It happens millions of times a day: rushing off to the airport and dashing out of a cab to catch a flight; having a distracting conversation at a restaurant; returning a rental car; checking out of a hotel. Someone inevitably forgets a laptop or has one stolen. Each lost or stolen laptop caries some drastic cost and a recent study conducted by the Ponemon Institute has tried to put an estimate on the full cost associated with a lost or stolen laptop.
Storage
Securing Windows 7
Windows 7 has been released to the consumer market and small business integrators, administrators and owners should start thinking about their strategy for deployment and how they will go about securing their environment. From our experiences with the beta, release candidate and official release (RTM) versions of Windows 7, I must say we’ve come a long way from the days of using National Security Agency (NSA) templates to harden and secure enterprise computers. Starting with Windows Vista, Microsoft started delivering products that were significantly more secure than previous versions out of the box.
In this fast moving internet age, the biggest threats these days come from malicious trojan executables and user laziness. The trojans you can get tricked into allowing into your computer system; the laziness is what happens when users naively lower their default Operating System defenses like disabling the User Account Control (UAC) in Vista and/or Windows 7, turning off automatic patching and deactivating the built-in firewall. The UAC and firewall, by the way, performs the same functions as applications we spend money on with products like Zone Alarm, Norton, McAfee etc. where you get notified if an application is trying to do something fishy.
Understanding Windows Permissions
Microsoft Windows is arguably the most widely used server system for small businesses. In terms of file storage, most small business environments use Windows. In this article, we will explore how Windows implements permissions on file systems. To safeguard against data theft, it is important that small business owners have an idea or understanding of … Read more
Device Manufacturers and the fleecing of consumers
I’ve recently had cause to wonder if device manufacturers purposely make sure their devices are of limited use to people who buy their products. A few examples:
I recently bought a couple of NAS devices and each one of them failed woefully to do what was advertised.
First is what I actually started calling the Great White Turd. It is the Netgear sc101T. I have come across ridiculous devices before, but this one takes the cake for its total uselessness as a NAS device. What is the point of hard coding a “NAS” to use DHCP and no option of setting a static IP address. What part of “network” was missing during the development of the product? The SC101T forces you to install a client software on all computers that may need access to the device. The software cannot be installed on a server class Operating System like Windows Server 2003 or 2008. You have to mount the drive and share it to be accessible but since it is assigned a DHCP IP address, anytime you restart the computer, the drive mappings are shot to hell and you have to do it all over. For a product that retails for $180, I am almost tempted to start a class action lawsuit so we can recover some lost revenue due to emotional distress caused by this piece of crap.
Backup Options for Small Business Owners
You’ve heard it a thousand times: backup your data. But I still find it rather amazing to walk into a client’s environment and ask, “so what do you do for backup?” and get a blank stare or “oh, we are doing ok”.
The “it will never happen to us” syndrome is prevalent in the small business environment. The result is a constant break-fix scenario that ultimately turns out to be very costly.
The cost of hard drives has fallen so dramatically that it is inexcusable for a small business owner not to have at least, a removable USB drive for backing up critical data. There are even “cloud” offerings that are pretty reasonable, although they tend to be very slow especially if you have multi-gigabyte files to backup.
For example, Carbonite will back up any amount of data you have for about $55 a year, while Mozy (owned by Iomega/EMC) offers 2 gigabytes of free storage for those who purchase an Iomega external drive.
Windows Backup 2008: Another Royal Mess
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.