January 2009 Archives

Brick walls are there for a reason. They give us a chance to show how badly we want something. —Randy Pausch, The Last Lecture

Symantec Endpoint Protection 11 Maintenance Release 4 has been released.  See below:

Symantec Endpoint Protection 11.0 Maintenance Release 4 (MR4) has been released.  This release contains a new build of the Symantec Endpoint Protection Manager (SEPM version 11.0.4000) and the latest version of the Client binaries (version 11.0.4000).

 

Please note This version of the SEPM and Client binaries can be installed as a new install or as an upgrade to an existing 11.x installation.

 

Today is an exciting day form me…  As of 5:00PM—I am no longer an employee of Dunlap Community Hospital.  For the past few months, I have been pulled back into the consulting state of mind.  I miss the day to day challenges that come along with consulting.  I have decided to take my business to the next level and concentrate 100% on my customers.  We will be adding additional technicians soon, with a host of new exciting services.  One of the new services that we are going to offer is managed services.  This is where we become your IT department for a monthly fee.  Very exciting stuff…

I know the one concern all of my customers had was my availability—they knew during the day I was at my “real job”.  Well, Tooley Consulting Group, LLC is my new job!  When I took the hospital job, I lost a lot of customers along the way because I was not able to give them the attention they required.  I hope they decide to come back!  I decided to take the dive and make myself 100% available.  If you have any questions, please let me know!

This is so funny!  The only two TV shows I really follow (besides the news) is 24 and House.  Tonight on 24, the show ended with the following:  If the President does not comply with the terrorists—they are going to destroy Kidron, Ohio.  Kidron is about 20 minutes from where I live.  This is a small farming and Amish community.  Wonder how they picked that out from anywhere else in the world?  Tune in next week…

What's New...

Just wanted to post a short message regarding Windows 7…  I have been using it regularly now for about a week.  Microsoft has really improved Windows Vista.  Windows 7 uses Windows Vista as its base—they started building on Windows Vista.  The features added surely fix the complaints from Windows Vista (UAC, Security, Performance).  I am currently running Windows 7 in VMware Workstation 6.5 with 1GB RAM and 18GB hard drive allocated—it out performs my dedicated Windows Vista PC!  One pain I am hearing that I hope Microsoft addresses is the Windows XP to Windows 7 migration.  It sounds like it may be a painful process—but hopefully this will be fixed before its official release.  I will post my experiences as I use it more…

Windows 7 Beta is available:

Windows 7, the next release in the Microsoft Windows family, is now available for download as a beta, and you are invited to try it out for yourself! Windows 7 represents a significant opportunity to grow your solution services as you help customers reduce costs and increase IT business value in a challenging economic climate. Building on the substantial investments made in Windows Vista, Windows 7 improves security, reliability, networking, and user experience.

This is so funny and true!

Recently, we have become a member of ASCII Group, Inc.  This partnership will allow us to be more aggressive in pricing for product and services.  We are looking forward with our partnership with ASCII Group, Inc.  Click on the logo below for more information.

Came across something interesting today…  A hosted blog site called JournalSpace recently had a data melt down.  They had no backups—only a RAID 1 configuration (mirroring).  So basically, when the data was corrupted/overwritten—the second drive copied the problems.  Here is a snippet from their website:

Journalspace is no more.

DriveSavers called today to inform me that the data was unrecoverable.

Here is what happened: the server which held the journalspace data had two large drives in a RAID configuration. As data is written (such as saving an item to the database), it's automatically copied to both drives, as a backup mechanism.

The value of such a setup is that if one drive fails, the server keeps running, using the remaining drive. Since the remaining drive has a copy of the data on the other drive, the data is intact. The administrator simply replaces the drive that's gone bad, and the server is back to operating with two redundant drives.

But that's not what happened here. There was no hardware failure. Both drives are operating fine; DriveSavers had no problem in making images of the drives. The data was simply gone. Overwritten.

The data server had only one purpose: maintaining the journalspace database. There were no other web sites or processes running on the server, and it would be impossible for a software bug in journalspace to overwrite the drives, sector by sector.

The list of potential causes for this disaster is a short one. It includes a catastrophic failure by the operating system (OS X Server, in case you're interested), or a deliberate effort. A disgruntled member of the Lagomorphics team sabotaged some key servers several months ago after he was caught stealing from the company; as awful as the thought is, we can't rule out the possibility of additional sabotage.

But, clearly, we failed to take the steps to prevent this from happening. And for that we are very sorry.

So, after nearly six years, journalspace is no more.

A very unfortunate situation that could have been easily preventable.  This happens more often than reported.  We can all learn from the mistake at JournalSpace and their cander to tell there users what actually happened.  They have posted a way to try and recover your posts from Google cache.  As of this time, the site is up for sale on eBay.

I am a big fan of Netflix.  Recently I purchased a Netflix Player by Roku.  For $99.00, this box is awesome!  Basically, some of the titles on Netflix are available for play on demand—either on your PC or through a box like the Roku.  The Roku player is wireless and takes about 10 minutes to setup.  Once it is setup, you can stream movies that are available on demand to your TV over the internet via wireless internet connection.  I was skeptical when I first purchased the unit.  I was worried about the video quality, especially since I have a web server and two VOIP phones sharing the same internet connection.  The performance is awesome!  I would recommend this unit to anyone who enjoys their Netflix account!  I hope more titles are made available in the future—which Netflix claims will be the case…

I decided to try out a new editor for my blog.  Microsoft has released a new client called Windows Live Writer 2009.  This software is available as a Release Candidate (which is why we are seeing some bugs).  I am actually using it for this post--we will see how it goes.  Anyway, during the setup the software asks to post a temporary entry to your site and notifies you that it will be immediately deleted.  The reason the setup does this involves checking the site theme of your blog.  My site uses MovableType as the blogging server software.  Whenever Windows Live Writer 2009 tries to delete the temporary entry--you will still notice the entry on your site.  This is quite cumbersome, but the fix is very easy.  You will need to go into MovableType and rebuild your site.  After the rebuild, the temporary entry will be removed from your site.  Windows Live Writer 2009 removes the static temporary entry from MovableType but fails to remove the cached entry--this is why a rebuild will correct the problem simply.  Microsoft has acknowledged this problem and is working to correct it.

Happy New Year everyone!  Hope everyone has a blessed and exciting 2009!