BNC is proud to announce that we are, once again, included in the 2009-2010 Top 250 Privately-held Companies in Colorado!  This annual list is compiled by ColoradoBiz Magazine and BNC has been included in the list since 2005.

Ranking 178th on the list of private companies throughout Colorado has proven again that our commitment to excellence in computer support for local businesses has not gone unnoticed!

To check out the full list, please visit their site -http://www.cobizmag.com/images/uploads/lists/250_PrivateCos.pdf

 

 

Do you have computer-related questions that you cannot get answered?

If so, you have come to the right blog!

Send your questions to me at khobt@bncsystems.com with the subject line "Expert Q & A" and I will post your question and answer in a future blog.  It can be anything from computer networking to server support to desktop setup to software-specific questions! 

 

Please do not post as a reply to this blog - emailed questions will get a response.

This weekend an instructor came in to talk to us about Windows 2008, and one of the topics covered was the Microsoft virtualization platform “Hyper-V”. The presenter offered the opinion that hyper-v is significantly cheaper than Vmware (e.g. $28) and offers the same functionality. On the surface this rings true, but I dug into this a bit deeper and have found that the reality is slightly more complicated. Comparing hyper-v to Vmware products is really trying to compare apples and oranges. A simple example of this would be the feature called “memory over commitment”. All Vmware solutions (including the free Vmware Server) allow for allocating more memory to virtual machines than is physically installed on the host and uses a variety of memory reclamation techniques (not just paging) to balance the requests for memory that the guests (virtual machines) make. This is not true with hyper-v – you are only allowed to allocate as much RAM as a host has. This means two things: 1) Vmware allows for a greater density of guests to be deployed per host, and 2) in instances where you have more than one Vmware virtual host and one has gone down you can start more VM’s in a degraded state to keep things running until you can correct the issue. These two things are not true for hyper-v – it refuses to allow you to start up more VM’s if the memory limits have been reached, even if the guests may not always use all the RAM allocated. At the end of the day this means that you need to spend more money on hardware with hyper-v to achieve the same results you would get with Vmware technologies. You might say “most SMB only have four or so servers, so you don’t need the overkill Vmware provides at the premium cost.” I agree, but only as far as the ESX line of software goes. Vmware also has a free version called Vmware server that provides excellent features for...well...free. I have personally deployed Vmware server v1.0x in production environments where we were getting a minimum of 8 guests per host on dual core dual cpu Dell hosts with 8gb of RAM. In some cases we were able to get 15 or more guests per host for things like file-n-print servers and domain controllers. Again your mileage may vary depending on the requirements of the guests, but the take away I want to highlight is that Vmware Server can do everything that hyper-v can at no cost and provides some advanced technologies that hyper-v has yet to implement. XEN is another alternative that is worth mentioning. You can use the free open source XEN and roll your own, or buy into the Citrix offering if you desire an easy deployment. Either way the XEN product is more comparable to ESX than it is to hyper-v with features such as live migration. The main issues I have found with XEN is it’s poor support for guest OS’s other than Linux or Windows, but for the SMB market this is not really much of a problem. The bottom line for me is that hyper-v is a v1.0 product whose feature set is very slim compared to other offerings in the same space. I look forward to seeing what Microsoft will do with this product, but the jury is still out. A colleague recently commented that “Microsoft can throw lot’s of engineers and money at hyper-v, so it will be feature rich and crush Vmware shortly.” and I agree that it could be done...but after a careful review of their recent attempts at revamping Terminal Services I have to say that it’s not necessarily the case that they will. My $.02 – I would love to hear what you guys think! Thanks!

On Monday Apple kicked off it’s WWDC, the highlight of which was a couple of announcements regarding the iPhone.

First, the iPhone 2.0 software will be available as a free download to all existing iPhone users and includes full activesync support.  Along with activesync, Apple is also offering a hosted sync service through a company they acquired called Me.com.  This will allow users who do not have exchange to sync their iPhone with Apple Mail, iCal, and the Address Book wirelessly and in real-time.

Additionally, the new 3G iPhone was announced.  This version comes with the 2.0 software preinstalled, is slightly thinner than the original iPhone, includes a GPS chip, and supposedly boasts better battery life (this one I’m not so sure about).  Other than 3G compatibility the major announcement was the new pricing.  The 8GB iPhone will be priced at $199 with the 16GB at $299.

Both of these will be available on July 11^th and I imagine that many of our customers that have been holding off based on our advice regarding IMAP syncing will now definitely want one.  In watching the demo the activesync configuration looks very similar to that on windows mobile phones, however, there was no mention of how to integrate a self signed ssl cert (might be a good time to push any customers getting one to purchase a public cert).

Just some information because I am sure it will be discussed frequently...

Job Description:

This is a full time, senior level consulting position requiring expert knowledge of the entire Microsoft product line for small and medium size businesses. This is a fast-paced environment, and those who join the team will be expected to have a very strong personal drive to succeed, to be able to contribute independently within a close team, and to be rewarded for their effort. The successful candidate will join our team operation within the Dallas area, providing both project and support services. Essential Duties and Responsibilities: As a representative of BNC, you will be responsible for: - Working as a consultant to our clients to support primarily Microsoft networks, desktops, and servers. - Managing system and/or network issues to resolution within our client base. - Managing new installations and migrations. - Identifying ways to improve our clients’ systems and infrastructure (upgrades to hardware, software, and network). You must: - Possess strong technical abilities and troubleshooting skills. - Be able to effectively operate within set guidelines, policies, and procedures. - Have excellent communication skills. - Have exceptional customer facing skills. - Have a high degree of demonstrated professionalism. - Be able to excel in a fast paced team environment. Qualifications: - MCSE 2000/2003 and proven experience working as a systems/network engineer - Progressive work experience in desktop support followed by a systems administrator position in 2-4 different network environment - Previous consulting experience with small and medium size businesses is a plus Compensation: - Salary Negotiable - 401K Plan - Travel Reimbursement - Cell Phone and Laptop for Business Use - Health Insurance- 3 Weeks Personal Time Per Year Do not miss this great opportunity! Please send your resume to careers@bncsystems.com.

As part of ongoing efforts to improve Amicus products and address issues as they arise, Amicus has now posted 3 new patches for Amicus Attorney 2008.  For Premium Edition 2008: A cumulative Patch addressing a variety of issues has been posted for download from the Consultant's site. As with Version 7 Patches, it requires manual installation at both the Server and the Workstations. The download, instructions and details of the fixed issues are available from:http://www.amicusattorney.com/var/cons_tech_downloads_pe08.asp Additionally, an updated Amicus.dot is available from the public download page. It contains updated macros that will resolve an issue occurring when using the Save and Add function after generating a document template that was originally converted from a version prior to 7. The download and instructions are available from:http://www.amicusattorney.com/support/downloads/support_dl_08pe.html  For Small Firm Edition 2008: A Patch addressing several Outlook link issues has been posted for download from the Consultant's site. This Patch also requires manual update of Amicus Administrator and each Team Member Workstation. The download, instructions and a list of the fixed issues are available from:http://www.amicusattorney.com/var/cons_tech_downloads_SFE08-outlook.asp The respective Known Issues and Knowledge Base for Amicus Attorney 2008 have also been updated.

The disco-era File Transfer Protocol (FTP) is making a comeback, but not in a good way  spammers are now using the old-school file transfer technology to serve up bot malware, and even as a backdoor into some enterprises that neglect to lock down their oft-forgotten FTP servers. Researchers at F-Secure have spotted a new wave of exploits that use FTP  rather than a malicious URL, or an email attachment  to deliver their malware payloads because few gateways scan for FTP attachments these days. Read more here - http://rss.slashdot.org/~r/Slashdot/slashdot/~3/250169260/article.pl

Okay, this may make your brain hurt! On application installed instances of SQL Server 2005 Express or Embedded edition, you cannot connect to them or manage them with commandline or SQL management studio tools. But you can connect, using windows authentication, if you set the server\instance to: \\.\pipe\mssql$microsoft##ssee\sql\query It’s kind of important because if the server isn’t backing up the embedded app dbs, the transaction logs will overrun all your disk space. And the OS/Veritas can’t back up the instance because they don’t know about the \\.\pipe\mssql$microsoft##ssee\sql\query connection string... Sharepoint and other web applications that use the embedded SQL have their own web-based backup/restore tools that talk to SQL, but at least in Sharepoint, there is no scheduling component for this as of WSS V3 (possibly in MOSS or Sharepoint 2007).

You may want to check your backup start times - on two different servers, BackupExec changed the job start time by an hour.�

Recently we had the error "DNE installation requires reboot first. Please run this install again after restarting the computer." while trying to install Cisco VPN client on an XP (SP2) box. Even after several reboots the same error message came up! Per DNE, the way to resolve this issue is as follows - 1. Uninstall the Cisco client 2. Reboot 3. Go to the website http://www.deterministicnetworks.com/Downloads/dneupdate.asp and download the update 4. Install and reboot - this will upgrade DNE to the latest version 5. Reinstall the Cisco VPN client - it will just install the Cisco plugin, it won't install an older version of DNE