What’s IT all about?

In a prior existence as an IT Manager, I implemented a Websense server on our network, primarily to monitor website usage and enforce our internet use policy. It was, and probably still is, a very good product offering a huge level of detail on who is accessing what on the network.

For a small business, however, Websense and it’s competing products just don’t make sense. Financially they are aimed at corporations, not a small office, and they require quite a bit of work to set up and maintain, let alone keep on top of the reports that are generated.

There are hosted services out there, through the likes of Messagelabs and Blackspider, that take the need for installing your own equipment away. However, there is still an ongoing cost involved, and you are likely to be faced with significant configuration and monitoring still.

If, however, all you want is basic web filtering (i.e. don’t let anyone access gambling sites) then this can be achieved for free. How, well it’s quite easy really, and it’s all achieved through DNS. For those that don’t know, DNS (Domain Name Services) converts those ever-so friendly website and email address names (e.g. www.fourlakes.co.uk) into much less friendly but very necessary IP addresses (e.g. 72.52.225.30) which tell your PC exactly where to find the relevant web page. Your network is probably set up to use your ISP’s DNS servers, which makes sense as they are located quite close (in network terms anyway) to your computer. However, if you change your DNS server settings on your ADSL or Cable router to point at those run by OpenDNS.com (namely 208.67.222.222 and 208.67.220.220) then you open up basic web filtering for your network. You need to register on the OpenDNS site first, but once you’ve done that it will recognise any traffic from your network and filter it against a whole raft of website categories. You can choose which ones you want blocked, resulting in a standard message which can be tailored to include your logo. This page also contains some fairly discrete advertising which is how the service pays for itself.

Additional feature include some pretty basic stats…you won’t get filtering or reporting to a user level, but you will find out if someone is trying to access unwanted websites on your network, allowing you to take action to track down the culprit if you so wish.

Worth a look.

Open source software is a bit of a buzzword (buzzphrase?) at the moment, and rightly so. Considering that the majority of the world’s websites run on open source software (servers running the suite of applications known collectively as LAMP - Linux, Apache, MySQL, PHP) and that the Firefox web browser continues to erode Microsoft’s Internet Explorer as the browser of choice for many people, it’s not surprising that more and more companies are happy to consider non-commercial software for mission-critical tasks.

Proponents of open source software will have their favourites, in my case that consists of Firefox for browsing; Thunderbird for email with the Lightning plugin for calendars; OpenOffice for documents, spreadsheets, etc.; Joomla for my website content management; and SugarCRM for management of Customer activities. I am also looking at phpList as a possible mechanism for running an email newsletter. The total cost of implementing the above, nothing but my time and the rewarding process of gaining knowledge.

Many more people go further than I have at the moment and use a Linux-based operating system such as Ubuntu. The one real issue with open source, though, is knowing what to choose, even for evaluation purposes. Whilst you can happily download and install any open source software to try it out, it can take a while to get a good appreciation of what is actually available in any particular area.

Well, that aspect of the choosing process has just improved with the creation of a pretty good list of open source software on mashable (link). You still have to compare the software and evaluate against your needs, but that is a process that should be followed regardless of the licence under which the software is provided. At least now, though, you know what you should be looking at.

Tomato v1.10 is out….use wisely

Work on the new, improved Four Lakes website has started in earnest now, and for the moment I’m looking at Joomla as a CMS solution. My current site, whilst reasonably professional looking, is extremely limited in functionality and, indeed, in the total number of pages I can publish. The current plan is to develop a LAMP/Joomla based site* using one of the hundreds (if not thousands) of Joomla templates out there. As a result I should end up with something professional, modern, and capable of boosting business rather than holding it back. And bringing my Joomla skills up to scratch is probably not a bad move either !

* Using VMWare to provide a LAMP/Joomla development environment on a Windows PC is a real boon here.

Some time ago the Skype network suffered a 48-hour outage, rather embarrassing for a company offering a service to individuals, an absolute catastrophe for a company hoping to break into the business VoIP market. The one over-riding need every business has from its phone system is that when you go to place a call, it just works. Not most of the time, or 99.9% of the time, every single time you pick up the phone you get a dial tone.

But 99.9% is amazing, I hear you say. Well, have you ever considered just how bad only achieving 99.9% uptime for your phone system is ? Lets look at the maths. There are 31,536,000 seconds in a non-leap year (60 seconds x 60 minutes x 24 hours x 365 days). So 0.1% downtime equates to 31,536 seconds, or 525.6 minutes or just over 8 hours and 45 minutes. That’s a whole working day without your phone ! And you have absolutely no idea when that outage will happen…it might be in the wee hours of a Sunday morning if you’re lucky, or it might be in the middle of the call that was going to close the most important deal you’ve ever made ! Now that 99.9% doesn’t look quite so good, eh?

One of the major plus points to Skype’s architecture was supposed to be the fact that, with a peer-to-peer network, you inoculate yourself against server issues. The bigger the network, the more ’servers’ (supernodes in Skype-speak) you have sitting on people’s desks, tables, laps, wherever. What could possibly happen that would cause a significant percentage of these disparate machines to fail ? Well, now we know at least one answer to that question…windows update ! The outage was caused by a significant number of Skype supernodes (read your PC) automatically re-booting as a result of windows update. (Click here for the word directly from Skype). Not a worm attack, not a flood in a data centre somewhere, nope, a standard update process. And the scary thing is, because this is a direct result of the peer-to-peer architecture (i.e. a design flaw), there’s not much Skype can do about it, despite their protestations to the contrary. Are you going to re-boot your PC a couple of days late, possibly exposing it to the security hole the patch has updated, just because Skype would rather you waited ? Nah, didn’t think so.

Personally, I prefer to have a bit more control over my critical business services.

One sometimes overlooked advantage of using VoIP technology over traditional telephony solutions is the enablement of remote access to the phone system. So rather than having to physically be at your desk (or at least in the office if you use a DECT phone), you can now have your work phone number follow you around wherever you have internet access. Many corporations, and a number of smaller businesses, who have jumped on the VoIP bandwagon have enabled this aspect of the technology already, and find it extremely useful. There is one important consideration, though, that you should make if you are considering this course of action yourself.

In the VoIP world, your voice traffic follows a very similar route to your data traffic. In smaller companies especially, the temptation therefore is to utilise the existing data network infrastructure to ease the implementation of the voice network. However, since the voice traffic needs to be routed via the internet, you end up compromising your edge-of-network security to implement VoIP (for instance, the recommendation for RTP traffic is to open UDP ports 10000 to 20000 !). Bigger companies will probably separate voice and data network equipment as much as they can to mitigate this risk, but smaller companies may not wish to, for financial or other reasons. Introduce the desire to allow remote soft or hard phones to login to your company PBX so that calls to their DID can follow them around the world, and you can start to see the extent of the risk.

The solution ? Well, as in many cases, that depends on the company and how much effort they are willing to put into identifying and addressing the risks. The only real solution is to run a proper risk assessment exercise so that you understand what could happen, the likelihood of it happening, and what you have to do to fix it.

The result, though, is peace of mind to go with your mobile VoIP telephony.

Following my move to Kent over a month ago, I have been having some interesting times with BT. Every other aspect of the move went extremely smoothly, the removal people were very professional and careful, the solicitor sorted their part of the deal on time and without fuss, all-in-all it could not have gone better. Apart from BT !

Some background first. The house we have moved to is brand new. So new that there was not even a phone line running from the nearest pole to the house, merely a wire hanging out of the front wall waiting for BT to hook up to. This I was aware of and had even managed to phone BT in plenty of time to order the phone line. That call was fine, and an engineer was arranged to turn up at the house the day after we moved in to install a new line. However, it didn’t quite work out like that.

Rather that give all the gory details (they are in a letter to BT’s Customer Services Director !), suffice to say that it took four visits, six engineers and over two weeks to finally get a line installed and a dial-tone active. Only then could I place an order for broadband (not with BT, I hasten to add) which was due to take a week to be activated. After the week was up and still no ADSL, I called the broadband provider to find that there was a problem with the exchange and BT could not get anyone out for two more weeks to even take a look at it ! Spot the recurring theme yet ? And don’t forget I am a VoIP consultant running a business from home.

Anyway, having spent a fruitless morning on the phone trying to get someone in BT to escalate this issue, a couple of days later the ADSL was mysteriously active ! My frustration must have filtered through somehow.

To further complicate matters while waiting for a landline, I discovered that my mobile phone reception inside the new house is absolutely terrible. I can just barely get a signal if I leave the phone in a window and use my bluetooth headset. So even though BT did divert the landline number to my mobile, it was not a great solution.

Another frustration during the downtime was the lack of access to email. In fact, I drove 80 miles one day to attend a customer meeting that they had cancelled by email the previous day. OK, I should have called to check it was still on, but if I had had access to my email…..

What really gets me, though, is the lack of choice over who installs your phone line. If I could have gone elsewhere I would, but that just wasn’t an option. At no stage did I get the impression that my case had been escalated, indeed during one discussion with BT I was informed that as I had purchased a residential line I would be dealt with in due course. You get the feeling that BT don’t really get the new reality of internet telephony. The only calls I might make on the new line will be residential calls, any business-related telephony will be VoIP-based. Therefore, the line is only needed to enable internet access…and I fail to see the point in paying £40+ a month for a business line when I can enable ADSL just as easily on a £10 a month residential line.

Wake up BT.

My testing of Google Apps continues, and one issue I have had has now been resolved. If you recall from a previous post, I had Lotus Domino handling mail, calendar and contacts for both work and personal purposes. Now that I am using Google Apps and Thunderbird for personal email/calendar/etc. I have lost the tight integration I had with my Palm Lifedrive and my mobile. But the synchronisation of calendar items between Google and Thunderbird has been solved…and the instructions are here.

OK it does not get my calendar items on to my Palm, but that’s not a major problem and I think that having my Google calendar in sync opens up a whole raft of new avenues, given it’s support for iCal and XML.

Now if only I could get contacts synchronised

…to arrange broadband in a new house before I’m actually living there ?

You may be aware that I will be moving house soon. If not don’t worry, it’s not that important to anyone but me and my family Being a brand new house, it doesn’t even have a physical phone line installed yet so the day after we move in BT will attend to run a wire across to the house and set up our new number.

(I must admit that arranging the new line with BT was a pretty painless process, and I even know what our new phone number will be before anything else has happened. A far cry from some of the business dealings I’ve had with them. Anyway, well done BT…so far.)

So, thinking that having exchanged contracts on the new house and committed to having a phone line installed, I called up my ISP of choice to ask for broadband, pretty please. I was a little shocked to hear that I can’t even place an order until the phone line is active, and once it is active I will have to wait 6 days for broadband to be activated. In a way I can understand why, after all it’s still possible that the house move will fall through or there will be a problem with the phone line installation. However, looking at it from a business point of view, wouldn’t it be better for them to sign me up rather than tell me to call back. After all, I may find a different supplier in the interim and take my custom there instead ! Additionally, I’m sure that some of the ‘paperwork’ could be sorted while we’re waiting for the phone line. And if a problem did occur, then simply cancel the order. How difficult can that be ?

The thought has occurred to me that BT would probably sign me up and enable broadband at least as quickly as the other supplier, but I have an issue with being tied into a 12- or even 18-month contract.

As mentioned a while ago, Four Lakes is moving from the Surrey/Hants border to Kent, now confirmed for 24th May. As part of the whole operation I will be moving house, which has been described as one of the three most stressful activities that can be undertaken. This particular move, so far, has been probably one of the smoother one, and yet there have been negotiations over work needed on part of the roof, and pressure from our vendor to move in a certain timeframe. Still, we have managed to exchange contracts successfully, and the moving date is set.

One of the painful aspects of moving house, I have found, is sending out change of address notices to all and sundry. Email has eased that problem somewhat, and online services like Plaxo have the potential to help too, but notifying the myriad of companies we deal with in our personal lives has always been a chore. Whether it’s the utilities, banks, credit cards or whatever, finding the right address to send your ‘Please update your records with our new address’ letter is most definitely a chore.

However, I came across a service the other day that has given me some significant help with this particular problem. Iammoving.com asks you a few pertinient questions (old and new addresses, moving date, etc.) and then asks you to choose from a list of companies to inform, categorised by type. Once you’ve built your list and, if necessary, added company-specific information (such as your bank account number) to some of the selections, you can press the button and electronic notifications are sent to your list. Or, at least, electronic notifications are sent to some of the companies on your list. The others produce a pdf which you can print and stuff into an envelope.

So it’s not as easy as it might be, due no doubt to the reluctance of certain companies to accept electronic change of address notifications, but still a useful service. If you’re moving house then it’s worth a look.