Matthew Buck’s Blog – Principal Engineer at RatwareUK

It’s not often I recommend a company! RatwareUK have been dealing with BarTel for some time now through several of our clients and we’ve been extremely impressed with both their level of service and results. BarTel are a well established business, based in Bolton and are one of the only few remaining, independent telecoms companies in the UK.

Because BarTel buy wholesale from BT, they can provide cheaper business call rates, saving companies around 20-30% on their business calls! BarTel also provide:

• Business Broadband standard or guaranteed
• Line Installation copper, ISDN or fibre
• Low Cost Calls
• Telephone Systems

In our experience, it has been far more reliable, cheaper and a better level of service dealing with BarTel compared to BT. For more information:

Contact Chris at BarTel: chris.hinde@barkertelecoms.co.uk / 0800 195 9011.

OK, so this weekend I find myself in the situation whereby I’ve got a POP3 account that I need to check regularly whilst I’m on the move. At RatwareUK we’ve got a BES solution, so I thought about creating a forwarder on the target email server to my principal email address which would push it through MSExchange and via BES to my blackberry. I hate email forwarding though – and it’s probably unwarranted – but I’ve got hangups from dealing with companies whose email aliases are setup on an unfathomable web of forwarders. I guess I’m biased but I try to avoid them at all costs! Using my Blackberry, I wanted to connect directly to my additional POP3 mailbox:

Introducing LogicMail – free, open source – I’m impressed. Implementation took around 2 minutes and I did it directly from their website on my Blackberry. I’ve now got a fast and reliable POP3 client which allows me to relay out through an SMTP server of my choice. The client also integrates with my Blackberry address list and has a host of settings to customise identity etc.

Pull technology will never be as fast or reliable as Push and we all know BES is the best at this. However, LogicMail provides a really good and painless alternative solution. It got me thinking about future blog posts. I think one day I’ll have to do a post detailing BES vs Windows Mobile.

Sec52 provide active network security for companies concerned with the vulnerability of their network, servers or data.

Their standard host assessment consists of a monthly scan of a pre-defined IP/Server or subnet. The scan is performed via an automated and manual assessment of all the ports, services and web scripts that are present. A security report is then available detailing all the vulnerabilities and a suggested remedy to secure them. The security report also indicates statistics and a vulnerability trend from month to month!

For companies that have a strong brand to protect or process sensitive data, Sec52 can really help establish a security culture among developers and prevent successful attacks. For more information, find out the benefits of vulnerability scanning and take a look at Sec52’s superb sample security report .

I’ve been using Ubuntu 8.04 LTS on my personal laptop for sometime, I also have a 9″ Dell Netbook which is running a remix version of Ubuntu. I’m primarily a Windows user, but over the last couple of years I’ve used Linux on and off generally because it looks nice and costs nothing. I’m writing this blog entry because I’ve just upgraded my Dell laptop to Ubuntu 8.10 and I’m astounded.

With Ubuntu 8.10, they’ve made a fantastic operating system. This is coming from a Windows Professional. The upgrade from 8.04 to 8.10 was seamless and instantly the new Ubuntu 8.10 came to life, correcting its own upgrade issues and cleaning up files. It even indicated to me that some icons had changed in the upgrade and where I could find them in 8.10 . Ubuntu 8.10 even includes a fix allowing <h> tags to finally display properly in Firefox. Browsing is now very very smart.

I also noticed that now my WiFi connection LED flashes on and off when it’s transceiving data. This is a smart and useful feature which was never available when my Dell laptop was under the control of Microsoft Windows XP (which apparently it was designed for).

Is it that Ubuntu 8.10 is actually controlling my laptop’s hardware better than Windows? With Ubuntu 8.10 I can use Remote Desktop to communicate with my Windows terminals, connect to my office via a VPN and I can even use Outlook Web Access inside Linux’s Evolution mail client.

Enough said, see for yourself: Download and try Ubuntu on a LIVE CD

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.

Sorry I haven’t been here for some time – we’ve been really busy. Work has begun on the prestigious Cognoscenti Software Project and with it comes a large upgrade to our internal systems to web-manage software projects. This means, that software clients can log directly into our project management system, view milestones, roadmaps, tickets and wiki pages related to their project. This interface is secure and live 24/7 and also allows the user to view trial versions, submit and track bug tickets and generally keep involved through long spells of coding. I will include more details on the main site as soon as I’ve finished setting up permissions, but the benefits are as follows:

• Secure and round-the-clock access to our project management system.
• View project roadmap, timeline and source code in real time.
• Submit and track change requests and bug tickets.
• Set up email notification, so that changes are communicated directly to the client.

The new Project Management System has now replaced Mantis (the old bug tracking system). The new system is not intended to replace face-to-face discussion, but is intended as another level at which our customers can check on progress and keep involved in short to long-term software development projects.

The new system is based on an open-source implementation of Trac. I am really pleased with it so far and we’ve had extremely positive feedback from customers who have tried it out. I’m hoping that in the future, this will serve as another example of our innovative and forward thinking.

More news and an update will follow this week.

This week, the governing body for all the internet assigned names and numbers (ICANN) met to discuss a huge problem that faces the internet in the next decade – the provisioning of IP Addresses and Domain Names.

Whether it’s your mobile phone, internet gateway or website, all of these use an IP address. Plus, they have to be unique. Domain Names like www.ebay.com, which resolve to an IP address, also have to be unique. As you may imagine, companies have been buying up domain names constantly and with more and more consumer devices like MP3 players and phones connecting directly to the internet, the scope for unique IP addresses and domain names is now very small. The world is running out!

In order to combat this issue, ICANN is pushing for the complete implementation of IPv6 (providing approximately 3.403 × 10³⁸ unique host addresses) and also custom TLDs (*.ebay, *.ibm etc.) The custom TLDs are especially interesting as not only will this allow companies to express their brand in a more creative way, but it will also free up a large amount of unique names and combinations which are currently not on the radar.

For more information visit the ICANN website.

Just thought I’d do a quick blog as it’s been a couple of weeks since we secured the new hosting deal with the data centre and things have worked out really well. Since closing the deal, we’ve deployed several Linux servers at the data centre, each hosting our clients special requirements such as online databases, high-dependency web applications and DNS.

The servers each run CentOS – one of my favorite Linux OSs for its stability and scalability. We’ve made sure each server has 4 processors (AMD Quadcore 9500), 2GB Ram minimum (plenty for Linux) and at least 2 hard drives configured in a mirrored Raid array. If one hard disk fails, the other can immediately take over and our Service Level Agreement with the data centre means that the failed drive will be replaced within 30 minutes. If both hard drives fail at once, which is highly unlikely – 0.0004%, all data is backed up every evening, and data periodically is uploaded to another RatwareUK secure server at a different geographic location. We’ve got eveything covered and we are passing on all the benefits to our customers!

The datacentre and RatwareUK co-manage the servers and have set up IP tables, anti-virus, ssh hardening and the centre runs daily security audits for us. The datacentre also offers excellent internet connectivity to our servers. They are now supplied by Tier-1 bandwidth providers and are just 1 hop away from 4,500+ networks. These new servers are fast and secure!

Finally, we have complete root access over the servers here in Wigan and have added them to our Pro-Active monitoring service. This means that, if the server stops responding, a service fails or there is a security alert – we’ll be advised within 60 seconds.

We are currently in the process of migrating data from our old hosting servers to the new ones. The new hosting servers are the pride of the company this month. At RatwareUK we like a good solution. For more information, please contact us.