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 not connect to a new access point until you disconnect from the old one. This will happen if the signal becomes too low or you manually disconnect. Then, and only then, can you connect to another access point, so roaming is non existent. Imagine a wireless SIP phone moving between access points – the call would be disconnected while the handset moved from one access point to another.

First4it have started working with Extricom, a wireless solution which is different from the rest. With a core controller and any number of wireless radios this system creates and controls a channel blanket, which allows users to roam without having to disconnect and reconnect opening up a world of possibilities. The example used earlier of a wireless SIP phone makes the use of sip over wireless a reality. One where a user can move from office to office, across large open spaces, or around hotels without losing connection. Imagine bar code scanners in warehouses and supermarkets, laptops in hotel conference rooms, and wireless SIP phones in large offices working between floors and offices.

There is no need to channel plan and the radios have no configuration. If a radio breaks or gets stolen there is no data on it and replacing it is simple, just plug a new one in. This keeps ongoing maintenance costs down and eliminates security risks.

So how does it work? By having a controller and multiple radios the client can communicate with the network via the strongest radio signal to its location. The system uses data collected from the communication with the radios to determine which has the greatest signal strength and then only transmits from that radio to reduce interference and noise. If the client moves it dynamically changes the radio it transmits from. The higher throughput comes from the total reuse system which means that the radios can simultaneously talk to separate clients on separate radios. Simple! Or sort of…

Combine this with multiple BSSID’s and multiple channels and the possibilities are endless. Run a public network, private network, voice network etc. all side by side using the same equipment roaming between radios with good throughput.

To get your hands on the wireless technology of the future contact First4it.

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 on your external ip address and tries to locate any vulnerabilities. It will have a look at a port, decide what kind of server is listening on it e.g. smtp and then try any known vulnerability and also ensure where possible it is using the most secure implementation of the protocol available.

The not so exciting part of all of this is that banks are now insisting any sites which process credit/debit card transactions attain PCI compliance.

A report is generated when your penetration test is complete which lists the vulnerabilities which need resolving. We have had great success in helping a number of our customers attain PCI compliance. One common issue relates to SSL in IIS and the level of security it offers.

http://support.microsoft.com/kb/q218180/

http://support.microsoft.com/kb/187498

If you need any help getting PCI compliance get in touch and we can help you.

Good Luck.

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 an office network environment there is usually storage available on the server available to store your data on. This is good for a number of reasons. Servers usually have redundancy built in so that there is less chance of losing your data. There is also usually a backup in place so that in the event of failure the data can be restored. So this not only keeps your drive nice and free but your data nice and safe.

In a home environment there are a number of products on the market which offer external storage, some of these with redundancy, which can be attached via a network or USB. Again keeping your data nice and safe and your computer running nicely.

Once you have moved all of this data there are a number of locations which Microsoft Windows creates temporary files in to help your computer run or perform certain processes, however they are not required once the process is complete and windows doesn’t delete them. To perform this process we must first change a couple of settings to get windows to show hidden files.

Open My Computer, click Tools, Folder options, View.

Select Show hidden files and folders and also untick Hide protected operating system files.

Now to the fun part. Deleting the files. When I delete these files I hold down the shift key while selecting delete. This performs a permanent delete i.e. the files do not get moved to the recycle bin.

The * is a wild card i.e. denotes all contents of the folder.

C:\temp\*

c:\windows\temp\*

The following two can be repeated for each user of the pc.

c:\Documents and settings\”user name”\local settings\temp\*

c:\Documents and settings\”user name”\local settings\Temporary internet files\*

These steps will free up a good chunk of space and keep you running.

It is important to put the setting we changed back so we need to go to My Computer and Tools and Folder Options, select the View tab and select Hide hidden files and folders and also tick Hide protected operating system files.

Good luck.

]]> http://www.first4it.co.uk/blog/c-drive-full-make-some-room/feed/ 0 http://www.first4it.co.uk/blog/the-great-yorkhire-show/ http://www.first4it.co.uk/blog/the-great-yorkhire-show/#comments Wed, 29 Jul 2009 20:54:25 +0000 Matt http://www.first4it.co.uk/blog/?p=75

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 is a 35,000 mile race around the globe.

The Great British Pole Climbing Championships were held at the show. Two very large wooden poles were erected and people with spiky boots on climbed up them in a small number of seconds. It all looked a bit too much like hard work to me so I just had an ice cream and watched.

There was also a large food hall full of tasty delights. From ice cream to pork pies there was a fantastic selection of regional fayre, with a large selection of trade stands selling garden sheds, jam and beer!

Back to the reason we’re here…. The network served its purpose well. Video was streamed from the main ring to the web site offering a live web cast. Its not on 4OD yet but hang in there, there is hope. Web access was provided to a number of news outlets allowing them to submit stories and photos for printing in their respective newspapers (a little birdy told me there were good cakes and tea in the press room). CCTV was streamed across the site to keep the public and exhibitors safe.

This was all made possible with a combination of 2.4ghz Wireless, 5Ghz Wireless, VDSL, Fibre, CAT5 and CAT6. Furthermore as far as I am aware there were no outages. So an extremely successful show with fantastic weather and a successful network with no downtime.

All that’s left now is to prepare for next year!

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 updating the information in the system with information as it becomes available. There are hundreds of wiki systems available, I decided to go with mediawiki. This is the system used by the most famous wiki wikipedia. Although it may not be the most feature rich of all the systems it is well supported and works on a number of different platforms. There are a load of plug ins available for it such as file upload, chat rooms and more.

The system allows you to start creating content instantly and dynamically builds tables of contents based on your heading structure. Interlinking pages is simple and recommended. The syntax is partly derived from html and is very simple, and if you want to do something more complex just have a look on wikipedia and copy it. Built in search functionality allows you to locate information quickly and easily.

Two of the most important features are version control of the uploaded files and the change tracking of the content. When a file is uploaded it can then be linked into a page. The file can be updated and the details of these updates are logged along with the user who uploaded them. This is similar to the change logging of the wiki pages. This allow others to monitor changes and reject them where required.

If you’re interested in how a wiki or other document/ content management systems could help you contact us.

Matt.

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 to fix.

I built myself a nice new box with some 500Gb Hard drives in to hold all our logging information and set about setting it up. I used the Cent-Os Linux distribution which is a red hat clone as we do on all of our hosting. I would recommend this distribution to anyone setting up enterprise services. While the updates were installing I had a look at other network monitoring solutions and I came across groundwork.

Groundwork offer a free community version and also a starter, professional and enterprise edition which come at a price, but support and extra features are included. They are not cheap ranging from £4,000 to £24,000+. The Community edition offers a wide range of features including Nagios, Management portal, Nagios plug-ins, Alert and escalation, SNMP monitoring console and Network health Overview.

After following the installation I got my web interface up and running and started to add my hosts. After trying the auto-discovery I realised that although very useful for an undocumented network, it was not required for a well documented network. I added all my host groups and started to build the network. It was amazingly easy and very satisfying to see it build up so quickly.

After adding all of my hosts I started to configure services. I added all of the Linux hosts to the system and set them up so that the plug-ins could SSH in to them and check the disk space, memory usage and process level. This should help maintain the servers without having to do so many weekly checks on them. I also added the smtp, http/s and dns services as appropriate. I was able to add snmp monitoring to all of my network devices and graph the interface status and the traffic passing on them. I haven’t got around to setting up the central syslog server yet but I will save that for a rainy day.

Having configured all of my hosts I was able to configure email notifications to let us know as soon as there is a service problem and the nagios map helps us diagnose faults quickly and efficiently. This lends itself to providing good service.

How can network monitoring help you

• Help you understand your network

• Locate any bottlenecks

• Understand your network requirements for the future

• Provide good service by allowing you to diagnose network faults more quickly

If you are interested in network monitoring then contact us and we can set up something like this for you.

Matt.

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 is designed to be green with ground source heating and cooling – all a bit grand designs really but the exciting bit is the BMS (Building Management System). This is a set of computers which collect data from sensors around the building and manage its energy consumption by for example opening the windows when its hot etc.. The BMS logs all its data back to a web server which sends out emails and soon text messages to alert people to changes i.e. the building’s on fire! or less excitingly the fridges have stopped working.

We have been allowing it to communicate with the rest of the world via the extensive fibre network at the YAS site. The fibre network also allows the extensive CCTV network of IP cameras to be viewed anywhere on site. This aint no ordinary fibre network – a mixtuire of single and multimode fibre forms a mesh across the show ground with spanning tree enabled, allowing the network to compensate if any of the links become damaged. For those parts of the site not lucky enough to have fibre available there are a mixture of 2.4 and 5 Ghz wireless links keeping even  the cow shed online so their wireless pda’s can pick up their email and milk .com rss feeds.

That’s enough excitement for today!

Matt.