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.

Most all of my clients have either a BlackBerry or an iPhone. 
And almost all of them use Microsoft Exchange.  This is not going
to be a compare and contrast of who is better: the BlackBerry or
the iPhone.  Of couse the iPhone has ActiveSync integrated into the
OS if you have the Enterprise Data Plan from your Wireless
Provider.  But now there is an equalizer, AstraSync enters the
picture.  AstraSync allows for you to synchronize your BlackBerry
with your Exchange server without having to Install BlackBerry
Enterprise Server or its free counterpart.  AstraSync is like
ActiveSync for the BlackBerry.  It allows you to get and recieve
Exchange Email, it updates your calendar and your contacts, you can
flag messages and add attatchments.  Pretty slick if you ask me. 
Also, what I hear is that you do not have to upgrade your phone to
the Enterprise Data Plan to be able to use it.  You can just get an
unlimited data plan with your provider and away you go.  The
software costs $49 per year and is well worth it when you look at
your savings from not having to have an Enterprise Data Plan.  They
also offer a free trial so that you can get your feet wet with to
see if you really want it.  Just use the link below to give it a
try.

http://www.astrasync.com/

Here’s the situation.  I have a corporate email account on
hosted exchange (Microsoft BPOS) and this is my work email,
calendar, and contacts.  I also have a Google apps domain for my
personal email, calendar and contacts.  I am a Google voice user
and share my Google apps calendar with my wife.  It is essential
that these calendars and contacts are the same.  I also have an
iPhone that uses the exchange active sync connection and have to
Goggle apps account setup for email only.

In the dark days of owning my blackberry, I tried to sync
everything using the Google app on the phone.  The results were
disastrous.  I had to undo the sync and restore from a backup.  I
also received errors all the time saying that the contacts and
calendar were being synched by another program (Enterprise
activated) and could not complete or a duplicate would be created.
 

This time around, I said that I need the application to reside
my desktop to handle the issue.  I searched and searched for
something free to do this but could not find it.  Add to the
complexity that I am running office 2010 x64 edition.  This only
further narrowed my options.

After searching for a while, I found Gsyncit. (http://www.daveswebsite.com/software/gsync/).
 I read all about it and decided it was going to do everything I
wanted it to.  The app is $14.99, but very much so worth every
penny.  It took about 10 minutes to setup, and then I had some
de-duplicating to do in contacts because the contacts between
Google Apps domain and Outlook were already out of sync from me
manually doing it when I remembered to.  The de-duplication process
to about 20 minutes.  I have almost 300 contacts so not to bad.

But here’s where I ended up after my $14.99 purchase and 30
minutes of work.  All contacts and calendars are synched between
the two accounts.  If I make a change on my phone while I am on the
road, it gets updated to corporate exchange.  Then when I get back
to the office, I load Outlook and all those changes are synched
back to the Google side.  I can also accept invitations from either
of my accounts in any method I want.  Then changes are synched
later when Outlook is loaded on my desktop.  Finally, since all my
contacts are in sync, Goggle voice calls are very rarely unknown
callers any more and I am no longer required to press 1 to accept
the call of an unknown caller.

To be a complete nerd for a little bit, I have been trying to
accomplish this for a very long time.   I have seen Gsyncit for a
while but really didn’t want to pay $14.99.  It has been a
frustrating uphill battle to get these all in sync but now that
they are, I feel major satisfaction.  

I WANT an e-book reader and I must have one!  I am tired of all
the books I buy and having to keep up with them.  I have broke down
my thoughts and would love any comments to help me finally
decide.

Kindle 

The kindle with its low price has me wanting to go that
direction more than any other.  I know what type of books I like to
read and amazon book store has most of the titles available for the
Kindle.  The e-ink and battery life of the new generation is very
attractive.  The big downside, I don’t get all the cool features of
the iPad.  Apps, web surfing and so on.

Nook

In my opinion, I feel like this is a very similar product to the
Kindle.  Barnes and Nobles saw the success of the Kindle, tweaked
and added some features and called in Nook.  To me, there just does
not seem to be enough originality to make me want to chose one over
the other.  Additionally, when I searched the BN site for books I
like to read, less were available for the nook than the Kindle.  I
welcome someone to prove me wrong on this one and bring up some
points I have missed.

iPad

Total awesomeness.  I want it!  But wait, reports I have read
say two things bad.  1. it’s not that great of a platform to read
books on.  2. because of the light it emits, the iPad is more like
watching TV than reading a book.  Meaning that my sure fire way of
getting sleepy, reading, now is going to keep me awake.  Apple’s
selection doesn’t seem to be that great right now (at least for the
books I like to read).  But it is Apple, that will change.  I can’t
remember that last time I bought music anywhere but iTunes.  We all
know Steve Jobs wish is for the same thing to happen with books and
media in general.  We are now saying, “what’s a CD?”, but Steve
Jobs wants us saying “What’s a book” or “What’s a Magazine”.    
 

Wrapping it up

What’s makes this the hardest for me to decide is that I am
cheap.  I want to be a cool kid and have an iPad.  But it’s the
most expensive option. My other issue in general is that a recent
report shows that people read much slower on the “ebooks” than real
paper.

Microsoft is trying to kill public folders and make everyone go to SharePoint.  As far as mobile access to SharePoint went, it was rather bad.  Text only or a really small screen of the SharePoint page. Today I needed a way to make SharePoint pretty on an iPhone.  Basically more elegant than the text only version.  After some research, I found Moshare.  http://moprise.com/

Right now the program is free to download and use via the App Store.  I downloaded, installed and configured in under 10 minutes.  

The drawback I see is that all information is read only.  Which, let us be honest, if you are using your iPhone to access the site, do you really want to do more than read the info?  

I had a client contact me recently about email encryption.  I new already that there were 3 ways to go about this:

1. You can use a service that manages the encryption.
2. Install an encryption gateway at your office.
3. Or install a desktop app that you have to manage public and private keys for.

This is a necessity for many that send sensitive email because once an email leaves your organization it is no longer encrypted. 

Example 1:  You have hotmail account and you email a yahoo account: the email is not encrypted once it leaves hotmail’s servers.  and visa versa.

Example 2: You have an Exchange Server in your organization and you email another company out there that has an Exchange server by default these messages are not encrypted either. **

While I was updating my pricing list for different services to recommend, I found a very compelling new service:  http://www.sendinc.com

The service does not store any of your data.  You go to the main page which has the email form on it.  After you type in your email address they require you to register.  You then create your message and choose who you want to send it to.  You can attach as much as 10 Megabytes of attachments.  The message is encrypted and then attached to an email that is emailed to the recipient.  So the message is no longer stored at Sendinc.  When the end user opens the website attachment the data is uploaded to the website and decrypted there.  All data transmissions are RSA SSL encrypted (1024 Bits).  Even if you forward your email to someone else they cannot read it.  It has to be opened from your email.

I give this web app two enthusiastic thumbs up!

**You can create a site to site encryption in Exchange server between different email domains but that is beyond the scope of this post and would be time consuming for managing the certificates between any domain and all the domains that you would want to encrypt your email between.

Do you think The Strickland Group has or is helping your business
by managing the Information Technology side of your business?  Do
you know other companies that could benefit from our services?  If
so, recommend us to your friends, colleagues, and business
partners.  The Strickland Group is offering $250 for each referred
new client that signs and enters into a new Managed Service Contract.

This money can be paid directly to an individual, credited to
your monthly bill, or it can be given to a non profit / charity of
your choice in your name.

Have your friend, colleagues and business partners call or
contact us.  Be sure they mention who referred them to The Strickland Group.

info@stricklandnetworks.com

(817) 224-2020

I have switched all my person email to a Google Apps account.  I
wanted the email control and the customized domain.  Only problem
was that I couldn’t use most of the other Google products.  In
particular: blogger, picasa, and voice.

I searched for some time trying to figure out how to do this.
 Nothing useful was coming across my screen.  I accidentally
discovered how to do what I so desperately wanted Google to do when
I was trying to setup adsense.  

Here’s how you do it:

Create a new Google account.  Here is the link. 

https://www.google.com/accounts/NewAccount.
 

Use your Google Apps domain email address and follow
instructions.  Once complete / confirmed, you can use most of the
Google products.

Bonus tip:

If you want to transfer your Google voice account from your
Gmail.com account to your Google Apps domain, click this link.
 

http://spreadsheets.google.com/viewform?formkey=cjlWRDFTWERkZEIxUzVjSmNsN0ExU1E6MA.
 

You must complete the Google account setup first though.