Reduce, reuse, recycle. Once you've
covered the first two, where do you go
to recycle? Electronics, especially
older ones and batteries, often contain
toxic metals that shouldn't end up in a
landfill.
www.earth911.com can help you find a
place to recycle your batteries and
other electronic and non-electronic
detritus.
Recycling may be easier than you think.
You can recycle many small electronic
items with the help of your local post
office
http://about.usps.com/what-we-are-doing/green/recycle.htm.
Fairfax County, where Iron Horse is
based, offers no cost recycling of
computers, televisions, and electronic
peripherals.
Lost Your Cursor?
If you tend to lose
your cursor in busy Windows XP or Vista
screens, open control panel, select
mouse, click on the pointer options tab,
and select show location of pointer when
I press the CTRL key. Then when you hit
CTRL, the mouse pointer will show up
with rings around it. This doesn't work
with some types of "mice," like the
touchpad on my laptop.
Super Powerful (and FREE) Security
Measures
Do you want to keep
your information safe? There are many
sophisticated ways to protect your
information, but one of the most
powerful ways is to make it unavailable
to prying eyes. The easiest way to do
that is to turn off the equipment. I
don't care how good a cracker is. If
your computer is off and he doesn't have
physical access to it, then he can't get
your data. Turning your computer off
also saves electricity and cash, so it
is a good idea for those reasons as
well. I know of some companies that
disconnect their network from the
Internet each night by throwing a power
switch. You can also increase your
security by allowing computers to power
down after a period of inactivity. I
also recommend that you set your
computers to lock after a few minutes of
inactivity as well, so that someone
needs to log in to see your valuable
data. In the various versions of
Windows, you can do this by right
clicking on blank space on the desktop,
selecting properties, and configuring
the screen saver. Banking web sites and
other security conscious sites, network
devices, and other devices have
inactivity lockouts that will protect
you with little effort on your part.
The Best Technologies You Still Aren't
Using (4)
Previously discussed:
Horse Sense 76
--Defragmentation
--Gigabit Ethernet
--Redundant Arrays of
Inexpensive Disks (RAID)
--Power over Ethernet
(PoE)
--Xerox Phaser Solid
Ink Printers
Horse Sense 77
--Ergonomically
Correct Devices
--Pay Per Click
Printing
Horse Sense 78
--Bandwidth
Management
--E Mail Archiving
Hard Disk Based Backups and Secondary
Storage
As hard disks have
gotten larger, data loss is becoming a
bigger issue. Thankfully, they have
also gotten less expensive as well, so
we can now use other disks to safeguard
our primary data. We can do that either
through some form of redundancy, like
RAID or replication, or through disk to
disk backup or archiving. I've talked
about different ways to protect your
data in Horse Sense 65
http://www.ih-online.com/hs65.html,
and the benefits of hard disks over
tapes in Horse Sense 60
http://www.ih-online.com/hs60.html.
Simply put, hard drives are a high
performance, high capacity, inexpensive,
durable, and, often portable way to
safeguard your valuable information. If
you are still using tapes, you are
costing yourself time and money.
Seagate and Western Digital have both
announced 2TB drives with lower power
consumptions that make storing data on
disk even more attractive.
Remote Access
There are two basic
ways to access a computer remotely. A
computer that accesses a network as a
remote node does the equivalent of
extending the network cable through the
Internet. This is usually done by
forming an encrypted connection through
the public Internet to create a Virtual
Private Network (VPN). Remote nodes
behave pretty much like any other node
on your network once you have made the
connection. Compared to a computer on
the network, though, this cable is very
long and tends to have a small amount of
bandwidth. So, instead of being able to
contact a server in less than a
millisecond, it may take hundreds of
times as long to get to the server.
And, when it does, instead of a gigabit
Ethernet connection at 1000Mbps, you may
be limited to 1.5Mbps T1 speeds.
Obviously, you can't afford to deal with
large files or with applications that
require a lot of talking back and forth.
You can "beat" the
high latency and low bandwidth
characteristics of a remote connection
by using remote control. With remote
control you use software on your end of
the link that uses software on the other
end of the link to take over another
computer, or something that looks like a
computer, like a virtual machine running
on a computer or a Citrix or Windows
Terminal Services session. What you
have basically done is to extend the
keyboard, monitor and mouse over the
Internet. Typically all that passes
between the two end points are screen
changes, keystrokes, and mouse
movements. Remote control doesn't
require a lot of bandwidth and can deal
well with fairly high latencies between
the end points. Applications that
require a lot of back and forth chatter
or that deal with a lot of data aren't a
problem because everything is happening
on the local network, not on the
Internet. Security improves as well
because the real data isn't traversing
the Internet; just screen updates,
keystrokes, and mouse movements. Remote
control isn't as transparent as remote
node. There are two key "costs" of
using remote control. First, you have
to have session(s) to control on the
target LAN and these sessions use the
resources of the host machine. Second,
you have to have the control software at
the remote end as well.
Remote control is
often used to control servers that are
either far away or locked in closets.
IP KVMs are devices that connect to one
or more servers via a
keyboard/video/mouse (KVM) connection.
You connect to them via remote control
software and control machines just as if
you were sitting in front of them. You
can even reboot or power cycle equipment
and watch as it comes up.
Over the years,
remote control has gotten easier.
Setting up encryption for a VPN can
require significant effort. So, since
most people have web browsers on their
computers and smart phones, and these
browsers have the ability to call on
encryption routines to talk to secure
web sites, programmers decided they
could use these browsers (and software
that could be easily configured within
them) as the client end of the
connection. On the other end, there is
typically a device or some software that
allows connection to a PC or session
that can be controlled. These so-called
SSL VPNs provide easy and secure
connections from most web enabled
devices, including smart phones or
someone else's PC.
Another interesting
twist is that remote control sessions
don't have to be remote. They can be in
the same office. So a windows terminal
that has no hard disk, a Mac, or a slow
PC with an old version of Windows could
all run the most recent software. They
just take over a session on a machine
that has the capability to run that
application. 20 years ago, "personal"
computers ran bulletin board software to
allow many people to simultaneously use
the same computer and hard disk. Today,
computers are even more powerful and it
is possible for many people to share the
same computer. Using remote control
technology correctly can enhance
security, compatibility, and
performance, ease upgrades, and lower
costs.
Remote control has
changed the way Iron Horse works with
its customers. Now we can manage and
troubleshoot routers, servers,
firewalls, and PCs remotely. This
allows us to extend our service range.
Not long ago, I troubleshot firewall and
connection problems between a customer's
offices in Utah and the United Kingdom
from my Virginia office. Remote control
technologies allow us to eliminate
travel time and expense and allow us to
resolve problems more quickly. With the
terrible traffic in the Washington, DC
metro area, this is a big deal. We can
even set up remote monitoring and
management so we can tell if there is a
problem and fix it. In fact, with
desktop and server management tools, it
is possible to look at a fleet of client
machines and perform needed remote
updates all at once, automatically. IT
staffing is expensive and smaller
companies often can't afford to hire
their own IT staff. With remote control
technologies, our help is now only a
phone call away and the cost/benefit
ratio for that professional service
keeps getting better.
Remote connectivity
allows employees to work from home which
has been shown to improve productivity,
boost morale, eliminate commutes, save
energy, save space, save money.... In
other words, if you don't have the
ability to access your work (or even
your home) computer easily, you need to
put this technology in place. For
example, if you don't have remote
control technology for your servers and
your network technicians aren't in the
office, you could have an extended
period of down time.
Unified Threat Management Appliances
If you haven't
upgraded your firewall in over 3 years,
you need to take a close look at what it
is doing for you. The firewall vendors
certainly have. Business class
firewalls now routinely offer other
functions and have become Unified Threat
Management (UTM) devices. They combine
firewalls (only let traffic that is
invited in), with intrusion detection
and protection systems (see if something
slipped in), anti-virus/spam/malware
technologies (keep bad things like
"vampires" out, even if they are invited
in), content filtering (keep people from
going where they shouldn't), virtual
private networks (keep conversations
with people across the Internet safe
from prying eyes), and other functions.
At the same time, their performance has
improved. Gigabit UTMs are now common.
Who needs a gigabit firewall? You may
if you want to access your web server on
the other side of the firewall but still
within the building. And, more powerful
UTMs mean you can use all those fancy
new features without compromising your
speed. You can also take advantage of
higher bandwidth links that are becoming
more common as the phone and cable
companies make these connections more
available. The firewall market has
matured. The new UTMs are faster,
better, cheaper, easier to use, and more
flexible than the firewalls, and even
older UTMs, they replace. Maybe you
deserve more than your old firewall.
Unified Secure Server Appliances
I am coining a new
term here. UTMs are mostly about the
data flowing through the device. They
aren't an endpoint. However, Unified
Secure Servers provide high levels of
security while also serving as a
destination point for your data. For
example, the server from which you just
received this e mail is the focal point
of our small network. It uses DHCP to
provide IP addresses to our
workstations. It serves as the gateway
firewall and router for our production
and customer networks. It sends,
receives, and stores e mail as an e mail
server. It performs antivirus and
antispam functions. It provides DNS
(changing
www.something.com into an IP address
computers can read) resolution for our
internal machines and resolves requests
for our domains from machines out on the
Internet. It runs the list server that
sent you this mail. It serves web
pages. It serves as a file repository
for our network using both Windows SMB/CIFS
and FTP. It does rudimentary traffic
shaping. It synchronizes time for our
network.... It has a lot of other
capabilities, but most people only use a
fraction of them. It does all of these
things not only for us, but for
corporations and Internet Service
Providers across the globe serving
millions of clients. While it has been
continually updated over the years, we
have used the same product since the mid
90s. The cost/benefit ratio of this
unified secure server is outstanding.
Could you use one in your business?