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Security via Interguard

admin — Mon, 05 Jan 2009 16:51:49 +0000

I have just had the heads-up from a good friend of mine to let me know that he will be sending over my copy of Interguard software for home, laptop and corporate security. All being well I should have the stuff over this evening and all things being equal will get something posted up over the next couple of days. As products go this is shaping up to be a great product with a very comprehensive range for features for such things as monitoring web access. DataLock which helps prevent data leakage from a business as well as laptop security so should your beloved laptop be stolen or lost then it can located, data retrieved and the notebook disabled from ever working again.

Awesome stuff so you’ll have the review as soon as I have it.

Ironic is the only word for it!

admin — Sun, 04 Jan 2009 17:31:47 +0000

I wrote yesterday about doing something you normally do but different. Well yesterday, as you may recall, I decided to walk to the shop which was very liberating however today I am regretting it. For the last couple of months the car has been a little slow starting, you know how it is when you turn the key and there’s the slow churn as the engine struggles to turn before it starts. Today we all got in the car to head off to pantomime in Nottingham, the kids were looking forward to Cinderella, only to find when I started the car it briefly began running only to stutter and die. Now at that point I thought things we’re going to be difficult but little did I know; it was 12:30 and it started at 14:00 with 30 minutes of travelling. After attempting to restart the engine numerous times the battery eventually gave in and said “no more”. During all of the this our neighbor, who messes with cars a lot, saw what was going off and offered a jump start needless to say I snapped his hand off. Sadly, 40 minutes later we were no closer to getting the car started so we decided the best thing was going to be to call the RAC to sort it. Some 1hr 20mins later the nice chap arrived and within 10 mins he’d got it all running again. Said that there was two possible reasons why it had happened, either the “leak back” pipes which were cheap to replace (£1-£2 + Labour) were letting air in the fuel or the “Injector Seals” which are more expensive (approx £200 + Labour) which would also be letting air in. He also noted that our model was the one with the known fuel pump issue which happens between 80K – 150K miles and costs about £2,000 to repair, more good news! But for now the car is running again, charging to be precise, and we’ll be going to see Jule’s friend in a little while before she goes off to Australia tomorrow for about 8 months.

As for the Pantomime that was well and truly missed, £70 down the drain but we’ll see if they can sort something at the box office (doubtful but you can hope). As for me; Would I still have walked to the shop? Too right, in hindsight I just would have took the car out for a run as well yesterday to “keep it going”, ah well C’est la vie.

Stop the world, I want to get off

robfranklin — Sat, 03 Jan 2009 16:47:55 +0000

Like most people I spend almost every working day racing around seeing people, speaking with them on the phone, rushing home at night to see the wife and kids. This I have done for many years so much so that it has become the normal speed of things and I am always in a rush. More recently though I have started to look at things a little more deeply and found that I don’t like all the rushing but what can you do to stop this? The single thing that made me realise that I needed to stop rushing was when I was taking my little boy to bed, as I do most nights, and he was doing what most 5 year olds do and that was mess about. Now Tom has not had a really normal bedtime routine since he was two before his little brother was born. This is because little Danny was born with problems which meant we have spent the last 2 1/2 years in hospital see www.potter-tate.co.uk for more info. Anyway, it was around 8pm and he was messing and rushing as usual I said to him “come on Tom, I’ve got work to do if you don’t stop messing then no story”. It wasn’t till I got downstairs and sat down at my computer that in dawned on me that in actual fact what I was rushing down to do was neither that important or in fact a “real” job that needed doing.

So I am resolved that while I cannot slow down the work pace while doing on-demand work what I can do is slow down outside of work. I am also resolved to doing things different to the way I have before. So earlier today I decided to walk to our local shop, something which I have NEVER done in the whole time that we have lived at this house which is almost 7 years. The local shop is only about 3/4 mile away and while I going running three times a week and pass it then I have never walked to the shop. You should try it sometime, it’s a surefire way to completely spin out your partner/wife. I said to Julie “I think I’ll walk to the shop”, you should have seen the look on her face. It couldn’t have been more stunned if I had said that I was catching a flight to the other side of the world! So leaving behind a rather confused Julie I walked to the shops, the thing was I ended up looking round with almost schoolboy fascination at houses that I had seen before but never really looked at.

So if you are looking for a New Years Resolution try this, “Do something once a week different to the way you have always done it”.

New year, new start

robfranklin — Fri, 02 Jan 2009 10:56:00 +0000

For those who have followed this blog in the past you will know and see that I have been very quite since summer. The reasons for this are many but most of them are due to personal circumstances which have knocked my life completely off kilter and have no only taken a lot of physical time but it has also significantly hurt my drive on a day to day basis. This in itself is a self perpetuating downward spiral in which you don’t do certain takes or maintain aspects of your life because you haven’t got the “get up and go” to do it but then you end up resenting, even hating yourself for no doing it. Then as time goes by you end up putting things off repeatedly until finally they are way overdue and almost impossible to recover from. Why am I laying this on the line and telling you? Quite simply I have been there and have now vowed to turn things around, it is a hard thing to admit that things have gotten out of control but it is much harder, in my opinion, to recover from.

With that in mind I want to commit, publicly, to maintaining at least two posts a week here whether it tech news, geek stuff or just how things are going. 2009 is a new year and while this is not a new year resolution, it is a life resolution, I just thought that it was a damn good time to start…leave behind the old and move forward.

So let me start by saying happy new year to you, all the success for the future and remember if you want to contact me please use the form above.

Regards

Rob.

Rough rides

admin — Sat, 30 Aug 2008 16:53:43 +0000

As I said yesterday we recently came back from France and the crossing there was a little rough. The first taste of this was when we arrived only to be told that the ferry had been delayed by 2 hours due to bad weather. Now on-land the weather was ok, a little overcast but on the whole not too bad at all. The story was somewhat different once at sea though.

The sea was choppy and this was the scene up on deck. The wind was blowing that hard on the main deck that Kyle was able to stand like this throughout a whole blast of wind which was no short thing. Not to be outdone though I had to have a try at it myself and the feeling was more than just a little odd to say the least.

Silence is golden…

admin — Fri, 29 Aug 2008 20:47:38 +0000

As you will see things have been extreemly quiet of late. Due to some personal stuff that was happening throughout May/June I had to focus my attention elsewhere for a while, then of course we have had the kids summer holidays which is always great. You get to see the kids more but then after about……2 hours you wish they were back at school and you can clearly remember why you hate the summer holidays!

We have also just returned from a weeks holiday in France which I have to say was an enlightening experience. It is some years now since I travelled abroad so I was a little green about these things but I knew all the normal stuff that was required (passport, GB plates etc). However, being a devout techy I had to take some essentials to ensure that I didn’t loose connection with the world. First stop was with T-Mobile to see what it was going to cost me in terms of mobile phone calls, should clients need me then I want to know how much it will cost me and also to ensure that it was enabled for "roaming". I was told that it was indeed enabled for "roaming" and to make a call back to the UK would cost me "38p per minute" and to receive a call would cost "19p per minute", not too bad however I was then told that I would also be charged "19p per minute" for someone to leave a message and then "38p per minute" to collect them!! Not too much of a piss take. I then asked what the rates were for data usage while abroad…this just go better again. I was told that it was much cheaper than it used to be as previously it cost £7.00 per MB but now it was only £1.60 per MB. Now obviously the young lady that I was speaking to but I am afraid that I do not agree I mean come on, on one hand we are told that we are part of the EU, the European Union, but all that goes out then window when the mobile companies have the opportunity at a pound of flesh. Needless to say I decided to see how much the Wi-Fi would cost on site. During the ferry crossing my mobile picked up a network called "On-waves" which is the maritime network between then English and Franch coast, what a fantastic service. However, when my mobile joined the network I was greeted with the following message:

Welcome to Maritime.It will cost you /min to make and /min to receive calls here. You can send a text for 40p a message and a picture message for 20p. To speak to T-Mobile Customer Services call +44XXXXXXXXXX from your mobile.

Now this was a nice message to get however it failed to provide a clue as to the cost of calls on this network. However, on my HTC TyTn which has a T-Mobile 3G data only sim inserted I received the following message:

You have latched onto a maritime network. Please note making and receiving calls are charged at £1.80/min from this network.

Slightly more dramatic costs for calling, I mean come on £1.80 per minute to make or receive a call you might as well just butter me up and stick it to me!!! Once in france another SMS was received confirming that call costs that I had already been notified of prior to leaving. Once we were at the site it transpired that Wi-Fi usage is charged at 8€ per hour which I just wasn’t prepared to pay, I mean it just doesn’t cost that much to buy it so I ended up spending the week with no Internet access whatsoever which was really quite surreal but oddly pleasant. Some would call me a tight git but I refuse to pay unreasonable rates for services such as this, what do you think?

Spam prevention

robfranklin — Mon, 28 Apr 2008 05:51:34 +0000

Recently we had some problems with our DNS provider for the business which caused us to look at moving the domain over to another more reliable provider. In the end we decided to settle with hosting the DNS with pipex and while they may not have always had the best reputation they are one of the larger players, considering the problems recently meant that we had no email or website traffic we were not able to get caught with that again. All went well with the transfer as I made sure that all of the DNS records were live before the actual transfer took place so the transition was completely seamless. However, since then it would seem that the spammer capitalised on one oversight that I made during the transfer; this was SPF (Sender Policy Framework). For those that don’t know what this is basically it is a TXT record within DNS which defines the hostnames and/or IP addresses which can receive and send mail for the domain name it applies to. This TXT record is read by any mail server that can support it and should the email not have originated from the correct address then it is treated as spam and discarded as such. If, however, the mail originates from a valid address then it is processed as normal and passed on to the recipient. On the other hand if the recipient mail server does not support SPF then this information is simply ignored. Since I hadn’t got this information handy I was tasked with re-creating the SPF data which for those that have looked it is not the most straightforward thing to do however Microsoft have very kindly created a wizard on their website which takes out most of the work. The address is as follows: http://www.microsoft.com/mscorp/safety/content/technologies/senderid/wizard/

Using this wizard you are able to enter your domain name and it will process the DNS record to see what settings exist with regard to mail servers and then guide you through the process of creating the SPF data. Over the past few years I have using a number of tools but this has to be the easiest to follow. So check it out, the more people that use SPF the less spam will be possible.

As always thanks for reading and if you have any questions then drop me a line.

Light relief

robfranklin — Sat, 26 Apr 2008 21:52:16 +0000

As anyone in IT will tell you most of your time is spent in front of a computer and if you work in support then a whole heap of that is spent watching progress bars descend into the abyss of life. I would estimate now that I have spent approximately 40% of my working time watching progress bars move across the screen just waiting from something to finish installing or uninstalling. Then as IT people we go home, see our family, then start working again or at least that is how my life tends to pan out. However now that the better weather has finally started I was able to get out in the garden today and start to get things straight so that the kids could enjoy the summer. As with many other people we enjoy nothing better than a BBQ in the summer and part of that is to make sure that the garden is fit for the occasion. The kids also really enjoyed being out there today as they were able to get scooters and stuff out and really play and for those who know me Danny was able to really have his first play outside. For those that don’t know me, our youngest was born in July ‘06 and was born with a great deal of problems and we are told he is "one of a kind" as no child with problems as severe as his has ever survived, to see more on Danny go to his blog www.potter-tate.co.uk. Any how Danny had a great time out there as you can see for yourself.

While it was a great day outdoors for a change it would seem that the forecast is back to being shite tomorrow as they are expecting heavy rain again. Still one day out is better than nothing!!

Linksys woes

robfranklin — Mon, 21 Apr 2008 06:49:27 +0000

Over the weekend I was onsite finishing off and installation for a client of a VoIP PBX system that we had provided. What they had got was one of IP PBX’s with 4 Linksys SPA941 IP Phones connect to 2 ISDN2e lines so that they had 4 incoming calls. Due to the nature of their business they get a large volume of calls and the 2 analogue lines they had previously was just not cutting it. Anyway, I connected the last phone to the system and decided to set the daylight savings time rule on the SPA handsets so that BST would be correct on the handsets.

So I dutifully changed the config on server so that the new correct dates were inserted and then did a factory reset on the handset to force it to get the correct configuration downloaded to the handset……boy was that a mistake!! What actually happened was that it downloaded the configuration for the server, restarted and when it came up again the display was not working it simply displayed the text logo for the handset. Now to all intents and purposes it looked as though the firmware had fried which was not something that pleases anyone. However, after downloading the firmware from the Linksys website it continued to do the same thing and as the display was screwed I couldn’t use the setup option to perform another factory reset. Anyway, after much backtracking I finally got the old daylight saving time rule from another handset and changed the configuration file on the server along with on the handset and rebooted and finally all was back to normal. At this time I still don’t know why the rule upset the phone so much but what I do know is that it caused be about 2 hours of hassle the I could have done without on a Saturday. Once I have tested this out in the lab I will let you all know the fix.

No backups = Disaster!

robfranklin — Thu, 17 Apr 2008 06:44:53 +0000

How many business do you either deal with directly or know that do backups? A large percentage I would say however how many individuals (home users) actually do backups? Not so many. If you ask a home user about backups then they will usually tell you on of two things:

I don’t really have anything important to backup
I brought some CD’s to do it just haven’t got around to it yet.

Let’s address these one by one….

I don’t really have anything important to backup.
Lie, Fact most people these days own a digital camera which they use to take photo’s of their kids, family, friends, holidays…..you get the idea. How many of the photos taken do we print? Well I find typically less than about 10%. How many do we want to keep? All of them. And rightly so, these are memories that can never be recovered. In the days before digital camera’s we got out film’s developed and kept the photo’s and short of a house fire these were never lost. Now with digital camera we can take more photo’s for less but if you are leaving them an a hard drive somewhere then they stand a very high chance of getting lost. BACK THEM UP. If this means that you have sit there for a couple of hours feeding blank DVD’s to the computer then do it. At the very least make a copy onto another computer. When it comes to photo’s I always advise everyone to make three copies of each DVD full of photo’s; Disk 1) Use this one to look at photo’s; Disk 2) Store this one at you house in a loft/safe or whatever; Disk 3) Store this a another family members house, so if yours burns down you still got them.
I brought some CD’s to do it just haven’t got around to it yet.
So goes to you just BACK THEM UP. The fact is that if you don’t YOU WILL LOSE THEM I guarantee it, it may take a few years but it will happen.

The other option is to get yourself a NAS box (Network Attached Storage) and connect it to your router. When it’s on the network it will be available to save data to which will give you a little redundancy in your storage network. There are programs that you can use to automate the backup task such as SyncBack which is available as both a full retail version or also as a Freeware version. What this application allows you to do is create a profile for performing a backup copy of data from one location to another and while this will not help in a house fire it will create redundancy for hardware failure which is much more common. So make sure you get those backups sorted out and if anyone want’s any further advice then don’t hesitate to contact me.