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Horse Sense #57
Contents:
A Personal Touch on the Web
It is nice to have friends who do
interesting things. For some fun, try one of these sites:
www.embroidme-springfieldva.com Jason does
"commercial" embroidery for companies and high quality
screen printing. I have a shirt with one of our famous dog
pictures on it that makes everyone laugh. The picture
quality is excellent even though he surprised me by using a
card I mailed him to produce the image.
www.islandshirts.com Lynn's mom runs this
business. Lynn (a guy) wears these high quality Hawaiian
shirts that are so colorful they can cause hallucinations.
www.moonlightthreads.com Cathy makes cute bibs and burp
cloths that are perfect gifts for baby showers. My wife
loves them and we go through a lot of them in a week.
Fortunately, they hold up well to washing.
www.fruitsandberries.com
A former computer dealer correspondent of
mine left the business to sell fruit and berry plants. Not
a day goes by when I don't think, "Hire me!" I haven't
tried the berries because I don't have anywhere to plant
them.
Chicken Little may be Right
Microsoft says recovery from malware is
becoming impossible:
www.eweek.com/article2/0,1895,1945782,00.asp
New Trends and Developments
In May 2005, portable computer sales
outpaced desktop sales for the first time. Portables have
become popular because they now rival desktops in
performance and capacity. One portable can replace a home
and a work PC. Their mobility is useful to travelers and
even those who just change cubicles or who want to work in
the conference room or library. They take less space and
power than desktops. But, as people become more and more
mobile, they encounter new issues and sets of risks.
Wireless connections aren't as fast as wired connections.
There are security, reliability, and use concerns. Is your
wireless or wired connection safe? How do you keep it from
getting stolen? What do you do if it gets stolen? What if
you drop it or something just wears out? How can you
connect to all the devices you need? What is the best way
to carry it? How can you connect back in to your business
safely? How do you back up the data? How do you manage
users who might not be connected all the time to the
corporate network?
Seagate bought drive manufacturer Maxtor
for $1.9 Billion to become the dominant player in the disk
drive business. Seagate owns the high end of the market
with its server drives and Maxtor owns a large part of the
consumer drive market, and especially, the external hard
disk drive market. External drives are becoming more and
more important as backup devices for portables and can also
serve as additional storage for one machine or many.
Storage use is exploding as businesses and individuals store
more information on their computers. Many businesses are
now asking themselves difficult questions. Is the
information I am storing subject to any regulations? How
long do I need to store something? Where should I store
it? What information is valuable and for how long will it
be valuable? Who should have access to this information,
who shouldn't, and how do I control the access? What is
involved in a disaster recovery plan? How does this fit in
with my normal operations, my backup routine, and my needs
to have an archive of critical information? How do I manage
this mountain of data without paying a fortune and spending
all my "free" time doing it? For answers to these
questions, we suggest you call Iron Horse before you lose
critical information, the federal government fines you, you
get sued, or you simply end up working too hard and paying
too much to manage your information.
Chances Are You Are Using an
Insecure Browser
Microsoft's Internet Explorer (IE) has
been the default browser for some time. However, it hasn't
had a major update in some time and is extremely vulnerable
to attack. For security reasons, I and many of my clients
use Firefox. It is a lot safer than using IE. Tabbed
browsing is indispensable. In one browser window, you can
have many sites open that you can switch easily between as
you might switch between tabbed folders in a file cabinet.
You can also save multiple tabs as a group. Way cool. The
speed is similar to IE, but Firefox flunks on some very IE
specific sites. That's OK. The code Firefox won't run is
the dangerous stuff IE will. Firefox has plug-ins that will
make it more useful. It doesn't take up much disk space or
memory. IE normally takes a large chunk of your available
disk space to cache web pages. This is a very wasteful use
of your computer's resources and can slow your access to
everything else and cause stability issues. The Firefox
toolbar search window can search various sites. The
download manager is good and sends the downloads wherever I
want them. It is easy to clear specific configuration and
history data for security reasons. Password management is
good. Updates are quick and easy. All in all, Firefox is a
great browser. We only use IE when we can't use Firefox
because the site owner has done something non-standard
(dumb). Firefox is also free. Get it at
www.getfirefox.com. Being able to download the full
product in a single download makes it much easier for
administrators to install and troubleshoot.
Is Your Network in Chaos?
Moving Towards Utility Networking
Most small business networks are
undocumented, unpredictable, not monitored or measured,
without a coherent source of help, and heavily dependent on
users and management staff to handle problems, generally in
a reactionary crisis mode. It is a struggle just to
maintain the configuration and keep the business running.
Well managed networks resolve these issues and become tools
for enhancing the business and implementing policy. While
these networks aren't completely automatic, they do behave
like utilities. You expect them to work. The costs are
reasonable and somewhat predictable. The features and
benefits are well known. There is copious documentation.
Help is easily available. The benefits are measurable.
Contact Iron Horse to find out where your network lies and
see how you, too, can graduate from chaos to something
better.
Multifunction Companies,
Multifunction Appliances
Symantec has become the Borg of the
security industry, assimilating companies like Veritas,
PowerQuest, Axent, and other well known names to become the
800 pound gorilla of the security world. As a Symantec
Enterprise Solutions Partner, Iron Horse has watched a
relatively small company become a multibillion dollar
behemoth in only a few years. Fortunately, Symantec keeps
buying companies Iron Horse already represents, so we often
know the products better than their own technicians and
salespeople. Sonicwall has also been on a buying spree
lately, buying Lasso Logic (disk to disk backup appliances)
and Enkoo (SSL VPN appliances). What both Symantec and
Sonicwall have in common is their recognition that network
appliances are the wave of the future. The most common
network appliances focus on security. Unified threat
management products (firewalls with additional security
features like VPN capability, antivirus, antispam, content
filtering, etc) are a popular choice. Both large and small
companies find buying a bag-o-securityappealing. Since
multifunction security appliances consolidate multiple
security technologies in one place with one interface, it
makes them much easier to buy, manage, and support. The
easier security is to manage and support, the more likely it
is to be effective.
Cymphonix Network Composer is a
"Bag-O-Security"
The Cymphonix Network Composer is so
amazing, I had to buy one for our network. In simple terms,
it allows me to manage how our critical link out to the
Internet is being used. For example, I can see who is using
the most bandwidth and what they are using it for. I caught
one of my employees visiting web sites he shouldn't have
been on company time and had an "interesting" talk with
him. For myself and other customers, I've used it to block
inappropriate web content, documented inappropriate use of
the network, to enforce internet usage policies, pinpoint
people abusing the network, to find infected machines, to
ensure business critical communications like voice and video
get priority over file downloads, to stop antivirus and
spyware downloads from web sites, to find misconfigured
machines that disrupted the entire network, and to generate
meaningful graphs and statistics to show how much better
things are with a Network Composer in place.
Some people have concerns about "Big
Brother" looking over their shoulder and monitoring
everything they do. Well, you can monitor a lot with this
device, and surfing inappropriate web sites is a problem on
a lot of networks, but even if you make the assumption that
everyone that works with you is hard working and completely
trustworthy, you can still have issues. Without the Network
Composer you couldn't see or correct problems like these:
(1) Bob brings his daughter in to
work one weekend and lets her play on a nearby computer.
She decides to play a game over the Internet with some
friends. A critical network backup doesn't complete.
(2) Jill wants to keep in touch
with some friends visiting town and uses Internet Messaging
to do so. Someone sends her a file which she executes and
infects the network.
(3) Your part time bookkeeper
receives a message from your bank to confirm account
information and clicks on the link to provide it giving your
information to a thief.
(4) You are making a voice over
IP phone call when one of your machines decides it needs a
software update from a manufacturer and begins to download
it. Your call disconnects and you can't reconnect.
(5) You discover an infected
machine on your network has been sending e mails with your
name on it out to thousands of people touting an investment
scam only because an annoyed customer calls you.
(6) On a temporary basis, you set
up a link to a printer and fileserver at another office.
However, you forget to take that link down. Months later,
two computers on the network are still running slow and your
link out to the Internet is slower than you expect it to be.
Do you know what is happening with that
critical link out to the Internet? You manage what you
cannot measure. The problem is that good management is hard
to describe. But, it is easy to see. I believe you can
make great use of it on your network, or I wouldn't have
bought it for mine. Cymphonix makes inexpensive appliances
for networks of all sizes. We are so sure you will like it
that you can try out the unit for 30 days, and if you don't
like it, you can send it back for a refund on your credit
card or account. We do this because no one has ever sent
one back. If you are worried that you don't have the time
or expertise needed to install or manage such a device, we
can provide those services as well for a fixed cost.
Truth or Joke?
Have you ever wondered how your computer
works? Well ... It's finally explained here in one
easy-to-understand illustration:
www.newportharbor.us/computerworks.htm (This animation may take a moment to load. No, we didn't think of it, but we like it!)
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