This week, a client site had a widespread login problem, and trawling the web for solutions delivered an interesting diversion on the path to success: this article.

It’s an interesting read and I suggest you check it out. But to summarise: don’t check your email too often. What’s too often? More than once every ten minutes! I’ll bet you didn’t know that. I sure didn’t.

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What does remote networking mean?

Well, simply put, remote networking means that I can access your computer (with your permission, of course!), from anywhere. In the world. So I could be on my vacation in the Bahamas and you could have a server failure in the South of Durban, and in a few short moments I’ll have logged into your server, identified the problem, corrected it and rebooted. The next thing you know, you’re back online. No waiting for your IT guy to finish at his current client, then make the long trip from where he is to where you are. No costly travel expenses.

It means that I can support five clients at once, and bill each one accordingly: you only pay for the time it takes me to fix your problem, nothing more. And did I mention the fact that you don’t have to wait for me to drive out to you?

Obviously, not everything can be fixed offsite. Sometimes there’s a problem that just can’t be solved without a screwdriver and some face time. And I’d be lying if I didn’t say I really enjoy any opportunity to use a power tool.

But even so, I am grateful to be an IT support consultant in an age where remote support is a simple matter, because I can deliver better solutions, faster, to more people.

-Finance for initial hardware purchases
-Fancy business premises
-Cash-flush business partners
-Technical know-how and enthusiasm

My business plan fell apart when I tried to calculate the costs of insurance. Imagine this: rent out 10 desktop computers, a server and three laptops. should have been easy. The purchase value in today’s terms is about R80000. Rent it out with an 18 month return on investment and get ready to rake in the bucks.

Hmm. Customer doesn’t want PCs – he wants productivity. Email.  Spreadsheets. Word processor. MS OFFICE ! and it only works on MS windows. add R 4000 per PC. Sigh. Okay. Recalculate. R130000. HMMM – MORE MONEY – YAY. Happy shareholders – lets dance the dance of greed.

Time to mitigate risk. Phone for insurance quote. 2% of capital value? No problem. I’ll sweeten the deal- include it no charge.Nearly missed the last thing the insurance rep says,

“NO INSURANCE ON SOFTWARE” – what?

Seems that most software comes with licences that make it worthless for resale. You are not allowed to resell Office or Windows (or antivirus or CAD for that matter) because it is licenced for use by one owner and nowadays may even be tied to the computer is installed on. That money you spent on software can only be realised on productivity. YOU WILL NEVER BE ALLOWED TO RESELL IT.

I threw the business plan in the rubbish bin. To this day I do not know how to run a legal PC rental business with reasonble control of risks.

Easy? Should have been but the problem then arises with respect to enforcement. If your business prohibits the private use of computers but turns a blind eye to people who check their GMAIL during company time then they have tacitly altered the scope of their staff contract.

If you try to discipline a member of staff for personal use of your facilities then they usually turn aound and say, “so-and-so also does it”. If this is true you are at the CCMA you are going to have a disappointing outcome. Read this article to see an example of the legal complexities.

The business owner should honestly answer this question: “What have I got to lose” and the costs include:

• Productive time (consider limiting private use to lunchtime or after hours)
• Integrity of IT system (cost of technician to undo virus damage etc)
• Intellectual property (your customer database can leave via GMAIL and there is little you can do about it if you are not carefull)

From my perspective I see a change in work ethic where the value of information has been forgotten. People who would never steal an apple off a cart have no problem downloading MILLIONS of rands worth of music and movies from the internet. They will be genuinely supprised when you scream at them for stealing your data. can you imagine the scenario?

” I only copied it so how does this hurt anyone? “

you have been warned

Thank you, Steve, for over 3 decades of innovative design.
Our thoughts and condolences are with your family.

iSad | Amazing how one businessman can inspire such an outpouring of emotion.

Find great tribute wallpapers like this one.

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much cheaper than buying a new lead

I have a customer whose PC started to show signs of unreliability and sometimes would not start so I suspected his power supply.  Instead I found that the power cable was damaged internally. A closer look revealed that it was one of the oldest in his possesion. Over the years his PCs have have been replaced but never the power cable. That three-pin socket in the back has not changed in 20 years and people are so used to it that it is usually taken for granted.

I knew that he has a drawer full of unused (often new!) cables so that is all that it took to fix this PC. (In South Africa this cable retails for around R40 or US $6). Diagnosing this was possible thorugh the use of high school electrical theory. Too bad I have to charge for 15 years of It experience for the call-out …

I have wasted so much time over the years over old, damaged cables. I once worked in a building that had to have the ethernet cables replaced because users were in the habit of pulling the slack out of the trunking so that they could move their desks another 20cm away from the wall ! This is especially funny when the I bill for 2 hours work and the buyer wants to argue that. “the cable costs R 3.00 / metre so how come I am so expensive?”

The problem is not the cable…

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Microsoft Small Business Server 2011 and a Linux-based SME server both offer useful email delivery solutions.

Two SME servers – One free, the other not.

I mentioned in my previous article that taking your users mail off-site (“using the cloud”) has problems in a low-bandwidth environment such as South Africa. Here I talk about two servers that do the job, with different secondary objectives. Microsoft SBS2011 is very clever and, I dare-say, very good value for money. This client wanted a sophisticated user experience. Linux based SME server has a lot more in common with older paid-for products such as SBS2003 but this customer didn’t want frills, and frankly, was not prepared to pay for software.

This table indicates similarities and differences between these 2 clients:

MS Small Business Server 2011

Microsoft’s Small Business Server 2011 needs a modern processor and I found that despite 6GB ram on board and a quad-core processor, the user interface was not very speedy. It seems that the package integrates so many software services that many inquiries such as backup data, user permissions, reports and similar operations have to collate a great deal of information. The server has been built with simplicity in mind for the user but what goes on in the background is definitely not simple. Use the setup wizards wherever possible to minimise heartache.

My previous experience was with SBS2003 so the new features take some getting used to. I felt more restricted with this version, but once I escaped the paradigm traps of my experience I found it very satisfying to finish the roll-out of this server. The customer loves that he can read a mail on his smartphone , and it shows up “read” on his desktop! Exchange is a very potent mail server and is hard to beat for shared calendars and notes. I enjoyed that this customer respects software licencing rights and keeps his software up-to-date. Because of this, he can take advantage of the new developments. Despite the popularity of Microsoft-bashing in certain IT circles, I feel that the time spent by Microsoft in producing this product has made for a product that delivers very good value for money for a small business.

SME Linux (formerly E-Smith)

In my previous article I mentioned that this client sent many mails with large attachments inside their own organisation.  They used to have a mail server but abandoned it “because it gave problems”. They tried to do without a mail server and choked up their bandwidth (wireless “broadband”). I had to put in a mail server to get this under control but I knew they would not pay for licensing. I guess they were tired of paying for solutions that did not work and they were sick of listening to promises that didn’t necessarily materialise.

Taking the unused tower server with 1GB ram and dual-core processor (think +5years old!) I downloaded the ISO, burned a CD and installed it over a weekend. It took longer to re-configure the client machines than it took me to to configure the server and I was impressed with the no-nonsense installation. It had many features I did not need, such as file-sharing, gateway, DHCP, DNS and more. I also liked the way it made the logs available to the web-based interface – troubleshooting was simple in that I was presented with few tools and had to make do with them.

Mail retrieval method

Many system administrators would not agree with the approach I use. In both cases, I had the mail “fetched” from individual user accounts at the ISP and dropped in to user mailboxes on the server. This means that a new user has to be configured at both the ISP and at the server. This may seem like double work but I was able to bypass the inertia of the users’ methods and history of doing business by e-mail. The users cannot perceive the difference, and I have succeeded in saving time and resources for users sending mail within the company.

This is what the client pays for – too bad it is not efficient in the conventional sense. When a user leaves the company, their mail is dropped into the mailbox of their replacement, replies use the new user’s account but mail follows the historical channels and people outside the organisation don’t get punished for changes in staff. This is not trivial for debtors and creditors clerks. (You know, the money people!)

The case for small business servers

Small business networks still concentrate on file and print sharing. Nowadays, network printers remove one of the original purposes of a small business server, handling the network functionality themselves. There is still a place, however, for servers in a small business environment. A central email repository makes a lot of sense in that it takes the load off a company’s bandwidth while still offering staff the “I’ve-handed-that-over” functionality they long for.

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protect your donkey (cover your ...)

Small Business Email systems – beware the user

When I joined a company as IT manager a couple of years ago, they had a mail server on the premises. It was a Microsoft Small Business Server with MS Exchange built in. It fetched mail from a global account at the ISP and distributed it throughout the company. This happened every 15 minutes and it was usually quite stable.  The business owners told me that they wanted to overcome some limitations of owning the server and I understood the problems to be thus:

1. The problem of on-premises e-mail server.
   •  The company had reached the limit of user licences for the server
   •  A number of staff worked from home or on-site at clients’ premises. These workers could not access e-mail away from the office. The owners also wanted their office mail forwarded to their private mail at home so that they could work from home when required. Effecting this was clumsy.
   •  Microsoft licensing costs were not prohibitive, but were nevertheless irritating, especially as the licences cannot be resold if the company wants to replace or upgrade at a later date.  (read the Microsoft EULA carefully – you do not own the software!)
   •  There were difficulties taking over mail addresses when staff left the company. The business owners wanted the addresses to stay “live” – where would the mail go? How would others retrieve this mail?

   I moved everyone’s e-mail off-site. This should have solved all the above issues, but I replaced them with far more problems and made much more work for myself. By having each user connect to their mail directly at the ISP I thought I had taken care of business. Wow! I was wrong.

2. The problems of off-site e-mail.
   • Staff like to send each other files by email:
     •  They can then “prove” they sent the mail (covering one’s rear is so much safer than using a shared folder to transfer files);
     •  They can use their e-mail client (Outlook) to search and track their correspondence – no need to have an ordered repository of documents;
     •  This bloats their e-mail client, often with multiple copies of the same document;
     •  Backups cannot be centralised – good luck recovering from hard disk crashes on user PCs, which are often the cheapest computers money can buy!
   •  This traffic has to leave the building and come back again, often between people who sit within metres of each other. Time delays tend to be unreasonable to those waiting for the files.
   •  Internet bandwidth is sucked up by mail transfers.
     •  This detracts from the “browsing experience” – trying to do internet banking on 1/5^th of the available bandwidth while “party photos” go from junior staff to other junior staff is very silly !
     •  Staff these days have no concept of the cost of bandwidth – whose fault is that ? Bandwidth is not just the ISP cost, it is also the cost of the chairman waiting for the salaries to authorise at the bank. The company pays him or her many times more than the staff member who is sending cute puppy videos to a colleague. How did that happen? (Beware – staff often feel “entitled” to their internet experience – watch them moan if you  try to nail them for this !)
     •  Prioritising management traffic is more difficult than it should be, unless you are prepared to pay for a decent router and the technician time to effect it.
     •  Remember this may have to be done every time there is a change in your network.
     •  Some ISPs limit the number of concurrent connections for outgoing mail. One big name here in South Africa only allows 4 concurrent sessions. This means that if 4 people are sending mails with big attachments then no-one else can send mail ! Users start to get error messages – they then phone you, Mr IT manager. Pointing out that they paid for a cheap internet connection will not go well for you! It will somehow become your fault even if you raised this objection at the budget meeting. (“Just solve it, but don’t ask for more money!”)

I have come to believe that small businesses in South Africa are not ready for “the cloud”. Overseas bandwidth can be had for so much less that having your server facility offsite makes sense. BUT in RSA a company of 40 people makes do with an ADSL line up512/down4Mb/s. Modern software assumes you have 1^st world connectivity so cameras are not afraid of 2 Mb images, scanners easily generate 10MB colour files, and the list goes on.  Many of these devices can send their files by e-mail !  Often users complain that their mail is slower than 10 years ago, despite the broadband revolution. Now we know why!

For a geekish article with more about this read this article.

In my next article I will discuss my recent experiences installing two small business servers -  one MS SBS2011 and one Linux based SME.

Happy, Smiley faces

Part of my role as freelance IT manager is to ensure that I am always on top of technology trends and developments, and to achieve this one of the things I do is subscribe to technology-focused news sites. (It helps that I’m passionate about technology and would read this stuff even if it wasn’t my core business!).

This weekend I came across an article that really got me thinking, not to mention fuming! Unfortunately it’s too late to act now, since the poll closed on Friday the 29^th of July. Having said that, I think it’s essential reading for anyone who uses the web as a tool in any capacity: if you ever read email in South Africa, you need to know about this.

Read the article here.

Essentially, the writer, Ivo Vegter, summarises the National Consumer Commission’s proposal to use the Direct Marketing Association of South Africa as the preferred provider to manage the national opt-out database.

He says,

the idea that an association intended to act in the interests of direct marketers should protect consumers from direct marketing is patently ridiculous. The conflict of interest is so obvious, one wonders how anyone thought it would be a good idea to appoint the fox pack leader to guard the wide open henhouse.

Good point!

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Maybe you’re a die-hard open-sourcer using the versatile Open Office offering. Or maybe you don’t know what you’ve got, but you’re in a hurry.

What can you do?

Fortunately for you, Microsoft knows your pain. That’s why they’ve released the Microsoft Office Compatibility Pack. Once you’ve installed this nifty 37MB download, opening documents from anywhere will be easy-peasy.

Click here to download the Microsoft Office Compatibility Pack.

Questions? Comments? Email me.