Wireless networks are great but we all know when it comes down to the crunch the throughput is just not there – interference is a nightmare and coverage can be a pain. Many clever wireless networks like GSM perform hand-off so that you don’t get disconnected when you move between cell sites. 802.11a/b/g/n has nothing like this to offer, once you’re associated with an access point you will...

The ever looming threat of PCI compliance seems to have come to fruition. For those of you who are thinking PCI compliance? PCI (Payment Card Industry) is a security standard to which your internet facing services must adhere to become compliant with the PCI standard. https://www.pcisecuritystandards.org/ The excitingly named penetration test is involved in the PCI compliance. This test tests all open ports...

Hello, I thought a little house keeping would be useful for some of you so I though I would try and do some blog posts covering common issues. One of these issues is the operating system partition or C drive getting full. Here are a few tips and tricks to keep your computer running and your C drive clear. The simplest of these is to ensure you keep all documents and data on secondary storage where possible. In...

Hi, Last week the Great Yorkshire Show took place and it was as it says on the tin GREAT. So I thought I would talk about some of the highlights and look at how the IT infrastructure allows the show to show off! Firstly: some of the highlights. The mighty Hull & Humber yacht was transported from Grimsby to the show. The Hull & Humber will be competing in the Clipper round the world race 09-10. This...

Hello and welcome to blog No 3! I have fallen in love with Wiki. I recently spent some time trying to work out how we could collaborate more and streamline our documentation. The requirements were to make it easier and quicker to find information, easy to manage and update and easy to use. I looked at a number of different solutions but the answer seemed so obvious. Wiki or what I know is, the concept of continually...

Hello again. This week I have been playing with network monitoring. We currently monitor all of our network infrastructure and our customers connections using nagios and cacti. These are both fantastic open source tools and serve well however we are using nagios v 2 and v3 is now out, plus maintaining it involves editing about 16 files which with my fat fingers often means I make a mistake and it takes a while...

Hello and welcome to theFirst4it blog. The blog is here to provide a small insight into day to day life here at First4it, technical tip bits and general drivel. This week we have had the opportunity to work with the Yorkshire Agricultural Society on their major expansion work http://www.fodderweb.com. This new building offers a café – with free WiFi for customers, farm shop and office space. The new building...