It sounds ridiculous, but seriously, this new phone is great. 
It looks like a pretty standard touch phone but then when you start
to use and experience the phone you then see what the big deal is
about.  All of the information is at your fingertips due to the
Information Tiles. 

Its screen is great, has enough storage for me, has almost
100,000 Apps.

Check out this Video:

And this one too!

 

Cool, Right?!!!

This article is specifically tailored to small businesses.
 You’ve poured your money, sweat, blood and tears into making you
business a success, but every time the mail arrives you dread
seeing another bill from the people that provide you IT support on
an hourly basis.  Maybe this month you used 10 hours or maybe 50
hours.  You remember seeing someone at your office working on
things but just can’t recall how much time was spent on the
computers.  After all, you were busy doing your primary job,
running and growing your business.

What if you could get 30 years of combined expertise in running
company’s IT departments at a stable monthly rate?  You outsource
your entire IT needs, and pay only a fraction of the costs of
hiring a full time employee.  Each month, your bill is exactly the
same as the last.  

I feel the stress rolling off your shoulders.  You have reached
a state of knowing no matter how messed up your software and
network get, you will pay the same money each month to get it
fixed.  If this is something you really want, call Strickland
Networks today.  (817) 224-2020

NOTICE:
 
IF THESE STEPS ARE PERFORMED INCORRECTLY OR WITHOUT TESTING
IT IS POSSIBLE FOR YOU TO WIPE OUT YOUR XENSERVER DATA LOSING ALL
STORAGE REPOSITORIES.  TAKE GREAT CARE WHEN FOLLOWING THESE
INSTRCUTIONS. Strickland Networks is not responsible for someone
erasing their virtual disks by mistake.

Now that that is over, let the fun begin!

I was updating a 6 server XenServer Farm yesterday and came
across a memory error.   It started out as a hardware (HW) error
and then turned into a BIOS problem.  The Dell Engineer then began
to search for the updates that I would need for my Server.  The
Dell representative was very helpful and began putting together a
list of updates that I would need…  I began to ponder the
multitude of different servers that I had to update after I
finished with these six.  I also know that I have a Windows update
DVD that will update all the Dell hardware on my Windows Server
plus the drivers. 

I asked the question to the Dell Tech and he replied that yes
there was a solution.  You need these two DVDs:

DVD 1 (System Management Tools and Build – DVD):

ftp://ftp.dell.com/secure/sysman/OM_6.3.0_SMTD_A00.iso.001

ftp://ftp.dell.com/secure/sysman/OM_6.3.0_SMTD_A00.iso.002

DVD 2 (BIOS and Firmware Images – Dual Layer DVD)

ftp://ftp.us.dell.com/sysman/om631_suu_a00.iso.001

ftp://ftp.us.dell.com/sysman/om631_suu_a00.iso.002

ftp://ftp.us.dell.com/sysman/om631_suu_a00.iso.003

ftp://ftp.us.dell.com/sysman/om631_suu_a00.iso.004

 

This tool can join the files for you:

http://www.treepad.net/download/hjsplit.zip

 

Proceed down to see the process.

It should be noted that this same process can be run on any
Linux Server.  It is not recommended on Windows Servers due to
possible driver incompatibilities.

 

Biggest problem with the great cloud migration: getting
there.  

I am a HUGE fan of moving what makes sense for your business to
the cloud and letting others worry about the maintenance and upkeep
of equipment and software.  But here’s the catch, what happens to
the average company when their Internet goes down?  You email, you
backups, your accounting software, and everything else that you
have trusted to be moved to the cloud is now inaccessible.  Do you
send all your employees home and have them work there?  Can you
trust your employees to not just goof of the rest of the day?  

How to minimize your risks:

Get redundant Internet!  Don’t be lazy about it and buy two T1
lines from the same vendor, because those will most likely both go
down at the same time.  Buy a backup DSL or cable line into your
office.  It will be worth the minimal monthly investment.  

Buy a router / firewall that can handle it.  We love SonicWALL
products at Strickland Networks.  Most of the models automatically
handle dual Internet connections.  Meaning if the primary is
unavailable, outbound traffic is automatically sent through the
second connection.  But it gets better, many models you can add a
high availability unit as well.  This gives you 2 SonicWALL
firewalls working in tandem to prevent downtime in the event of a
hardware failure as well.  Now you could lose 1 firewall and 1
internet connection before becoming unproductive.    

Need some more help:

Email or call us today.  817.224.2020

Quick poll, how many of you still own a VCR and still use it
regular?  Most of you are using DVD / Blu-Ray or streaming it over
the Internet.  So why do you hold your data backups in the prisons
of tape?

There are a great deal of solutions out there that are disk
based and store your data in a secure spot in the “cloud.”  But why
settle for just backup when anyone can provide that?  How much
better would a total solution that covered recent backups, disaster
recovery and business continuity be for your company?  Our solution
at Strickland Networks is called TotalProtect because it keeps you
protected in all of these three categories.

Backups

An initial backup is done and then
continuous incrementals follow behind.  The first destination of
backups is to local storage at your site.  That can be a Strickland
Networks recommended NAS device or your own storage.  The next
destination for your data is off to our data center.   There, the
base image plus 1 month of your most recent data is kept.

Disaster Recovery

Let’s assume worse case scenario,
your entire office is destroyed by an act of nature.  Strickland
Networks can virtualize your most recent backup sent to our data
center and help you make changes to allow you and your company to
keep working remotely until a new physical location can be found
for your office and new equipment purchased.  Then we’ll help
transition back to the new hardware – all with minimal
downtime.

Business Continuity

We’ve all heard the horror stories. 
Or maybe you’ve experienced it first hand.  Your Server RAID has
failed beyond repair, memory fails and the parts are out of stock,
CPU’s over heating … whatever the issue, with TotalProtect you
have the ability to turn your backups into a running virtual server
or do a bare metal restore to new, dissimilar hardware.  Your down
time is now hours, not days.

Read more here.  http://bit.ly/SN-TotalProtect,
or call (817.224.2020) / 
email today for more information.   

Some people will try to tell you that the only enterprise class
virtualization out there is VM Ware, but I am here to tell you that
Citrix is a contender.  Not only is it a contender but it is
growing in features and in acceptance.  Citrix XenServer is
actually the World’s largest Internet Facing Virtualization
environment, Amazon Elastic Compute Cloud (EC2).  Because the
foundation of XenServer is built on the open source Xen, there is
lots of opportunity for developers to to build upon the feautres
and functionality of the product.  One such features is Everun by
Marathon Technologies.  The product will allow you to even unplug
the server that your primary node is running on and the transfer to
the secondary server is so seemless that if you were running XenApp
on the server your end users would never even know that they
swicthed to a different server.

 
http://www.marathontechnologies.com/high_availability_xenserver.html)

There are many companies that can benefit from an iSCSI SAN but few can afford the entry level price of a DELL MD3000i with 30 Terabytes of Native Storage would cost roughly $14,000.  That is a good chunk of change to drop for a storage solution.

We have been able to leverage some of our market contacts and now can deliver an entry level SAN solution with 32 Terabytes of Storage for around $8500.  To be fair, I chose both to have similar hardware and support options.  Sounds compelling, doesn’t it?  Give us a call for this entry level solution and get your Virtualization, Cluster, or just storage environment off to a good start. 

817-224-2100

 

We’ve all heard the lectures about password security 100 times. 
We know the basics like “don’t use real words,” “no names of your
family members,” and “the most common password is the word “god.” 
We’ve heard these things before and I think most of us have a false
sense of security about our how secure our lives are.

These days, password cracking tools are freely available on the
internet.  “Hackers” with almost no skills download powerful tools
that rapidly attempt to guess a password using combinations of
every word in the dictionary and every name.  Personal computers
are becoming more and more powerful meaning that the time it takes
to attempt these brute force password attempts becomes shorter and
shorter.  Also, new password cracking algorithms such as rainbow
tables are becoming accessible, even to people that don’t know how
to use them.

On top of that, most people use the same password for
everything.  Their personal email accounts, their banks, their
retirement accounts, their facebook etc.  If not exactly the same,
then some variation of the same.  If a hacker guesses your password
for one account, what kind of access to destroy your life do they
have?

My final argument in favor of paranoia is this: Let’s assume
bank websites are secure.  Those institutions put a premium on
defending their customers from hacking attempts or internet
vulnerabilities, so let’s just assume those places are hack-proof. 
Addditionally, let’s assume those sites are the one place where we
keep a ridiculously long, very secure password that is different
from every other website we use.  Are we safe in this scenario?  If
I were a hacker, I would avoid bank sites assuming they’re too
hard.  Instead, I would go after an email site.  I would assume
people keep less secure passwords for their email and therefore
they are easier to get into.

What kind of information would a hacker have access to if he
could gain full access to my email account.  There’s not really
anything sensitive in my email account by itself.  What I’m
concerned about is how many other secure websites are tied to my
email account.  For instance, could a hacker go to my bank website
and click the “I forgot my password” link and have my bank send a
new password to my now compromised email account?  What about my
401k website or my investment account.  The possibilites are enough
to keep me up at night.

So, what can we do?

First, follow good password behaviors.

• Keep a separate, secure password for each
  website. 
  

I know how daunting this is, but there are tools to make it
easier.  Keepass is a free, open-source password database that is a
highly encrypted place to store passwords.  It will even
auto-generate passwords that are as complicated as you want them to
be.  You only have to remember one password to open your entire
database of passwords.  It has the ability to copy and paste
passwords so you don’t have to type them and you can store the
url’s for important websites right in the app.  There are versions
of keepass that you can keep on a usb thumb drive or even on your
phone.  Another tool to make a secure life easier is Roboform – it
has the same master password concept as keepass but will auto fill
in website passwords once logged in.
 

• Don’t use real words in your passwords

A trick to make this easier to live with is to substitute
symbols or numbers for letters.  For instance, if you want your
password to be the phrase “world wide web,” subtitute the lettering
for something similar to “W0rldw1dew3b!”  It’s easy to remember and
won’t be found in any dictionary.  Remember to use a mixture of
lowercase and capital letters as well.

You can also use passwords based on phrases that are important
to you.  The phrase “The Lord is my shepherd, I shall not want”
would become something like “tLimsIsnw.” 

Patterns on the keyboard are equally efficient.  For instance,
start on the bottom row with the letter “z” and click through to
the “m” and then do the same patter in reverse on the top row of
keys.  Easy to remember, difficult to crack.

• Change your passswords periodically

I recommend changing passwords frequently, at least every 90
days.  As personal computers get faster and faster, this can help
keep you ahead of any password cracking attempts.  The longer your
password is, the longer it takes to crack.

• Keep your passswords at least 8 characters
  long

Hopefully, a good password policy will keep you out of heartache. 
A little extra precaution goes a long way in this always connected
world we live in.