July 13th, 2010
We all rely on our connection to the outside world more than ever these days! It’s not enough to have the computers on, they need to be connected to the outside world for email, web browsing and instant messaging etc. This is especially true for businesses of course who rely on their connection to trade with their customers. Generally speaking most small businesses rely on a single ADSL line and if that goes down, which they do from time to time, then they are helpless until it comes back on-line which can be anything from a few hours to a few days in some cases.
Why not consider having a second ADSL line put in place, they are not expensive these days and you can get one for about £30 a month, preferably with an alternate provider so that if you have a problem with one line the other will carry on working.
If you POP your mail there will be no problems and if you get your mail via SMTP then with the right routers and rules set up at your Internet service provider hosting your mail you can send and get your emails via both lines. You can also bind the two lines together for faster broadband access too. The big advantage of course is that should one line go off you will still be able to get your mail and browse the Internet.
How two lines are better than one.
This will give a large degree of fault tolerance, you can go further than this with load balancing routers that can switch over the lines between them but as a first step this is a very sensible and economic option that will keep you working through an outage that would normally stop you. Of course you will still be going out to the Internet through your local BT exchange, but the chances are that this is not going to be down altogether, it is much more likely that there will be a problem with a single line, or a card in the exchange.
All in all I can’t see why any one would not want to put this type of system in place these days, the low cost makes it a no brainer.
Have a look at our website and contact us if you want more information on this type of solution www.cselimited.co.uk/contact.html and drop us a line, we would be happy to help.
Tags: ADSL failure, ADSL fault tollerance, broadband, business continuity, dual ADSL lines, email, email systems, internet at work, keep working
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July 2nd, 2010
A vulnerability has been recently discovered in the “Windows Help and Support Centre” as used in Windows XP. Basically this is a tool that is used to offer basic assistance to users and makes use of the internet to gather information and offer advice and downloads including drivers and updates.
The problem is that it uses the HCP protocol as well as the http one and it’s not too fussy about the sites it connects to as it cant validate URL’s properly when using the HCP protocol.
This has led to the bad boys writing websites and links that exploit this vulnerability and if a site with this code is browsed, or a link in an email followed to this code it can then download the “payload” to your PC and in effect do what it wants.
There is more information here on Microsoft’s technet site if you want to learn more.
The best advice for the moment is to keep your antivirus and security software as up to date as possible. There is a workaround listed on the site that involves editing the system registry to disable the HCP protocol but this should not be attempted by the feint hearted as in the words of warning at the beginning of the post “Using registry editor can cause serious problems that may require you to reinstall your operating system” and this is not a fix, its just a workaround until a fix is available.
The worst affected countries at the moment seem to be Portugal and Russia but it will spread.
Windows 7 is not affected by this problem.
Tags: antivirus, malware, network security, Security, virus, Windows help and support
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June 11th, 2010
At one point or another most of us have accidentally deleted a file or folder on our systems, hopefully you have a good backup and your IT team can recover the file for you. But this takes time of course, wouldn’t it be good if there were a way to retrieve the file yourself?
Volume Shadow Copy or VSS has been available since Windows Server 2003 and what this does is take a snap shot of your network drives at set points, this then allows you to look at previous versions of files. If this has been set up on your servers, or if you are using one of the later operating systems such as Windows 7 or Vista then you can access previous versions of your folders via the Explorer screen. Once you have opened up Windows Explorer simply find the folder that contained the file or folder that you deleted and highlight it, then right click on your mouse and select properties.
Screen shot of previous versions of folder
Once of the tabs that will be revealed will be “Previous Versions” clicking on this will offer you a selection of previous versions of the folder which you can look through and find the files that you are missing.
These are the files that are recoverable in this folder
From here you can then restore them or save them to where you want and hey presto you have your file or folder back again and without going to the tape backup.
Make sure that you have your VSS turned on and set to take snapshots correctly so that the next time you accidentally lose some data you can get it back again quickly and easily. If you need help then look here for how you can get help to set this up correctly.
Tags: data recovery, data security, microsoft, restore from backup, Security, shadow copy, VSS
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June 4th, 2010
I thought that this week I would air my thoughts on the pro’s and cons of cloud computing against having the hardware and software located on-site on the local network. It would seem that cloud computing is the latest “big thing” and it may well take off in a large way over the next few years as people first prove and then trust the technology.
In effect cloud computing allows companies to buy in to services hosted in the “cloud” or “on t’internet” if you prefer. So rather than buying server hardware and all the associated software and licences that go with it such as Microsoft Exchange server and sharepoint it is possible to subscribe to a service and pay per seat per month, typically about £5 per user per month for Exchange and about £9 for Exchange and Sharepoint with some data storage etc.
The cloud computing concept is a good idea in theory, however it’s not quite as cut and dried as you might think, firstly you have to get over the idea that your data is not held in your offices, if you are a smaller firm of less than 250 staff then it wont even be on a dedicated server, rather you will have a slice of a shared server with your data ring fenced just for you. My problem with this is that once your data is up there in the cloud it is very difficult for you to be sure that no one else has access to it. We have all heard of several big names that have been compromised lately by cyber attacks and some could even be called cyber warfare, and one could imagine that an orchestrated attack against these resources would be attractive to those who are interested in this sort of thing and once they are in to the system presumably they would have access to hundreds or thousands of companies details/data or even just turn off the service to cause economic havoc. I know that you could be targeted directly if you had your own server in any case but it’s still worth bearing in mind.
My second issue is that once you host most of your data off site you become totally reliant on your communications lines, and if like most small businesses that’s a broadband line then the risk of it being off for a day or so once or twice a year are not that unlikely, and if you are unlucky enough to have had a problem then you will know that they often come in spurts so you may have a period of time where a line is unreliable. This would cause major business disruption if your data was in a data centre in London and you were sitting in your office in Wigan!
On the other hand if you are the type of company that has a lot or remote staff and not many internal people then it might make more sense to host this type of service in the cloud than at your office, you may not even have an office in which case it could help with collaboration on projects and smooth workflows. Another point to consider is that with the subscription based model you would get all the latest updates and upgrades applied automatically within the cost of the agreement so if that’s important then it could be good for you.
Talking about the costs, don’t think that the cloud based option is a money saver, it’s not meant to be, when you think that the average server is in use for 4 or 5 years for a small business and that you pay a one off fee for the perpetual licence for the software then its easy to run a comparison, lets look at a 10 user SBS Standard network running Exchange. A simple server (ML150 with 4 hard drives) might set you back about £1K and the server software another £750 plus installation & configuration (bear in mind that you still need someone to do the configuration on the cloud based system so not much saving there) then at the £9 per user per month it would equal the online option after about 20 months, meaning that you would have 2 years “free computing” and of course if you have your own box then you can run other software on there too such as your accounts package and other business software etc. The cost equasion seems to stay like this through the range of users ( 150 users = £16,200 / year) so cost is not the reason to go to the cloud in my view.
In conclusion, whilst I can see that it would be very useful for some small businesses to go to cloud computing it’s not for everyone, I think that the good old box in the rack or in the corner is here for a while yet, and for those who need the functionality that cloud based systems offering, there is the option to have a mix on both on premise and cloud based services, they will work together and will synchronise well.
Tags: Cloud computing, cloud v's on premise, email systems, microsoft, online computing, prevent data theft, work from home
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May 28th, 2010
A recent survey of businesses reported that, 92% of firms with more than 250 employees, and 83% of smaller firms (up to 25 employees), said they had an I.T. related security incident of some sort in the last year. That seems a very high figure but its not all that surprising when you consider that most people still don’t take computer security nearly seriously enough!
I am sure that a lot of the firms in the statistics above will have had some basic protection in place and a proportion of the incidents may well have been relatively minor, but a general lack of knowledge and a false belief that “they won’t be interested in my data” leads companies to neglect the security of their networks and allows others to take advantage of the fact.
We would recommend that regular reviews of network security are undertaken and whilst the full on security audits are perhaps a bit much for a small company, and lets be honest penetration testing sounds painful 
and social engineering is a bit of an overkill when there are only 30 of you in the company to start with! But there are things that you can do to improve the security, look back at previous posts about stronger passwords and there was the one about preventing your systems from being used by spammers other things that you should think about are what you allow your users to do on the network.
Do the users on your network need to be able to install software on their PCs? if not then why not consider taking away the local admin rights? This will stop them from installing software that could potentially cause problems later such as peer to peer file sharing, “free software” that comes with a load of viruses and can prevent quite a few user induced problems.
Are all the users on the network set up with the right level off access? Too few rights and they wont be able to work and too many and they will be able to see things that they shouldn’t and make changes that could affect your whole network. If there are users on your network with full domain admin rights then this is probably a bad idea. Even the network administrator should have a standard logon for the day to day stuff and just use an admin account to log on to make system changes.
Setting up effective user groups can help with this in the long term, that way you can assign rights to the group such as sales, admin, management etc. and add individual users to the groups so that they have exactly the rights that they need depending on what role they are performing making future management much easier.
Are your firewalls set up correctly so that they only allow the traffic, both in and out, that you want to allow and prevent all other traffic? As they come out of the box they are quite open and need to be configured to get the best out of them so its worth checking the rules are all set correctly, we can help with that if you need help call us on 0161 941 4555.
There are lots of quite simple checks and modifications that can be made to a network to reduce the risk of becoming a victim of a security breach, so do take some advice on how to protect yourself before its too late. you could do worse than give us a ring and have a chat.
Tags: antivirus, computer security, data security, data theft, employee steals data, firewall, malware, network security, passwords, PC performance, Security, spam, virus
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May 14th, 2010
The last time I wrote on the subject I had seen a demonstration of the new Office 2010 at a Microsoft event, and whilst the Beta version was available I decided to wait until the release version was available before trying it myself. I installed it yesterday on my old laptop running XP and it went on great and so far I am still impressed. I had thought that it might slow the system down but it is fine, just as fast as it was before so far.
The number of available editions available has been simplified, rather than the host of options that were available in the previous versions there are now fewer options that seem to make sense. There are the Home and Student, Office Home and Business and Professional versions available as FPP (Full Packaged Products) see below for details:
- Office 2010 Comparison Chart
I am not sure why but the 2010 will not be available under the Open Licence Plan until July, and unlike the OEM or FPP packages, where if you bought the 2007 version and registered it, you could download the upgrade free, under licencing you will not be able to upgrade unless you also buy the software assurance, I guess that anyone looking to purchase Office under licencing should hold on until July to make sure that they can get the latest version.
Once you open up the programs the first thing that you notice is that the ribbon is still there, of course it is, did you think that MS would give up on that idea? I know that a lot of people hate the ribbon, and it does takes some getting used to but once you start to get the hang of it you can find your way round quite quickly and now that it has been incorporated in to the whole suite I guess that people will get used to it even more.
I do like the return of the file button, nice and obvious and easy to see (they have made it a nice bright colour too, I wonder if they did that sarcastically because people couldn’t find the “pearl”?), and the enhanced printer selections and print previews are great too. It looks as though the filtering and search options in Outlook are going to be really useful, I particularly like the clean up option that allows you to tidy up those long conversation emails, you know the ones, where there are 100’s of emails all relating to one subject with all the messages and replies incrementing one at a time and getting longer and longer just filling up the mailbox, with this button you can clear out all the old messages and just keep the most recent one. The other thing that I will have to experiment with are the one click rules that you can set up (within the ribbon) that allow you to forward mails on or move them to a folder with one click.
Any way so far so good, I will let you know if I change my mind and go back to the earlier version but so far I doubt that I will.
Tags: Office, Office 2010
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April 30th, 2010
Bet this doesn't last the weekend out!
Tom Elphick who has been with CSE for over 31 years is starting his semi retirement this week.
After being with the company for so long he just can’t bring to tear himself away from us all, so will be carrying on part time for three days a week to keep his hand in on printer repairs and of course to hold Daves ladder! Well it was either that or Pat would have had him down at B&Q.
Tom is our longest serving employee, he started working with us back in the days when floppy disks were 8″ wide and if you wanted to write double sided you had to turn it over, and more often than not programs were loaded on to a computer by means of a punched cardboard strip! Yes he really is as old as he looks!!
I remember talking with him back in the 80’s when Apricot brought out a machine with a 20MB hard disk drive (and yes I do mean megabytes, we had never heard of gigabytes then) and we were laughing about it wondering why they bothered making such a big drive as no one could possibly ever need to store that much data, shows what we knew!
There are a couple of us still around who have worked with Tom for around 25 years and we can bear witness to the fact that he is still the same now as he was back then, always ready with a tale to tell, generally of the tall variety and a joke to share though after all these years I can’t say that there are many new ones!! Still it’s the way he tells em!
We wish Tom a very long and happy retirement except for Tuesdays,Wednesday and Thursdays when he can come in to the office and do his bit after all no one said we had got 30 years worth of work out of him 
Tom likes to play chess on-line, and with his new 22″ screen he will be able to see where he is going wrong, but if he is going to use his other gifts at the same time, (Whisky and decanter set) he may not improve for some time.
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April 23rd, 2010
It would appear that a mistake by McAfee, one of the largest anti-virus companies, has caused thousands of PC’s around the world to fail because of a “false positive” issue, i.e. identifying a clean bit of code as infected/bad. Not a bad little virus in itself I suppose
The problem has occurred because an update that they sent out, wrongly identified a part of the Windows operating system, svchost.exe as the wecorl.a virus. This meant that the antivirus software quarantined the file which stopped the operating system from working and resulted in machines constantly restarting and not being able to complete the boot sequence.
The problem was spotted quickly and McAfee have apologised for the mistake and released a fix, of course because the eroneous update was only in the wild for a short time not everyone will have been affected and it appears that the bulk of the problems were in the US…… this time. This has caused McAffee a major problem and I suspect rather a few red faces as they work to help their customers who were affected by the problem to recover. The other anti-virus companies are, in public at least, sympathetic, no doubt thinking that “there but for the grace of God” etc.
So how can this happen? Well in truth I can’t say what caused this particular issue. McAffee say that there was a problem with their QA process (having made recent changes) which allowed a faulty code to get in to the update. However a simple overview of how anti-virus software detects viruses might be useful here.
Viruses like any other software are just a bunch of code, long string of characters, the antivirus software is looking at this code and checking the character sequences against known sequences that it holds in a database. Now if you are looking for the whole virus then you can have the AV software look for the very long sequence of characters and only identify code as a virus if it is an exact match, fine but what happens if the virus writer changes the code slightly and re-releases the virus, as a variant? Well some of the code will be the same so you have to look for shorter and shorter sequences. The shorter the sequence that you are looking for the more likley it is that it can match a sequence in existing legitimate software, so you can see that there always needs to be a balance to ensure that the software identifies viruses positively whilst not identifying good software as a virus, a false positive.
Of course there are other methods that the antivirus software packages use such as sandboxing code (allowing it to do what it wants to do in a controlled environment where it can’t get at the main system and watching to see if it tries to do something naughty) and then quarantining the code if it is likely to be a virus.
So for all of you who have not been affected you can smile a bit, but just be aware that your antivirus software is updating several times a day and hope that your antivirus vendor does not have a similar problem in the future.
And before signing off, in answer to those of you who are wondering if you would be better off not having any anti-virus software at all? The answer is NO.
Tags: antivirus, malware, microsoft, network security, Security, virus, virus protection, XP applications
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April 1st, 2010
With the choice of Internet browsers available it can be difficult to know which one is best to use. In the end it comes down to a matter of personal choice of course and often not a little prejudice.
However we came across some interesting statistics recently by NSS Labs showing how in tests that they carried out there was a large difference across the major browsers in use at the moment. The results below are from Q3 2009 but if you want to see more information click here
In our chart we have reproduced the results for the four most common Internet browsers, Microsoft IE8, Apple Safari 4, Google Chrome 2 andMozilla Firefox.
The tests aim was to determine how effective web browser protection was against two of today’s most prevalent security threats, namely socially engineered malware and phishing attacks.
Internet threat protection comparison
So based on these tests results it looks like the majority of us are right to stay with IE8 for the time being.
It goes without saying that this will not remove the need for antivirus software, keeping your operating systems (see my previous blogs and these one two) updated and perhaps most importantly of all using your common sense, but it’s good to know that there is another layer of protection there to help in the fight against malware.
Happy Easter.
Tags: Browser, Internet, malware, Protection
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March 19th, 2010
So what? you might ask, it’ll only be a revamp of the older office 2007!
Well having had a look at it I can only say that I was impressed! There has obviously been a lot of thought put in to how to improve the user experience, and enable the average user to be able to perform tasks that would previously had to be put out to a specialist.
The ribbon is still there, I know that a lot of people don’t like it but once you get the hang of it it does make sense, with functions being grouped and displayed according to what you are doing, and you can customize the ribbon if you want to. The simple fact is that if you tried to get all the functionality in to the old toolbar system the screen would be full of buttons without any workspace so I guess that it will be here to stay for the foreseeable future. They have conceeded the fact that the pearl in the top left was not very intuitive and this has been replaced with a file button that doesn’t look as nice but at least you know it’s there!
Some of the improvements will appeal to some more than others but some of the things that appealed to me were:
- The improvements in the way that email can be managed in Outlook, with the ability to compress long email threads in to conversations, choose to ignore future emails on the same thread (i.e. automatically delete it) the ability to add rules to emails, when used with exchange, that prevent confidential emails being forwarded, copied, printed or sent out of the building.
- The fact that when keeping notes in Onenote it now tracks what you were looking at at the time and inserts a link allowing you to keep the context of your thoughts.
- The ease with which you can edit picures and video within the document that is being worked on instead of having to use a picture or video editing package.
- If you work on documents in collaboration with others then there have been further improvements to allow simultaneous working, with only the paragraph being edited being locked for editing rather than the whole document meaning that you can have two people editing a document at one time if you need to.
- I can see that the presence facility in Outlook/Exchange would be good for some people, the fact that you get details of if someone is in or not when typing a name in the address bar could be useful in a larger organization.
- The massive improvement in Powerpoint, which frankly has to be seen to believed. click here to have a look
- Office is available for use on a larger number of devices such as smart phones and even offers web based and subscription options.
With office 2010 starting to ship from May through July depending which version you buy but to make sure that people purchasing and activating Office 2007 either under OEM or FPP before then they will be entitled to a free upgrade to Office 2010 available to download up until the end of September.
Tags: microsoft, new office, Office 2010
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