Managed Services

Windows Backup 2008: Another Royal Mess

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I am always baffled by the constant ability of Microsoft to take something that was working very well and turn it upside down all in the name of trying to improve the product. The list is long so we won’t even bother. The latest in this list is the supposedly new and improved Windows Server Backup 2008. In my opinion, this is one of the most frustrating thing the company has done to small business owners in terms of backing up files. Don’t get me wrong, the concept behind the product makes sense – for those who can afford it. It has:

  • Faster backup technology.
  • Simplified restoration.
  • Simplified recovery of your operating system.
  • Ability to recover applications.
  • Improved scheduling.
  • Offsite removal of backups for disaster protection.
  • Remote administration.
  • Automatic disk usage management.
  • Extensive command-line support.
  • Support for optical media drives and removable media.

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What Can Astaro Linux Do For You?

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I had a client who was just getting killed by spammers. Every morning their inbox was loaded with junk mail and they had as much as five thousand (5,000) emails in their spam filter box when they came in. I decided to help them out with the free version of Astaro Security Gateway. We threw the software version (v7) on an old AMD box they had lying around – 2GHz processor, 20GB IDE drive, 512 RAM, two NICS. What a difference spam filtering at the perimeter of the network makes! The first week was like “wow”. Astaro actually generates a daily report and for email filtering we had 36,930 processed. Get this, out of that number, 36,832 was categorized as “Spam emails blocked”. And the live log was right there for us to see. Emails the system was not sure about were placed in quarantine and you have the option of having an admin view, release or delete those emails, or have a report sent to the affected user. The report even had a “Top 10 Spam Sender” entry with the IP addresses and countries of origin (little flags) of the bad guys. There was also a “Top 5 Spam Countries” entry on the report.

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Why Microsoft will continue to have piracy concerns

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Little things usually cause people to make very drastic decisions, sometimes not because they want to, but mainly because they are driven by disgust. Take my experience with Windows Vista for instance. I just got a new computer that came preloaded with Windows Vista 64-bit Home Edition “Premium”. So far, so good. Of course, since the computer came with no productivity software, I had to shell out a few hundred bucks to buy those and install them. As a consultant, you have to know what you are supporting, so the Windows platform is a necessity especially since many business environments have the “Home” edition of Microsoft’s Operating System. I have been using Linux as my main desktop for some time now, and I recently installed Linux Mint 64-bit with OpenOffice 3, Evolution Mail, and about 75 other pieces of software for CRM, project management, network penetration testing, file encryption etc for $0. Naturally, I was probably a little testy with the Operating Sytem than most “regular” users – the ill-advised decision to remove the ability to disable your network adapter with a single right-click, for example, or the contant request for validation even to do relatively minor things.

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Cloud Services and Virtualization Benefit Small Businesses

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The benefits and Pitfall of moving resources and infrastructure to the cloud, and the impact of service outages for the small business owner is a topic that is sometimes avoided by promoters of cloud services. The buzz right now is cloud services and a cursory read of the high-octane promotions paints a very rosy picture … Read more

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