of the information services we provide and more disappointed that we had done such a poor job telling people about them. So here’s a list of the feedback services you get from us when you are on a LANcom 770 support plan.

NEWSLETTERS AND BLOGS

1. This blog. www.lancom.co.nz/blog
2. Our monthly e-mail newsletter (e-mail sales@lancom.co.nz and ask to be put on the list)
3. Our very popular weekly MS Office Secrets newsletter that gives a new office secret tip every week.(e-mail sales@lancom.co.nz and ask to be put on the list)

MONTHLY

1. Monthly activity report presented at your site during the monthly IT strategy meeting 
2. Printed transcripts of all work done on your site with your monthly billing

WEEKLY

1.  Weekly call by the helpdesk to confirm all jobs closed and review status of current open ones.

Online Control Console

Log on the Online Control Console 24×7 to access the following

1. Current open tasks (add new ones here too!) 
2. Online transcripts updated daily of all work done on your site
3. Internet traffic usage reports broken down by computer
4. Uptime and downtime of your critical servers.
5. Online records of all backup checks done on your server
6. Online Key Performance indicators for our service agreement (average time to respond, average time idle for jobs)
7. Historical invoices.

And that’s off the top of my head. 

More as  I recall them

The ’site:’ command 

Many web sites have poor searches that are slow and inconclusive. You can get Google (www.google.com) to search that site for you by typing site:  and then the web site you want to search. For example, I find Microsoft’s search engine slow and it is often not clear if the whole site is being searched. By visiting Google putting site:www.microsoft.com exchange in the search field I am searching all pages at www.microsoft.com with the word ‘exchange’ somewhere in the content

Fact 1: Modern computers systems can be configured to allow or restrict what users can do during their time on the computer.

Fact 2: In many companies employees spend most of their work day on computers.

It is the habit of managers to link these two facts and try and to use the security and management tools that come with their computer systems to manage their workers. This is a mistake. We receive requests to give read access to certain areas, restrict access at certain times – generally force people to do things they are doing but management would prefer they didn’t.

Unfortunately this is mostly doomed for failure for two reasons. Firstly these systems tools are primarily to maintain the security and integrity of the computer system. So that when they are pointed at people there it is invariably a poor fit with unintended consequences. The most costly unintended consequence is where someone is stopped from doing their legitimate work. Secondly, by defining the rules by the computer system this legitimises work arounds. If you use the firewall to stop Internet chat and a user finds ‘a workaround’ then this must be OK because the rule is defined by the computer system restrictions.

There are exceptions, where the stakes are high (e.g. your HR documents) or where there are no other management processes available (e.g. computer systems for students at a university campus).  Everywhere else setting expectations from workers is for the company manual and job review meetings.

In the last month we have upgraded our SPAM filtering. We have noticed a big decrease in the amount of SPAM getting through. If you use our filtering service you should have noticed this too. This decrease will make everyone happy.

The difference in the new IronPort technology we are using is the introduction of what they call a ‘reputation filter’. All Ironport appliances around the world report back to the IronPort HQ on suspicious traffic. By comparing suspicious traffic reports from different IronPort appliances when a match is made the sender in question is very likely to be a SPAMmer.

Previous technology mainly used content scanning (which IronPort uses as a second level defence) where the content of the e-mail was analysed according to the rules of the AntiSpam vendor. These rules had become much less effective as SPAMmers continued to craft e-mails to get around them. 

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It’s Friday and your week is running out.

Can you, hand on heart, say you know whether you have successful backups this week?  Having no backup is the only computer failure from which there is no way to recover.  

Well not EVERYTHING. But in many industries it will change the landscape beyond recognition. This is the first in a continuing series where I will try to point my customers to online resources that can far better explain what the Internet means for their industry. Main stream media (TV, newspapers, magazines) has been deeply affected by the online revolution. The biggest NZ paper, the NZ Herald, has a free edition online. I am sure some of the management hates this but if they don’t give it away there are plenty of free alternatives and they will lose that customer’s attention forever.  With the blogging explosion journalists are grasping at what makes a blogger different from a journalist apart from the pay packet. Journalists are struggling with this question because the difference is very often hard to discern. It makes fascinating reading.  

Jeff Jarvis who has a long and successful journalistic career in the main stream media has been blogging these issues for a number of years and is a great place to start. His widely read blog is called buzzmachine

Security is very topical right now. As I write there are huge queues at the airports of the US and Europe where people are being stripped of nail scissors and baby formula before they can board their aircraft. I have my doubts about the effectiveness of a lot of these measures and therefore the possible motivations for them but I can’t be sure. Aircraft security is not my area of expertise.