Our U-verse service was down on Wednesday.  We called Tech Support and they said they would have someone out the next day.  Ok, I can understand that.  I wasn’t happy about it, but I can understand it.

I got home after work and decided to watch one of the shows I previously recorded.  No Shows!  What?!?

I called tech support back and asked them why I couldn’t watch my DVR, the answer was astounding.  You have to have Internet access.  To watch TV??? On a DVR??  What???

Ok, technology isn’t always as pretty as it’s made out to be, but to not be able to watch a show that is recorded on a hard drive in a box in my house w/out internet access is absurd.  And that’s not even the best part of the call!

Ok, it is what it is.  So I asked when it would be fixed.  She said it would be fixed before 8PM the next day, but that the problem was outside the house so no one needed to be there.  To which I replied, “so sometime tomorrow this is just going to magically come back on?”  and her answer was . . . .

“No Sir, not magically.”

On-site Tech Support provides all inclusive solutions for business relocation and start-ups. We have over 10 years of experience in completing successful office relocations and building new business networks from the ground up.  Let us sort out the technology part of your move for you while you focus on other issues involved in moving. We can help you reduce the downtime of your network by effectively navigating the common obstacles encountered with office moves and business relocations.

Are you starting a new business?

Starting from scratch is not as easy as it sounds if you try and do it yourself. At On-site Tech Support, we can provide you with a one stop resource for the entire set-up process. Working with our premier technology partners, we will find the most efficient, cost-effective solution for your business. On-site Tech Support will have your new office set up and ready to go when you are.

Here is a brief list of things you will need for your new office.

• Server/Network room with sufficient AC
• Internet and network connectivity – Do you need a Static IP?
• Cable
• T1
• Ethernet Over Copper (or Fiber)
• Data and phone cabling
• Are you running a VoIP phone System?  Then you may need different cabling.
• Network Hardware
• Network design, execution and documentation
• Firewall
• Switches
• Gateway Security
• Wireless network configuration
• VPN remote access solutions
• Servers - Purchase, configure and install
• Email
• In-house or hosted email
• Exchange or Pop3
• Backup and Offsite Replication
• Disaster Recovery and Business Continuity
• Workstations, laptops
• Printers, scanners, etc.
• Transport, connection and testing of equipment at new office
• 3rd party vendor management

Fore more information on business relocation or new startup businesses, call us at 619-717-8070 or fill out the form below.

Here are several steps you can take to avoid compromising your network security:

WiFi Access WiFi technology makes it easy for you to network your computers. Your WiFi signal may broadcast beyond the physical security of your office allowing uninvited visitors to access your network and compromise your network security and compliance policies. Make sure your WiFi network connections are password protected and securely encrypted. Also, consider turning off your WiFi during non business hours.

Thumb Drives and USB Drives Sharing data through thumb drives or USB drives may allow unintended computer viruses and malicious software, also known as malware, transfer from other non secure computers and enter the perimeter of your secure network. For this reason, some network administrators set strict IT policies that prevent thumb drives from being used on any office computer. There are plenty of secure services available for files sharing between computers (e.g. remote backup and remote control software). Ask your IT support professional about your policy for using USB drives and thumb drives and the impact they may have on your network security.

Security Patches Operating System and Application Security patches are designed to keep your network secure. Your network security is as vulnerable as its’ weakest link. As one hole in the hull can take down the largest ship afloat, one computer that is out of compliance may create a hole in your network security.

Anti-Virus and Anti-Malware Similar to Security Patches, keeping your Anti-Virus and Anti-Malware definitions up to date will help keep your network secure and in compliance. Some virus programs may use your network to hop from one computer to another. Once an infected machine connects behind your firewall other computers may be exposed. By keeping Anti-Virus and Anti-Malware definitions up to date you can avoid loss of data and loss of employee productivity.

You may think your network is as invincible, just like many thought the Titanic was unsinkable. Contact your On-site Tech Support for a FREE Network Audit to make sure there aren’t any icebergs looming in your network security policy.

When businesses use a public cloud provider to store their data offsite, they’re basically sending the data off into a service provider’s data center. But just where is that data center?

Many providers are hush about the location of their data centers, and some for good reason related to security. But in some cases customers want to know where their data is being stored.

For those who do want to know where the data lives, most of the major providers outline in a service-level agreement (SLA) or on their website where the data will be stored and in some cases, you even have a choice.

So does it matter where the data is stored? Yes and no.  You want your data  to be close to where it will be accessed by end users. The farther away the data is, the slower the speed of response. You also may specifically want data in different locations for disaster recovery and business continuity reasons.   Building in multiple layers of redundancy and data replication can guarantee that if there is an outage in one area, that the data is backed up somewhere else.

If you are an On-site Tech Support customer, your data is securely backed up and stored at ScaleMatrix, San Diego’s Premier co-location Facility.

For more information about the cloud, backup, co-location or managed services, call 619-717-8070.

Google suffered a massive Google Apps outage last Tuesday that affected up to 10 percent of its global users, leaving them unable to access their email accounts.  What started off as an outage that affected less than two percent of the Gmail user base quickly grew to over ten percent.  With over 350,000,000 users, that’s a lot of downtime. 

When your public cloud provider goes down, whom do you call? More often than not, your business is on hold and the problem is completely out of your hands. You simply have to wait and hope for the best …

One of the key advantages of relying on a Provider like On-site Tech Support is the commitment to your business.  Our technicians actually care about your business and the importance of uptime and reliability. On-site Tech Support offers a multitude of business continuity and disaster recovery solutions that ensure 100% uptime and reliability.

For more information, call 619-717-8070.

This was the subject line of an email I received Wednesday morning from All Covered.

I have to admit I was totally shocked.  I know we rock, and are the #416 Managed Service Provider in the world, but still, it was quite surprising to receive a letter like this.  

Here are some of the highlights.

. . . After researching your firm, I believe we have many similarities including our focus on IT Infrastructure, Managed Services, On-site and remote support solutions, and other areas. . .

. . . We’d like to establish a dialogue with you to see if there are indeed common threads between us and to explore M&A [merger and acquisition] discussions with All Covered be it something today, or well into the future. . .

. . .our M&A charter has dramatically expanded with a focus on growth with the best and brightest IT services leaders — firms like On-site Tech Support are considered “A” players among their customers and peers.

Well then.  If you are a client of ours, you should be very proud, if you are not, call now.  619-717-8070. (Shameless plug)

As true as this letter may be, let me assure you, we are not selling.    

Let me repeat that,

WE ARE NOT SELLING!  Business will continue as usual and we will be there to service your servers, networks, PC’s and IT Infrastructure, just as we have always been.  

If you value hometown private companies with superior service and support,

Call On-site Tech Support today

619-717-8070

1. What is your RTO?
2. What is your RPO?
3. What is your budget?

RTO - Recovery Time Objective -How Quickly Can Your Business Recover?

Your Recovery Time Objective (RTO) is the maximum amount of time your systems can be out of commission — from when a disruption occurs to the moment your system is available again. Another way to think of this is “how long can you afford to be without your email, accounting, order entry, etc.?”  We hear answers to this question ranging from “15 minutes would kill us” to, believe it or not, “If i was down for a week it wouldn’t really matter that much.”

Business Continuity. Businesses need to have continuity. When operations are disrupted by a server failure, companies need to recover quickly and return to normal operations as soon as possible. Recovering data, applications and system files over an internet connection sounds easy enough, but it can be a painfully slow process. Consider the download bandwidth of your own network connection, the size of your system, and think of how long it would take to restore everything currently stored on your server. Also consider that in the case of a disaster, internet transmission infrastructure may be damaged or missing. If there is no internet connectivity, off-site information will be unavailable no matter how well it is backed up. On-site storage would be better in such situations, but file-by-file recovery, even with on-site availability, is still a time-consuming process. Fortunately, a file-based disaster recovery solution isn’t the only option. On-site Tech Support uses a block-based method of information recovery. While file-based recovery is only possible so long as applications or systems are available to process the recovery, block-based methods typically image and store an entire disk. Rather than recover individual files, one at a time, recovery is accomplished by writing a disk image onto a new drive, which duplicates exactly the original information: data, applications and operating system. The speed of block-based disaster recovery methods makes them superior choices for business continuity.

RPO – Recovery Point Objective – How Much Data Can You Afford to Lose?

“How much data can you afford to lose?” is an over simplification.  RPO is a measure of the maximum time period in which data mightbe lost if there is a major incident affecting your systems –  not a direct measure of how much data might be lost.  The RPO is expressed backward in time from the instant at which the failure occurs, and can be specified in seconds, minutes, hours, or days.  Once the RPO has been defined, it determines the minimum frequency with which backups must be made. This, along with the Recovery Time Objective, determines the optimal disaster recovery technologies and procedures.

• If your backup runs once per day and is taken off-site once per week, your RPO is 1 week.  You could conceivably lose 1 weeks worth of data.
• If your backup runs once per day and is replicated offsite once per day, your RPO is 48 hours.  You could conceivably lose 48 hours worth of data.
• If your backup runs every 15 minutes and is replicated offsite throughout the day, your RPO is 15 minutes plus replication time which depends on your internet speed.  This could be as low as 20 minutes total up to several hours if you have a slow connection.

RTO and the RPO have a very significant effect on the design of your Backup and Disaster Recover Solution so must be considered in concert with all the other major system design criteria.

Budget – What Can You Afford?

How much money do you have available to protect your data and systems? This answer largely determines the degree to which you can implement an Adaptive Infrastructure.  You may do all the calculations for Recovery Time Objective nad Recovery Point Objective and sit back and smile and say “Do it!”.  And then you get the price tag.  The lower the RPO and RTO limits are, the higher the price.  You have to find a balance between your pain threshold and what you can afford.

We can help!

Call today for a Backup and Disaster Recovery evaluation and assessment.  Our engineers can help you with all of this.  For more information call 619-717-8070.

The Problem

The Intel Hybrid Cloud Server comes with 3 NIC’s.  Each one has a special function.  When we ran the initial configuration, we mis-configured one of the NIC’s.

• NIC A is for remote management and the internal network.
• NIC B is for use if you are using the appliance as a firewall.
• NIC C is reserved for later use.

None of the documentation said any of this, and even if it did, who really reads the instructions anyway?  My over thinking tech thought he’d be smart and configure NIC A for Remote access and NIC B for the internal network which makes perfectly logical sense to me.  It worked fine for the customer, but we didn’t have remote access for some reason.

Intel Tech Support

I called Intel Tech Support and got Luis on the phone within 2 minutes.  I was working remotely from my office and we worked for about an hour to change the network to NIC A to no avail.  I needed to be on-site.

The next morning Luis called me back and I told him that I was on my way but I wouldn’t be at the client for a few hours.

I showed up at the client around 12:40PM and got setup. The cell reception at that location is non-existent so I had to use a land line and the closest phone was about 30′ away from the server, 2 rooms away.  I called in and got Luis on the phone in 2 rings.  We worked for a while with me running back and forth between the phone and the server.  Eventually he suggested we use a go-to-meeting session for the audio, that way I could sit in the server room.  Since I didn’t have Internet on my laptop because of a custom IP config to manage the server, I had to borrow a laptop to get the audio session running.

After about an hour and a half of removing NIC’s and rebooting, adding NIC’s and rebooting (each reboot was about 15 minutes) he got another tech on the line to help out.  About 5 minutes after that a THIRD tech joined the call.  Most of the time you can’t get one tech that knows what they are doing AND speaks proper English and I had THREE.  I won’t go into all the details about what we did but all in all it took about 5.5 hours to get  this resolved with some creative thinking and more creative networking.  At the end of the day I had a fully functional server with remote access.

Now don’t get me wrong that everything was cherries and gravy, the initial problem was lack of documentation from Intel and an overthinking tech on my end, but I can’t say enough about the superior tech support at Intel.  All three of them stayed on the phone with me until this was resolved and I really appreciate that.

So to summarize:

• First call less than 2 minutes on hold for an English-speaking tech.
• The next day he called me back.
• I called back in and got him in 2 rings.
• Situation was escalated and rather than hand me off he stayed on the phone while 2 additional English-speaking techs helped me work through the problem for 5 hours!
• All three techs stayed with me until the issue was resolved and the customer was back online.

That is how tech support is done.

If you are interested in the Intel Hybrid Cloud Server fill out the form or call 619-717-8070 for more information. 

]]> http://www.on-sitetechsupport.com/news/tech-support-the-way-it-should-be/feed/ 0 http://www.on-sitetechsupport.com/news/limitations-office-365/ http://www.on-sitetechsupport.com/news/limitations-office-365/#comments Tue, 03 Apr 2012 05:08:08 +0000 Scott Smeltzer http://www.on-sitetechsupport.com/?p=1062 Office 365 is new.

The list below may not actually be accurate.

The Internet isn’t always correct.

Microsoft isn’t always correct.

Software changes and receives updates.

Below are the limitations I have found for Office 365 vs. an on-premise SBS server.

1. Must have Reliable Internet Connection
2. Does not support Google Chrome browser
3. Significant Migration Costs
1. No Migration Tools for SharePoint or Linc
4. Service Level Agreements may not work for your organization
5. No Control of Backup or Recovery – Must rely on Microsoft for this (considering their track record for spectacular failure at times, this is almost a deal breaker for me.)
6. No backing out – there is no option to go back to the on-premise model
7. On-line applications lack the full feature set of the off-line versions
1. Word Online
1. No ability to edit tracked changes
2. No Format Painter
3. No Symbols, Shapes or Equations
4. No Smart Art
5. No Translation or Thesaurus
6. No Spell check in Excel
2. SharePoint limited functionality
1. No search from Exchange or Windows 7 search
2. Storage is only 10G with 500MB/user
3. Exchange Online Limited Functionality
1. Does not support unlimited message or mailbox size
2. No Managed Folders
3. Retention limits – See Below
4. Rule limitation is 64Kb
5. No Public Folders
6. No GAL segmentation
7. 1500 Recipients per day

Retention Limits: The maximum number of days that items can remain in the Deleted Items folder before they are automatically removed is 30 days. The maximum numbers of days that items removed from the Deleted Items folder are retained before they are permanently deleted is 14 days. The maximum number of days that items can remain in the Junk E-mail folder before they are automatically removed is 30 days.

There are a lot of things that Office 365 does better and that list will be published soon.

An obscure clause in the terms of service limits the number of recipients you’re allowed to contact in a day.  Small business accounts are limited to 500 1,500 recipients per 24 hours.  That’s not a limitation of 1,500 recipients on one message. That’s a limitation of 1,500 recipients during a single day. And the limitation doesn’t apply to unique recipients either.

If you  send a message to me and Cc: John, that would take up two of your  allotted recipients. If you later in the day sent another message to just me, it would take up another recipient, even though you already sent a message to me. Unfortunately, 1,500 recipients when viewed in this fashion really isn’t that many.

Microsoft’s online documentation confirms this limitation, if you know where to look. In Office 365 help, under Recipient and Sender Limits, this is what you’ll find:

Recipient rate limit The maximum number of recipients that can receive e-mail messages sent from a single cloud-based mailbox in a 24 hour period.

• Microsoft Live@edu 500 recipients per day
• Office 365 for professionals and small businesses 1500 recipients per day
• Office 365 for enterprises 1,500 recipients per day

Microsoft claims it’s a necessary anti-spam measure:

Every online service provider must limit and constrain its service based on limitations such as the amount of disk space currently in its datacenters or bandwidth currently available and also enforce behavioral thresholds which prevent inappropriate use of the service by malicious users or criminals. This is true for any form of web-based service.

In the world of email, one of the thresholds that must be enforced is the amount of email that is sent through the system by any one user or organization in order to combat spam, mass-mailing worms & viruses. To ensure that all users experience the level of performance, email delivery expediency and client connectivity behavior that they expect, we must determine what usage typifies behavior of a spammer, for example, and put controls in place to prevent such inappropriate use. We ask customers with legitimate needs for a service that exceeds these thresholds or must go beyond these limitations to contact support so that we can best meet their specific needs.