I just finished my own disaster recovery operation. There are still a few loose ends but the major work is done. I’m fully operational. Saturday, Dec. 20, 2014 was a bad day. It could have been worse. Much worse. It could have shut my company down forever. But it didn’t – I recovered, but it wasn’t easy and … Read more
By Jan. 4, 2015, I now have an automated backup script in place. Every day at 4 PM, I backup the website and supporting files to my Windows server. From there, it goes to an external backup system every night. I built another test VM and restored my backups to it and viola – … Read more
By now, we’ve all read and digested the news about the December 2013 Target breach. In the largest breach in history at that time and the first of many sensational headlines to come, somebody stole 40 million credit card numbers from Target POS (point of sale) systems. We’ll probably never know details, but it doesn’t … Read more
I parted with some money 2 years ago and bought myself a tablet. My wife – the most un-high-tech person on this planet said, “Greg, you need to get one of those. The world is changing and you need to know what’s going on.” Just one many reasons why love her. So I bought … Read more
I’ve taken thousands of telemarketing cold calls over the years. Many are deceptive, most are awful. And a few are good. Here is a common deception. Many calls originate in call centers in India or the Philippines. Callers use IP phones and connect via the Internet to a system in the US, which generates … Read more
I survived one of the worst customer service experiences ever this week. We can all draw some lessons from this story. The end user customer operates branch sites across the Midwest USA and uses Infrasupport firewalls to connect to the Internet and main office in the St. Paul, MN. area. This branch site is … Read more
Sometimes when high tech meets international politics, reality really is stranger than fiction. First, a few enlightened members of our US Congress accused Chinese telecom equipment giant, Hauwei, of spying for the Chinese government. Here is one of many press articles, this one from October, 2012. Here is another article from 2011. Apparently, much of … Read more
Many people will see the words, “Net neutrality” and groan about yet more tech gobbledygook and geeks who spend too much time pretending to be Mr. Spock and watching Star Trek re-runs. Nobody on Main Street cares about net neutrality, right? Isn’t this all just an arcane concept that never intersects with real people … Read more
With all the IT security issues in the news lately, suddenly IT security is everyone’s problem. One natural question behind the headlines is, what is the right way to handle IT security vulnerabilities? Here are some thoughts. To keep things simple, let’s limit this discussion to three major players. The real world is more complicated, but … Read more
Given the recent security breaches all over the news, what would a good Main Street business security solution look like and how much would it cost? After all, if organizations such as the NSA and large retailers such as Target can’t keep their secrets safe, what chance does Main Street business have? A pretty … Read more