Second Tier Vendors

Second tier software vendors are those who aren't one of the big, household names. They don't advertise on TV, but they're selling perfectly acceptable products - often very good ones - & they're generally trying really hard to become one of the big guys. That means, if you're careful, you can get a great product & excellent support for a very attractive price. There are dangers, of course. Some go under, but that happens even with the big guys. Look at what Symantec did with their firewall hardware in June 2006. Dropped it cold & the customer can go to hell.

Another disadvantage is that it's tough to sell a high profile system, such as email, to the suits if they've never heard of it. Everyone has heard of the big 3 of email (Microsoft, Lotus, Novell) although Novell's perceived future isn't as good as it could be. (I've struggled to keep Novell for years. Their marketing department hasn't helped a lick. They should be shot!)

It's not just the suits. I'm making extensive changes to our network, a great time to put in new systems, but my VARs (Value Added Reseller, sells me hardware, software & engineering support) don't seem to know anyone except the big names, either.
Backup: Symantec's Veritas or CA's ArcServe. (Acronis? Why not?)
Antivirus: Symantec or McAfee - one mentioned TrendMicro. No Sophos?
Firewall: Cisco, maybe SonicWall (WatchGuard, Fortigate?)

I hate Symantec & CA. They’re big companies who have grown far too big. They’re more interested in running me through paperwork games than letting purchase the software & get on with the job at hand. Their default tech support generally sucks, is hard to get to & hampered by language or draconian rules. Their better grades of support are generall too expensive for small companies. I don't recall what Symantec wanted for their Platinum AV support, but I do recall I've never been able to afford it. Since their AV product now sucks, I've gone to Sophos. They're small enough to try harder, support their customers 24x7 & send me licensing along with the purchase. No hoops to jump through!

I bought a Fortigate FW rather than a Cisco (I also looked at SonicWall & WatchGuard), but I have limited time & experience to pick out all my own products. I need to know they work in the field. Who can better tell me than my VAR? I'm looking at 3 different VARs since they mostly don't want to look at new solutions, but only at the ‘proven’, big name companies.

Cell phones don't cause car crashes...

A new study shows no correlation between car wrecks and cell phones. http://www.darkreading.com/document.asp?doc_id=132130
This perfectly illustrates that a study can show anything you like, if you massage the data correctly or have your head so firmly shoved up your ivory tower that you can't see the light of day. Most people have trouble doing more than one complicated thing at a time. Driving is complicated. Sure you can do it on cruise control most of the time, but you have to be alert and prepared for anything. At 60mph, you're moving at 88 feet per second. That's a lot of ground in a hurry.

A distracted driver will have more car accidents than one who is paying attention to the road. That's common sense. The key is how the accident is reported to the police.
- People in an accident will slant the story to make themselves look better. Are they going to admit they were chatting away? I think not.
- What about the accidents caused that they weren't involved in? I'm sure they're not reported to the police. I've seen an instance where a person in a large SUV weaved out into another lane, causing another car to go into the ditch. The police said since the SUV didn't make contact with the other car, they could not consider it to be at fault.

I think these budding scientists need to come out and commute an hour every day. As the roads get more crowded, vehicles get faster and people get busier at the wheel, we'll continue to see more accidents. People are getting more options to get distracted everyday. GPS, phones, onboard computers, dvd players - a host of things.

Moving Out

I’ve lived all around the US at various times, but was born in Long Island, NY & spent most of my life in north-central MD. I remember our small farm out by Lake Ronkonkoma. We had a couple of horses and used to ride through the surrounding fields. I went back maybe 10 years later & the farm was a bunch of houses, the surrounding fields had more houses & a strip mall.

Thirty years later, the same thing had happened where I lived in north central Maryland. Traffic was horrible as the original roads had twenty times the traffic. I didn’t know most of the people I’d meet in the local hardware store any more. There is farmland around, but all those moving out to take advantage of ‘country living’ have ruined the area. They want street lights, curbs, sidewalks and a McDonalds. Watch them get behind a combine or a hay wagon. They’ll wet themselves as they are forced to slow down and can’t pass. Watch them pass a horse and rider on the road – half the time the idiots beep their horn – and slowing down isn’t even a passing thought.

I got tired of the rat race on the east coast. It’s become wall-to-wall city slickers, all who seem to think another law is the answer to every problem. They’re building mansions on 5 acres of old field and usually aren’t home to enjoy it because they’ve stretched themselves beyond their means. All their kids are perfect little angles and they’d never dream of actually hitting the little brat to teach it some manners – they appeal to its ‘better nature’ instead – like any young animal is born with a moral sense.

I’ve looked for years to find a place that was rural and had a decent job market. My son and his wife found one, mentioned it to me and we were off. Within 6 months, even in the current, lousy real estate market, we’d sold our half acre home in MD and moved 10 hours away to 15 acres in central KY. I found a good job before the first week was over.

I see the same seeds of growth here though. This area is very similar to where I lived in MD about 25 years ago. The 15 acres we have was once part of a much larger farm that was mostly sold in 5 acre lots. The people are still country minded, though. They slow down for animals. Tractors are almost as common on the roads as cars. The neighbors stop to chat or at least wave as they go by.

What's on the user's PC?

I started a new job and one of the toughest challanges has been determining what applications the users have on their PCs. The users don't seem to know. A printed form with check boxes for the main, standard applications and blanks for others comes back mostly empty. How can a person use their PC all day and not know what applications they use?

One issue seems to be understanding what an application is. They can't tell the difference between a web portal and an installed program. They can't tell when one program calls on another. Worst of all, they don't know the difference between a business application and something they or their predecessor installed for fun or to test.

Much of the blame for their ignorance lies in a complete lack of policies and policing of the system. No one has ever taught them what a business application is or what unwanted software, such as the Weather Bug or an IM client is. Some of these PCs are 7 years old and they've never been cleaned between users. More RAM was added, the OS upgraded and that was all.

Cleaning up a mess like this isn't something that can be done quickly. Software policy has to come from the top and one of the worst abusers is one of the company owners. Training that person is the priority. Cleaning up systems properly and educating users as they get new or recycled PCs is also a big part, but unless upper management toes the same line, abuses will happen again and be harder to stop without causing resentment.

The Magic Black Box

"The system is broken! It's been down for days!!! When are you going to fix it?!!!" asked a panicked user yesterday. I'd heard no complaints from anyone else, hadn't heard a thing from her & I've been here reading emails, walking the building & picking up the phone. I've even talked to her a couple of times, so her statement was obviously way off. This is pretty typical behavior from users that are computer illiterate, yet work on them all day.

I calmed her down, showed my concern & asked some pointed (simple!) questions. I found out that one application wasn't working & the problem was a simple drive mapping that she had disconnected. It took 10 minutes to figure it out & 10 seconds to fix.

I've never understood how someone can work with a piece of equipment all day for years & still not have the foggiest idea of how it works. Is it just because I'm a tech that I always try to understand at least the basic concepts of everything I use? I'm not a mechanic & new vehicles or my heat pump are beyond my capabilities to fix in a lot of cases, but I can generally tell what has gone wrong when something does & how to maintain it. I tend to question any technician that works on them & try to find out more. Even my wife, who makes me check her oil, is pretty good at describing issues with her car & has some basic troubleshooting skills.

But many of my users display no curiosity about how their PC works & refuse to maintain it. They often revel in their ignorance, proclaiming with pride how they know nothing about it. They're proud that - to them - it is a 'magic black box'.

All efforts at educating them fall on deaf ears or the knowledge seems to dribble out shortly after I leave. So far, the only way to teach them has been if their boss teams up with me to hold them accountable for their ignorance & that's a dicey proposition. I have to make sure EVERYTHING is documented, both sign off and it always causes hard feelings all the way around.

How else can I get this type of user to desire to know more?

Email Retention to the Suits

Ever try to explain Email Retention to someone who doesn't really even understand the concept of file backup? With all the new laws, backup options & email retention gadgets, there are a lot of options. The bottom line is I need to make sure the company covers itself the way they want to. That means the owners need to make the decision & live with it. How much insurance do they want to pay for & what type?

The cheapest way is to keep email on backup tapes & over-write them every 2 weeks. Hummer found out that was a problem when they were sued as a Napster investor. The judge ruled that no matter what their written policy, they had an obligation to keep relevant email.

The next cheapest, that I'm trying to avoid at all costs, is keeping the traditional backup of the email system forever. I got burned by that once, learning the hard way that if the data is available, I have to find a way to get it.

An incident occurred at a remote site back in 2000 or so. We had GroupWise 5.1 (I think). The remote site had a couple of PCs. A year later, the site was sold. The GroupWise client was removed, deleting the remote database & the user from our system. The PC went with the site. A couple of years after that, the lawsuit started. A year or so after that, we switched from GroupWise 6.5 to Exchange 2003, getting rid of all of our Novell servers. Another year passed - we're up to 2005 now - I was told to get all emails pertaining to this incident.

Who was involved? 12 peopleSearch terms? 5 different terms were decided on.Number of tapes? 1 for each quarter, but go back to 1998, since we had to prove prior knowledge of conditions, which meant we wound up with 14 tapes all together.

How to actually restore the tapes? Build a Novell server with the proper hardware, restore NDS, install the backup software, GroupWise 6 (I didn't have the correct earlier version, reinstall a later version) & then try to restore some of the users who had left. I got some, since I had their FID & could recreate their user accounts. Others I couldn't. Connect with a workstation with the GroupWise client on it & search. Restore another tape & repeat. I also had to go through everyone's archives. The GroupWise search tool isn't the greatest & the workstation I was using was old & slow. It took me 3 months! I had day to day duties at the same time. Budget season, too. Oh yeah, that email retention policy was a GOOD solution.

Then there are the various devices that save all your email forever. I'll be pushing for one of them, although the cost is going to make them choke. How good will it really be? It will probably take a lawsuit to find out...

Patches on a new PC?

I bought a new PC from Dell with XP SP2 loaded. I would've liked to get Office 2003 pre-installed as well, but that's impossible since they're so deeply in bed with Microsoft. Only the latest & 'greatest' for their customers, according to my corporate salesman. Office 2007 offered only. I should feel lucky I could get XP SP2 rather than Vista!

It took me half a day & a dozen reboots just to get the PC ready to personalize. Most of the time taken by patches! Out of the box, I think there were over 80 patches just for Windows XP SP2. Then I installed Office 2003 & the number jumped to over 100. I don't find that acceptable.

I thought I recalled Microsoft saying they would have XP SP3 out about the same time as Vista? I know they changed the date now to the first half of 2008. I guess we'll have over 200 pathes by that point - if we can even get it. Maybe by that time Vista will actually fit into a corporate network.

In the meantime, I have 18 PC's to roll out as quickly as possible. Thank you, Clonezilla!