LANcom Technology Blog

We received today the following spam email addressed to our publicly known DNS email address:

Timeline Media. Tapes. Cards also References Books External linksedit termThe Sears Telegames System manual top Imagic catalog bottom.The user manuals several early systems. Its vary slightly due rounding computer. Indicates items available while supply lasts. replaced. Copyright cho doiLeave required never News read blogs serverHelp Documents find correction newsroom emails sent address below. answers questions having technical inquiries problem call customer care: NYTIMES/. Address: EditorThe West rd St.New NY RELATED

It was sent in clear text so there are no hidden bits that could fool you. What you see here is what you get. There is no offer to buy anything. No company stock being pumped. It makes no sense at all.

It was most probably sent by a beginner spammer who hasn’t learned how to use his/her spamming software. This email serves no purpose other than to clog up your inbox (Maybe that’s the intent and we are looking at vandalism)

This kind of rubbish is very difficult to stop

Wireless networking (WiFi) has been one of most disappointing technologies of the last few years. It promised a lot but has often only delivered frustration. On paper a $200 WiFi access point and $1000 of WiFi access cards could make $6000 of cabling redundant and avoid the clutter of using cables. It hasn’t panned out.

Security has been a headache for WiFi from the start. Traditionally your standard cable based local area network came with some very good security built in. It’s called your front door. For a hostile user/hacker to get a device onto a standard network running on standard twisted pair cable they have to physically get into your building. With a wireless system they can often sit across the road.

The WiFi industry has a poor record in addressing the fact that your WiFi network can be very accessible to anybody near your building. From day one most WiFi Access points have shipped ‘open’ which means that the default mode is to accept connections from anyone. Remarkably this continues in the name of usability.

There are ways you can secure your wireless access point.  The WiFi industry got this wrong as well. Their original security regime WEP (Wired Equivalency Protocol) was difficult to hack but still hackable. You needed specialist software and that software needed a week or so of encrypted packets to break your encoding. But after a week of sitting in a van on the road next to your office your opposition were now able to connect to your network without having to be in your building. Not good.

After much anguish the WiFi industry got it right and brought out the WPA (WiFI Protected Access) encryption protocol. This was done properly and for all intent and purpose is unhackable.

The affordable units suffered from overheating and consequent freezing. In 2005 sat in a meeting where a representative from the largest wireless manufacturer told me this was a fact of life until the next model.

All wireless services – radio, television, cell phones, WiFi - suffer from the same two curses - Interference and blockage. Cordless phones share the WiFi frequencies as will your neighbour’s WiFi systems. WiFi has difficulty getting through concrete floors and walls.

One of the reasons WiFi has looked so poor is how reliable twisted cabling (the stuff you use now) actually is. Those long in the tooth will remember the Coaxial that was widely used before twisted pair and how one user unplugging his/her computer could bring down the entire LAN. For all practical purposes twisted pair cable doesn’t fail. So even a relatively stable WiFi system that well planned that falls over an hour a month (that’s 99.98% uptime) is seen as far less reliable.

If you are going to have one access point for casual use or the use of visitors (make sure you firewall properly) then you can deploy a single access point quite simply

For anything else the only effective way to deploy WiFi widely is to do a comprehensive site survey that measures each room and determines how many access points are necessary and where they should be. Even after all this planning an inconsiderate neighbour could ruin it all. For this kind of hassle twisted pair cable starts to look attractive again.

As ever the technology is getting better and there will come a tipping point. It just isn’t here now.

One of the great things about our new Asterisk computer based PBX system is it can use industry standard SIP connections to connect to extensions and other services.

Inside our office this means we can buy any SIP (Session Initiation Protocol) compliant handset and that will work as a telephone extension over our network (one cable to your desk for computer and your phone)

Another neat thing that this means is that we can use SIP compliant VoIP providers (Voice over IP providers who work something like Skype) for extra telephone trunks to handle our calls. For the non technical this means we can use the Internet to connect to a Skype-type service and they will make the local call for us and patch us through. It’s essentially like hooking Skype up to your PBX and it is transparent to the user.

The cost for NZ calls is about 6-10c a minute (greater than 4c per minute on a normal landline) but of course there is no base rental and you only pay for what you use.

Conditions apply as always. Telecom’s crippling of ADSL (mostly by lack of investment but regularly by design) will be an issue from time to time. You will also need to be with an ISP that properly provisions international bandwidth as the phone call is going over the Internet to the US/Europe before it gets to a telephone line. Skype themselves don’t support SIP (they have decided to only use their own propriety protocol) but there are plenty of similar services that do.

We are very particular that all the servers we procure are under warranty and that the warranty matches the server’s use.

Unless the server is a special case and be down for weeks then you need a current warranty. The reason is that regardless of whether the server is HP, Dell or IBM if a part fails, and you have no warranty, when you come to replace that part it is regarded as a new sale. This puts you on the end of the supply chain and the supply chain for computer companies is often weeks long (especially for spare parts)

So in the case where a part fails you may have to wait weeks for a replacement. Last year we picked up a new customer who had been sold an IBM server by the previous incumbent with only a one year warranty that had expired. They were poorly advised that they could save money by buying replacement parts if the parts failed out of the warranty. When the motherboard on the server failed and they tried to purchase a new motherboard they were given a delivery time of three weeks. This server could not be three days out of action so they had to buy a completely new server - very expensive.

It is also important to get a warranty with the right response time. The standard HP warranty is a next business day warranty. If you phone in the fault first thing Monday morning it may be Tuesday afternoon before an HP engineer responds.  Remember too that this a commitment to ‘response’ and not to a ‘resolution’

You can upgrade a server warranty and this is best done at purchase. Proper registration is also essential to get the contracted response. For critical servers (like email) we recommend HP’s 6 hour call to repair warranty that targets to replace any failed part within 6 hours of the call regardless of when it was called in (e.g. a warranty call logged 1:00am on Sunday will be resolved by 8:00am Sunday.

Our 770 support plan does not have a lock-in term. You can cancel it at anytime with one months notice in writing. What we are saying is that we are confident that at the end of every month you will want to continue with your LANcom 770 plan.

Other companies will offer you support plans with a 12, 24 or even 36 month lock in. What are they saying about their plans?

Far and away the most common form of computer education is the show-and-tell. The ‘teacher’ gets onto the computer of the ’student’ and says click here, type this, drag this while the teacher actually does these actions. It’s great to do it this way as it can be done ad-hoc and it is done in context on the student’s computer. It is not so great in that the teacher will only do one show-and-tell, it will be as short as possible and the teacher will not be there in a week when half the new learning has been forgotten.

Camtasia from techsmith is a software product that addresses these problems. It will record what is on screen as a movie you can play back in Windows Media Player. If you have a microphone you can record the commentary. That way you can record your show-and-tell once and copy it to many of your students. They in turn can play the movie time after time if they require.

We have been using Camtasia in house for many years as an in-house training tool. It is time for our customers to start using it as well I think.

Vodafone is entering the broadband market and have been talking themselves up as a competitor for Telecom’s ADSL (Bitstream, Jetstream etc) service.

Vodafone and Telecom have had a wireless broadband offering for notebooks for a couple of years but the anaemic speeds both offered were strictly for a single notebook. The difference now is an increase in speed from Vodafone’s latest devices that means the new service can feasibly support a small office of non-demanding users.

At peak speeds users will get a 3.5 Mb/s download but Vodafone predict a more likely 800Kb/s down and 300Kb/s up. Pricing starts at $29 per month but the 200Mb data cap for this is targeted for single users. The more useable 1 Gbyte plans start at $49/month ($10 for each additional Gbyte).

It’s of obvious interest for companies with temporary situations, or where there isn’t a phone line to run ADSL, or a small office that can’t get (or doesn’t want) Telecom’s service.

We will be trying it out in the near future and I will let you know how it goes.

It’s us – LANcom Technology is a Microsoft Gold Partner.

We haven’t been great in communicating this so you probably don’t know that we are a Gold partner or what that means. We became a Gold partner by passing a range of difficult tests and qualifications. We did it because they (the aptitudes and qualifications) were an important part of providing a great service to our customers who are almost universally Microsoft users.

So LANcom Technology is a Microsoft Gold Partner. This makes us elite among Microsoft partners. I quote Microsoft ….

“Microsoft Gold Certified Partners are the elite Microsoft Business Partners who earn the highest customer endorsement. They have the knowledge, skills, and commitment to help implement technology solutions that match your exact business needs. Microsoft Gold Certified Partners have passed the highest level of requirements from Microsoft and have demonstrated the most robust, efficient and scalable implementations of Microsoft technologies in demonstrated enterprise customer deployments or an on-site Microsoft assessment.”

There’s more at Microsoft’s web site

Do you know how many people went to your web site today?; this week?; ever?

Do you know where your visitors went on your web site and from which pages they are exiting?

If the answer is no then an easy (and free!) way to get good answers is to use Google’s Analytics service.

There are two steps.

1. Register your web site
2. Put a small piece of script in each page of your web site

You can register by creating an account and your website URL (e.g. www.lancom.co.nz) by browsing to http://www.google.com/analytics/ and filling in the forms. You can use your existing Gmail account if you have one.

Then get your web developer to insert a standard four lines of code in each Web page.

From then on every visitor to every page on your web site will record their visit with Google and Google will build you comprehensive tables and graphs of who came to browse and what they did when they arrived.

Best of all the service is free.

Customers on the 770 IT management plan have their own online console. The console carries a tremendous amount of information about your computer systems and what we do with them.  The console can be reached by browsing www.lancom.co.nz and selecting ‘your control console’ and logging in (contact us if you are unsure of your name or password)

The first screen of the console has all the outstanding tasks and all the transcripts on progress for that task. You can see old tasks that have been closed and you can create a new task here.

You can update you company and contact details here.

You can view reports on the following:

• Your inventory equipment from the hardware audit
• All your backup reports (tabulated and graphed)
• Your internet usage (tabulated and graphed)
• Your Internet and email server outages (tabulated and graphed)
• Support agreement Service levels (the following by day, by week, by month as a bar graph)
• Number of open tasks
• Total time spent on tasks
• Average time spent per tasks
• Average age of tasks
• Average idle time of tasks 
• Your current subscriptions with us
• Your current and historic invoices

If you are on a 770 IT Management plan and want to know how to access this information just call us or drop a line to support@lancom.co.nz

If you want to know more about getting on a 770 IT Management plan contact Owen Redmond at (09)3778282 ext 112 or owenr@lancom.co.nz