Matthew Buck’s Blog – Principal Engineer at RatwareUK

Location, location, location.

I thought about writing this post after a friend of mine called me and said he’d found a new office for his business – but he’d heard reports that the broadband on-site was limited. He asked for my advice.

There are three key things you should remember when sourcing broadband for your business:

1) Is VirginMedia’s Fibre Optic (not ADSL – they offer this to non-fibre enabled areas) available in your location?
If so, purchase this and read no further. VirginMedia’s fibre service is unrivalled, both in their routing hardware and down to the wire. If you can’t go with VirginMedia’s fibre optic service you are stuck with ADSL. This isn’t too bad as long as you’re close to the exchange and your exchange has a wide range of operator presence.

2) What services are available in the exchange to which your potential phone line would be connected?
Some people sign up with [Random ISP] Ltd and then experience a poor level of internet service. This is usually because although [Random ISP] Ltd sell broadband to customers all over the UK – they don’t actually have their own hardware present in your local exchange to which your physical line is connected. This means that all communication between the wider internet and your router has to travel through BT’s core hardware first before being re-routed to another BT exchange to hop onto [Random ISP]‘s network. Clearly this is undesirable and users tend to experience lag, packet jitter and, during peak times, bandwidth throttling.

You can check exactly which operators are present in your local exchange by visiting Sam Knows . First make sure you get the correct exchange by entering your phone number and postcode (your line may be connected to any close by). My advice is that if the operator you want has no presence in your exchange, cut your losses and sign up with BT Broadband to receive the best service available.

3) Once you’ve found out which exchange you’re connected to, also check the distance you are away from it.
Many operators will sell you ‘ADSL2+ up to 24Mbps broadband’ – however if your premises is 8km away from the exchange you are likely to get a sketchy 2Mbps which drops on and of throughout the day. Not great if you use hosted services! Use Sam Knows Exchange Mapping to show/hide the coverage of your local exchange. If you are right on the edge of the exchange’s coverage, it’s likely you’ll need some expert help, such as a bonded broadband solution, leased line or in rare cases; satellite broadband. There are other factors to do with your physical line which will affect speed, but none really more so than your distance away from the exchange.

In answering my friend’s question, he didn’t move his business. It turns out that many existing tenants only received slow broadband and the premises was situated on the very edge of the local exchange’s coverage.

In summary:

• Can I avoid ADSL? If so, go with VirginMedia’s Fibe Optic Broadband.
• Does the operator I’m signing with have a presence in the exchange? If not, just go with BT as you’ll be using their network on your first hops anyway.
• Are you close enough to your exchange to receive a good level of service? Remember, operators will sell you 24Mbps and you may only ever be able to receive 6Mbps. So maybe find a cheaper deal, if available.

Yesterday I got thinking about some of our clients and the way they do business and I thought ‘Why is a strong relationship with an IT support provider essential?’

IT has become an essential part if not a mandatory cog in most enterprises. Just as you have someone looking after the direction of the company, the finance, the vision – you’re also going to need a good IT support partner. For the past decade at least, IT has been tied in with marketing, communication, data, disaster recovery, corporate security, efficiency and business growth. Here are a few real life examples that I can think of immediately which demonstrate why a strong relationship with an IT support provider is essential -

1) An important email sent by one of our clients to their customer is repeatedly bouncing back.

Your IT support partners are able to see the error message and commence diagnostics to resolve the issue. It’s important to remember email can not work correctly for many reasons. Some are within your IT Support‘s control, others are factors outside your organisation:

The domain name or email address has been entered incorrectly.

The email address exists, however, the recipient’s mail server is offline.

The email address exists, however, the recipient has mis-configured their name servers or DNS records.

If you are relaying straight out from your mail server, there could be a problem with your ISP’s DNS servers which means your mail server is unable to resolve the IP of the recipient mail server.

The email is being rejected by the recipient’s mail server due to the recipient’s inbound mail policy.

Your mailbox is over-limit and your mailserver is not allowing you to send/receive email.

The recipient’s mailbox is over-limit and is not accepting new mail.

…

The above initially reported problem appears to be minor, however, many problems could arise from this one incident; some not very technical, some which are. If you’ve got an IT support contract, you’ll have a team to hand which will solve an issue like this quickly.

2) You switch your workstation on in the morning and it won’t boot up. You have work to do and there are no spare computer terminals today.

If you have an IT support contract, you can immediately hand the issue over to them. Quite often, if a computer is unusable, your IT Support partners will lend your company a replacement PC immediately whilst your existing workstation is repaired. If the workstation has been procured from your IT Support partner, it’s likely to be under warranty and your IT Support will have strong support links with the vendor, so you’ll be sure that the problem will be resolved quickly and effectively.

3) You wish to terminate one of your employee’s contracts, however, you’re worried about corporate sabotage and access to the employee’s emails.

Your IT Support partner will be able to best advise you on this. It’s likely that your IT system is already configured with several layers of access. For example, an employee with a sales role will not be able to see data from the accounts department. In the event that the employee’s contract is terminated abruptly, your IT support provider can assist throughout the process, making sure data remains safe and recoverable.

RatwareUK once had a case where on the last day of employment a user maliciously deleted  all project files. The data was immediately recovered by RatwareUK, allowing the company and the user’s successor to continue with the project. Your IT support provider will also be able to divert employee emails to another user and provide access to or merge their mailbox into another account. Lastly, if mobile devices are in use, it’s likely that your IT Support will be able to wipe or ‘kill’ the handheld remotely, meaning that even if an employee leaves the organisation quickly they won’t have access to or a record of contacts or corporate email.

4) Your landlord has sent you a letter giving you 3 months’ notice to leave your current business premises. He wants to sell the property and land for commercial gain.

In the event you are faced with the above, you’ll probably be looking for a new home for your business the same week. You may find the right place, but soon you’ll be faced with questions like these:

Does it have suitable structured cabling for my network?

Where can I place my existing server and network equipment?

How do I plan the move so that you don’t have any email or business downtime?

Your IT support provider will be able to answer all these questions and assist your business in the most important decision making you’ve probably had to make all year. Office relocations can be stressful and there’s a lot to go wrong, plus you’ve got to have all your services enabled before you move – telecoms, broadband and fax, for example. If you’ve got branch offices, you may have to reconfigure VPNs and firewalls so that your wide area network encompasses the new office.

If you’ve got a strong relationship with an IT support provider, you can trust their expertise and allow them to assist in maintaining, developing and expanding your business. If you’re looking for a new IT support provider, take a moment to contact RatwareUK for a no-obligation IT support contract assessment.

It’s been a year since we deployed our last conventional server in a business environment. “Conventional” meaning a server whereby the operating system sits directly on the computer’s hardware. It’s odd specifying that, isn’t it? It’s almost as if we now live in a virtual world and it’s taken as given that any hardware will be at least running one virtual machine or more.

Windows Virtual PC

Virtualisation is the most important thing to hit the IT industry in the past decade. I know VMWare and other methods of virtualisation have been around a long time before this, but with the advent of 64-bit systems and mega-fast processors, running concurrent virtual machines without problems, virtualisation has become a definite reality for all new deployments these days. For example, I installed a 32-bit Windows 7 Desktop PC a few days ago – it came in-built with Windows Virtual PC, which allows you to run a completely separate Windows XP VM. Amazing! You can also configure it to start your Windows XP applications in Virtual Mode. You can download virtual PC here.

Virtual Box

In the office, if we want to create a new Linux OS to run from a tiny flash drive for a thin client, say; instead of playing around for ages trashing a computer in the lab, we simply create our OS in Virtual Box. Virtual Box allows us to safely create, recall and test virtual machines over and over again without our systems having to be hardware dependant. You can download Virtual Box here.

Hyper-V and VMWare

From an infrastructure perspective, virtualisation has completely changed the way RatwareUK deploys, manages and migrates server systems. Now we use Microsoft Hyper-V and VMWare vSphere to create virtual server machines on one piece physical hardware. It’s now become common for our clients to have 3-4 servers on one physical box. If they need a hardware upgrade, no problem – we simply power the VMs down, re-assign the virtual resources and boot the VMs back up. Before any major system work is done, we can also quickly and safely snapshot the VM. If we need to move the server to a new piece of hardware, we just migrate the image onto a new virtualised box.

Terminal Server and XenDesktop

Lastly, to provide a common desktop experience to users, we also virtualise this too. Using a combination of Terminal Server, Virtual Machines or Citrix, we can provide a hard disk-less thin client solution for each end-user  and stream their desktop environment over LAN or VPN back to them. The user doesn’t notice the difference and the whole organisation is provided with the applications they require to work from anywhere. Business continuity and support response times are also improved significantly and every user receives what we call a common desktop experience, irrespective of what hardware they use to access the IT resources.

Computer Virtualisation Experts at RatwareUK

Contact us for more information on the benefits of consolidating server hardware and providing virtualistion across your network.

Its been a very busy month for me as I helped co-ordinate the relocation to our new premises in Skelmersdale. RatwareUK are now based in the West Lancashire Investment Centre which is straight off the M58 and near the Orrell Interchange at the M6. I’m extremely proud of what we’ve achieved together as an organisation over the last 12 months.

Please sign up for our newsletter (bottom of page) and or follow me on twitter at www.twitter.com/ratwareuk .

If I could have a pound for every time I’m meeting a new client and they ask “Can we have a wireless network, instead of a wired one?” we’d be a) rich and b) doing a serious mis-service. If everyone was as familiar with the words “virtualisation” as they are with “wireless” we’d be very happy. I guess it’s because people have wireless networking thrown at them by TV adds, ISPs and their savvy, computer-addict children. Why can’t people request virtualisation?

Today RatwareUK decided that, unless there was a specific technical circumstance against it, virtualisation was from now on, going to be the preferred solution we push to SMEs. VMware, memory and processing power have come a long way since I used to run Linux through a VM window on my home PC almost a decade ago. Now VMware is a credible and widespread solution, providing a multi-server deployment on minimal hardware and revolutionising IT support, security and provisioning. Within an SME context it consolidates everything and gets rid of the need for complex restoration processes and the constant up-hill support battle present on a multi-OS client environment. Virtualisation kills the need for complex group policy work, scripting and client upgrading. It pools your resources and configuration into one place.

I’m unsure what’s next for virtualisation. Maybe transferring your virtual machine solution from your office, to your hosting company’s cloud?

IT professionals have simply ignored Vista. Windows 7 could now change everything.

I was thinking the other day about Windows 7.  It was only released in the back end of October, however, with Vista being such a flop, it dawned on me that Windows 7 will, by virtue, be the biggest change in business user experience since 2001. That’s almost a decade. You may dismiss this and believe that Vista bridges the gap between XP and Windows 7 and this isn’t really big news, but it doesn’t and it is big news.

Think about it. Although new domestic PC sales have pushed Vista as the “number one” OS and ditched XP, most business IT professionals have refused to deploy Vista. An ideology so stubborn that it has caused Dell Commercial to continue selling XP Professional, alongside Vista to this day. In the history of Microsoft, this has never happened before. Also, the statistics for operating system market share state that XP peaked at 76.1% in 2007. That’s 76.1 percent of the world’s computers running Windows XP. In 2008 this market share is said to have grown to over 80%. This is telling, especially considering it’s two years into Vista’s release, and I bet this percentage is even greater when you consider just commercial networks on their own.

I was chatting with my colleague and we recall commissioning just one Vista machine since its release in 2006. And guess what? This was by accident! (We messed up the order with Dell). Adding insult to injury, we refused to join it to the domain and booted it straight into a terminal server window, providing a 2003 style user-experience. XP is just so much nicer for the “domain experience”.

So although you may have been using Vista at home for some time, don’t forget that at work your PC is more than likely XP Professional. And, as first reviews of Windows 7 are extremely positive and the door has finally closed on the Vista debacle. Techies all over the world are lifting their noses out of their Cisco manuals and evangelizing Windows 7. As XP completely bypassed Vista in the commercial world. A huge change is definitely upon us.

Before I start, please understand that this is not a politically motivated post. I’m purely interested in the mechanics behind the Golden Shield Project or what’s known as the Great Firewall of China.

Since 2003, the Chinese government has imposed a mass censorship program on china’s internet activity; essentially cherry-picking and blocking communications in and out of the country.  Unfortunately, this series of firewalls stand between China and the rest of the Internet.

RatwareUK first met this problem some time ago, when one of our customers who deal with China were experiencing some serious and unexplained email lagging. On inspection, it’s reported that China uses various censorship methods, such as:

• Access to certain IP addresses denied. This causes issues, for example, where a blocked website resides on a virtual hosting server, all websites on that server are blocked. Quickly you’ve got a lot of blocked sites!
• DNS filtering and redirection (to prevent IP addresses from being found).
• URL filtering (to prevent access to websites with a specific domain name).
• Packet filtering (terminate packets with a specific keyword contained within).
• Connection blocking (if a previous TCP connection is blocked, future attempts from both sides are blocked for a period of time).

Chinese users can get around these issues, by using proxies, VPNs and other encryption methods. However, it does make the average user in China completely restricted to the authorities’ prescribed information.

You can see whether your website/domain name is outright blocked in China by using this handy tool – http://www.websitepulse.com/help/testtools.china-test.html . If it’s not blocked though, don’t be surprised if any communications with China are slow, as your data is filtered through some serious hardware!

Sorry I haven’t commented here much recently – been really busy managing a server migration and evolution. Just wanted to wish everyone who reads this, on behalf of the team, a very Merry Christmas and a wonderful New Year. May we all continue to grow and prosper in 2009!

For RatwareUK this has been a monumentous year and all indications are that 2009 will be even bigger. We are kicking off the New Year by providing all existing IT support customers with Pro-Active Monitoring free of charge! So watch this space.

If you require support whilst our offices are closed, please submit a ticket via our helpdesk.

Have a fantastic holiday.

RatwareUK have been busy this month completing many projects, one of which is SIMPLIFi. SIMPLIFi is a software project for Cognoscenti Compliance Limited (CCL) the major function of which is to provide companies with a tool to store applicable legislation and track their company’s compliance. The software project has been active for approximately 4 months – we’re now past the BETA stage and are extremely close to the final product.

The software project consists of a JAVA client and MySQL database. All aspects were designed and built by RatwareUK. The concept is that the product will run on a customer’s computer and constantly poll a database (kept current by CCL) for updates to legislation. The customer can choose from a complete list of environmental legislation and select which bits apply to their company, ask for guidance and store related documents – all on or offline. The JAVA product and web service is robust and it will be used by thousands of companies.

The customer’s accounts and access to legislation is controlled by one central database, designed and implemented by RatwareUK which is based on a secure dedicated server. Each time the customer connects with their software, a complete synchronisation takes place whereby their stored documents are backed up and relevant legislation is updated giving them the opportunity to track their compliance.

Cognoscenti are in the process of launching their website www.cognoscenti.biz where they’ll soon be showcasing and selling SIMPLIFi.

At RatwareUK every customer comes to us with a different set of problems. Every business is different, we know this. We’re different too. It would be easy to roll out a template that 75-90% fits their requirements, but we’re perfectionists. A solution that fits with the client’s business as well as creating new depth and scalability is what we’re after. This is why last week, when we were designing a wide area network, myself and a couple of engineers worked on a Saturday to discuss and configure the VPN and servers.

Free from the daily tasks of maintenance and programming, we set up a projector, meeting desk and proceeded to discuss and design a company’s network – literally – on the wall. We found this workshop approach was extremely productive. As engineers we were actively learning and implementing new skills and our combined rigour and ingenuity was poured into the new system. We then continued bench-testing the system and it was eventually deployed the following week. It was a complete success and the customer was provided with a system that worked precisely the way they wanted it to. You’d be surprised, but this sort of forward thinking is discouraged in some organisations. I certainly, would not work for any other company.