Emails That Hurt

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Network security is a difficult subject to manage because it covers so many aspects of the network that a company runs on. Users need to understand that they play a very important role. Your emails are a big focus of the bad guys out there. Today, emails come from so many different sources, many of which are just being sent to cause problems for you and your network. Here is a simple step that can really help your company. Remember, if you initiate a problem you as well as your network might be down slowing, even stopping, your productivity for a period of time forcing you to miss deadlines and in most cases costing the company a lot of money.

I see emails that say, “IT Support Request” or “Need IT Support” from senders I don’t recognize. I really want to open them but because of what I see in the field I know that I need to investigate it a bit more. Without opening it, right click on the email and choose “Message Options”. In the bottom part of the window that opens you will see “Internet Headers”. To the right you can scroll down until you see the “From” line, in other words, who sent it. Notice the email address. If you don’t like it, delete the email. You can open your browser and type in the domain name to see if it is a legitimate company. (example: From: Robert@abc123.com. Type in www.abc123.com) You can call them to see if that person exists. You can even ask for that person. If you are in any way unsure who this is or why they sent it then don’t open the email, delete it and then go to the Deleted Files folder and delete it permanently.

IT support professional in many cases can determine which user initiated a network problem and how. It is not uncommon for companies to fire the user because that person broke an Acceptable Use Policy (AUP). Don’t be that person!

Trust me; this little step helps a lot.

Robert Lane
President/Owner
ASE, Inc.
Getting you ready for tomorrow today
703-273-8388 ext 111

 
ASE, Inc. is an IT technical support services and consulting firm in the Washington DC Metro area.  Since 2000 ASE has focused on providing full outsourced IT department services to small and medium businesses as well as providing senior level expertise designing, installing and managing complex networks as well as security consulting to very large entities in both commercial and federal markets.  Call ASE today – 703-273-8388.

 

Still have an XP machine?

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More and more manufacturers of software and devices are not providing support for XP in their products. I know that many of you decided to keep your XP machines because you don’t have compliance to worry about like HIPAA, FINRA and SEC. Many more feel that if it works fine then why change anything. But as time moves forward, and, as manufacturers of products that you have update their software (create new drivers) you will find that these products will not provide support for XP anymore.

Let me give you some examples.

  • You have a program that tracks the inventory you purchase from a distributor. The company that gives you that program may have updated it and you need to get it. That update does not support XP.
  • You have to upgrade your financial software but the new upgrade won’t work on XP.
  • You bought a new printer but the disks don’t offer XP support.

Therefore, even if you don’t care about the security issues such as XP weaknesses created by hackers and expose to the world, you still might not want to deal with the hassle of compatibility.

If you do decide to re-use your computer and just load a newer Operating System like Windows 7, you may want to have someone verify that your computer is able to have Windows 7 loaded. Many older systems can’t handle Windows 7 or higher.

Hope this helps.

Robert Lane
President/Owner
ASE, Inc.
Getting you ready for tomorrow today
703-273-8388 ext 111

 

ASE, Inc. is an IT technical support services and consulting firm in the Washington DC Metro area.  Since 2000 ASE has focused on providing complete outsourced IT department services to small and medium businesses, and, FISMA & HIPAA Compliance services to all size companies including the Federal Government.  Call ASE today – 703-273-8388.

Small business Disaster Recovery/Business Continuity: 1 to 5 Users

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After years of seeing very small businesses, defined as 1 – 5 people, endure worsening malware infestation and powerful virus infection disasters I recommend a simple inexpensive policy that really works continuing your business productivity.

Get a second system on your desk and now use two:

  1. One for working on data, documents, etc. This is your main machine and should be the newer one.
  2. One for internet browsing such as research on the web, programs that search the web for data and casual non-business “stuff”. This should be the older machine.
  3. Save a copy of your data to a separate storage device that is a central repository for all of your data including Outlook data or similar programs, and, your Favorites folder in case of a disaster.

You may recall me mentioning that the biggest problem when a system is down is that the user doesn’t have another system to work on. By incorporating this policy into your business practices you now address Disaster Recovery/Business Continuity better. Why? Even though you buy a new machine and transfer everything over to it you can leave applications you use to work with data such as your office suite, PDF apps, etc… on the older machine so that if the first (main) machine fails you can access your data that should reside on the separate storage device from your second machine and continue business. Plus, this methodology also helps you keep the older machine up to date better to be ready when a disaster occurs.

By incorporating this methodology you leave most if not all of the internet access to the older machine so that if it gets infected, and these days we are seeing so many more problems from accessing websites we thought we could trust like your health insurance company site, you still continue working since the machine that doesn’t have the data is the one that is infected, not the main machine. Better said, the one that does have the data is less exposed. Much better!

This is a very inexpensive method to recover from a disaster and continue business. Since you don’t have the infrastructure of a larger business then you don’t have expensive backup solutions, probably don’t have an IT administrator employee and don’t have a storage room of spare systems. This method provides quick switch-over to a functioning machine. Your data can immediately be accessed on the external storage device.

You should be able to get a very good new PC (Personal Computer – notebook, desktop) ranging from $400.00 to $800.00. The external storage devices are about $100.00. Setting them up is easy and you can use the manufacturer’s assistance. What’s more, if you are using Windows 7 you can take advantage of  the image backup utility that makes a complete image copy of your PC’s hard drive that can be restored quickly as compared to reinstalling all of your applications, updates, patches and, of course, data.

Objective: keep your most important machine off the web as much as you can..

Hope this helps.

Robert Lane
President/Owner
ASE, Inc.
Getting you ready for tomorrow today
703-273-8388 ext 111

ASE, Inc. is an IT consulting, engineering, hosted and managed support services provider covering the Maryland, Virginia and Washington DC area.  Since 2000 ASE has focused on providing full outsourced IT department services to small and medium businesses as well as providing senior level network security expertise to all size entities in both commercial and federal markets.  Call ASE today – 703-273-8388.

The ATI2DVAG Problem

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You’re working away on your computer and all of a sudden you get a blue screen telling you the problem is an ATI2DVAG infinite loop issue, could be hardware but most likely software. You freak out because you have always heard of the “blue screen of death”. NOT AS BAD AS YOU THINK. I went through this. Here is what happened and how you can fix it. One thing is for sure – you have an ATI video card and driver in your computer.

The issue could be that somehow your computer improperly loaded a driver (software) so that it has two versions of the same driver. Therefore, as the system sends a signal to display images it goes into an infinite loop from one driver to the other and back. The first time I got this was right after I bought a new HP 6830 notebook. Within 2 months I got the first blue screen. When I called HP support the tech in India told me to load the operating system disc and use the OS repair feature. Absolute mess. This futile attempt messed up my OS so badly that I had to wipe the drive and reload everything – again – from scratch. Two months later it happened again. This time I had my call elevated to a manager who told me that he was simply going to reinstall the driver. It only took about 30 minutes and everything seemed fine. Two months later it happened again. This time HP reloaded the driver AND had me set the Updates process to manual so that I could read each update before accepting. If any of the updates pertain to ATI or video then I was told to skip them. Things were fine for about 4 months. Then it happened again. By now I was not a happy camper.

Even though my company, ASE Inc., is an IT Network Support services provider (great plug, huh?) I didn’t want to bother my engineers as they need to stay billable and focus on the clients. By now I was so mad that I asked my team what they thought. Every one of them came back with, “it’s the motherboard, the chip on the motherboard.” I called HP and demanded that my motherboard be replaced. After looking at my history they agreed and dispatched a technician with a new motherboard early the next day. It took the tech about 30 minutes. The tech was great and the problem was solved.
A few things to think about. First: when I searched the web for ATI2DVAG I saw some postings describing the problem and stating that I could download a utility that would solve it. Don’t do that. The sources on the web can be worse than the problem you have. Second: in my opinion, stay away from the OS repair. As shown above, doing that caused me six more hours of problems and the real problem took only thirty minutes. Last, sometimes it can be the hardware even though you may think it has to be just software. As one person said, it could be as simple as one of the chips not acting the way it should.

Hope this helps someone.

Robert Lane
President/Owner
ASE, Inc.
Getting you ready for tomorrow today
703-273-8388 ext 111

ASE, Inc. is an IT consulting, engineering, hosted and managed support services provider covering the Maryland, Virginia and Washington DC area. Since 2000 ASE has focused on providing full outsourced IT department services to small and medium businesses as well as providing senior level expertise designing, installing and managing complex databases and network security consulting to very large entities in both commercial and federal markets. Call ASE today – 703-273-8388.

The IT Dilemma: Who To W2 for IT?

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stockxpertcom_id8109922_size4So you can hire someone as an employee to handle your IT support internally.  Great.  Who?  This discussion will focus on who a small to medium sized business should hire to handle the company’s IT support.

You’ve checked the boards and see everyone from kids in high school to retirees who just want to stay busy.  You are a company of 65 people with servers, a core switch, firewall, router and lots of end user machines – clients. (desktops & notebooks.)  The old statement, “you get what you pay for” will certainly apply here so watch out.  Yes, there are lots of people out there but you need someone who can cover all of the bases. (see my previous discussion, “The Right Outsource”)  This person doesn’t have to be a Certified Information Security Specialist Person (CISSP) but certainly one who know how to troubleshoot all of the end user machines and the peripherals like the printers – blindfolded.  The person needs to know how switches work, how routers work, and absolutely needs to know how firewalls work.  Your servers: this person needs to know how to work with the operating system running your server(s) and the applications on them like Exchange,SQL, Terminal services etc… Why?

If you hire someone who only knows the client side of things, the end user equipment, you will find yourself in big problems when, for example, the server has trouble.  The diagnosis will take forever; the resolution will be slow if you don’t call out for another person to visit, and all of this at a tremendous cost to you.  Say your firewall has a problem and you can’t communicate.  An inexperienced person will only foul that up more or at least take a long time to solve the problem.

Make sure the person of choice has strong server skills by asking what operating systems are you proficient with; knows firewalls by asking what firewalls are you skilled at like SonicWall and Cisco; does this person know how to manage switches and if so which ones.  How good is this person with Exchange or whatever you use as a communications server.  Have that person give you references that you can call and then ask them how they found him/her and call them.

For a full time employee with the skills to cover all of these technologies in the Washington DC Metro area, not in the city, you are looking at paying someone an annual salary of ninety thousand per year. ($90,000.00/year)  Why so much? Because it’s a lot to know and if they do know their stuff they will diagnose problems quicker no matter what the technology, remediate faster minimizing down time.  Also, they will know how to set an IT strategy that protects your investment as time goes on.

Don’t be fooled by a great looking resume.  Make sure they have a broad range of skills and are good at them.  They don’t need lots of certifications but do needs lots of experience.  Some of the best engineers have no certs.  They are just really good.

One last note, a company this size may benefit from using hosted and/or managed services.  These services can be used to compliment your IT staff.  If used properly your IT employee will find more time to manage bigger problems while proactively managing the entire network, from firewall to BlackBerry.

For further discussions on hosted and managed services contact Robert Lane of ASE, Inc. @ 703-273-8388 ext. 111.  Robert.Lane@goaseinc.com; goaseinc-staging.coydhea2-liquidwebsites.com. ASE, Inc. is an IT consulting, engineering, hosted and managed services provider in the Washington DC metropolitan area since 2000.