Glo Networks Technical Blog (Glo Blog)

If you’re not familiar with what IPv6 is, it’s the next generation Internet Protocol. In broad terms, if we don’t all start using it we’re heading for a world where communicating directly between devices gets a little trickier (if you want to know more, check out our (rather long) previous blog post entitled “The sky is falling on our heads; We’re running out of addresses“).

As you can probably imagine IPv6 is generally considered a Good Thing(TM), by many technical people. After all, we don’t want to make our lives harder, do we?

The problem is uptake has been slow. The first official specs were released in 1996, but work on defining the protocol is tracable back to 1992. That’s a long time ago in the computer industry. The main issue was a chicken and egg problem; why bother upgrading your network when no one uses it? And no one will use if it there’s no reason (read: content). The other problem has been sometimes you can get an IPv6 address without having an actual IPv6 network, and sometimes it won’t work. That’s the non-technical explanation.

These 2 issues are whats caused IPv6 to really stutter.

However last year, on June 8th 2011, major websites and services enabled IPv6 by default to gauge the impact. It turned out that most of the potential problems weren’t really problems for over 99.9% of their users.

So this year, on June 6th 2012, major players who rely on the Internet, and produce hardware and software to access the Internet, will be enabling IPv6 permanently including, but not limited to;

• Akamai
• AT&T
• Cisco (& Linksys)
• Comcast
• D-Link
• Facebook
• Free Telecom
• Google
• Internode
• KDDI
• Limelight
• Microsoft Bing
• Time Warner Cable
• XS4ALL
• Yahoo!

So where am I going with this?

Glo Networks are proud to announce that we are now able to provide native IPv6 accessible web hosting right now. We’re working on the rest of our services at the moment, but we feel this is an important first step. One of our website host boxes is happily server on IPv6 -
dig -t AAAA stem.glo-net.net

; <<>> DiG 9.7.3 <<>> -t AAAA stem.glo-net.net
;; global options: +cmd
;; Got answer:
;; ->>HEADER< ;; flags: qr rd ra; QUERY: 1, ANSWER: 1, AUTHORITY: 0, ADDITIONAL: 0

;; QUESTION SECTION:
;stem.glo-net.net. IN AAAA

;; ANSWER SECTION:
stem.glo-net.net. 3600 IN AAAA 2a01:4f8:121:2322::defa:ced

;; Query time: 44 msec
;; SERVER: 213.133.99.99#53(213.133.99.99)
;; WHEN: Wed Jan 18 16:13:07 2012
;; MSG SIZE rcvd: 62

If you already host your site with us and want access either open a support ticket on GloHelp or give us a ring.

If you don’t already host your site with us, feel free to give us a ring.

If you want to talk about IPv6 enabling your corporate office network, again feel free to get in touch.

Want to know more? Check out world www.worldipv6day.org, www.worldipv6launch.org.

Posted by Karl in Cool Stuff, Networking | No Comments »

For those of us Exchange admins who aren’t fully up to date with Exchange 2010 service packs (for whatever reason – don’t berate us) and have slowly been getting annoyed with an ever increasing amount of mailboxes that get automapped in Outlook 2007 and 2010 can rejoice. One of our staff spent 10 minutes reearching, understanding and writing a bit of Powershell to resolve the issue en-bulk.

Just run the following under a Powershell instance with the Exchange modules loaded (i.e. the Exchange Management Shell).

foreach ($u in $(Get-User)) { Write-Host "Clearing the msExchDelegateListLink for $($u.distinguishedname)"; $ad = [adsi]"LDAP://$($u.originatingserver)/$($u.distinguishedname)"; $ad.msExchDelegateListLink.Clear(); $ad.SetInfo(); }

Be aware that if you do this, all auto mappings for all users will get removed. This may not have the desired behaviour as some users may be relying on an automapped account. It should be feasible to alter this as required, as it’s pretty damn simple!

As with all things, do this at your own risk, we accept no liability, yadda yadda yadda.

If you’re curious (and lets face it, if you’re modifying the Active Directory en bulk, you should be!), basically what this does is loop over all users, and clear all values against their Active Directory account msExchDelegateListLink attribute. This attribute is where the automapping gets written to.

As an example imagine 2 users, Bob and Alice. Bob is an Exchange admin and at some point was granted full access (with permission, naturally) to diagnose a problem with Alice’s mailbox without having to disturb her too much directly. Bob will now be added to Alice’s msExchDelegateListLink attribute. It’s this entry that needs to be removed.

Apparently in SP2 there is the facility to disable automapping, at the time of adding the relevant permission; the shiny new “-AutoMapping” argument to Add-MailboxPermission. As with many things Exchange 2007 and newer, it’s just a facility available at the Powershell console, for now. And you know what? We’re ok with that.

Posted by Karl in Applications, Cool Stuff, Scripting, Servers | No Comments »

If you follow technology or business news you may have heard that Atos, a large (giant?) technology services company, have announced they intend to ban their employees from using internal email. The reason Atos has provided for the ban is because employees spend large amounts of their time checking and replying to internal emails (the average Atos employee receives over 100 emails a day), of which only 15% of were useful according to their analysis.

Currently they have imposed a deadline of 2014 for zero internal emails. The reason for the delay in implementing the ban is to ensure they have other methods of tackling the internal tasks normally associated with email programs (communications, calendars, document sharing etc.).

While Atos aren’t revealing exactly what tools they will be using to replace internal emails, Atos chief executive Thierry Breton mentions “a cloud computing environment, social networks, instant messaging, micro blogging, document sharing, knowledge community” in an interview with the BBC.

The announcement has incited mixed responses. Some seem to be lauding them as harbingers of the future, showing businesses the benefits of internal social networks and cloud computing. Others deride the plan as ‘stupid’ for merely shifting the problem of ‘interruptions’ and ‘unproductive communications’ from email to other sources.

Glo Networks have followed this news, and the responses from the technology and business worlds with a particular interest, not however, as you may imagine, because we think that Atos are being bold and innovative, rather for the opposite reason. We feel this isn’t a particularly new approach.

In fact here at Glo we already use internal emails minimally and have done so for years. Instead we rely on other tools which we find much more suited for our work. For example:

• We all sign in to an IRC chat channel which is used to keep in constant communication with colleagues in different offices.
• We use an internal wiki and knowledge base to share information between the team.
• We use VOIP services like Skype for when we need to talk to one and other.

While we understand that Atos intend to create their own all-in-one, integrated solution for their some 80,000 employees (as may be appropriate for a business of that size) we feel obliged to point out that alternatives to internal emails already exist and have for some time. While we’re sure that internal emails will continue to be used by many companies for the foreseeable future we also want to let any companies who want to break free from internal emails for whatever reason know that it can be done, right now!

Posted by James in General | No Comments »

As an out sourced IT Support company serving many different areas of business here at Glo Networks we use a large variety of different software every day. As such we would like to suggest some of the software we find useful to our blog readers:

Smartcode VNC Manager
In the words of the creators: SmartCode VNC Manager is a powerful yet easy to use remote administration, network management and monitoring software.

Our thoughts: This is a very handy way to manage several remote sessions at once, as well as store connection details for ease of access.

TeamViewer
In the words of the creators: Teamviewer – the All-In-One Solution for Remote Access and Support over the Internet

Our thoughts: Sometimes getting access to a remote session can be tricky if not already configured; TeamViewer makes it simple. With this small program it becomes easy, just run a small program from both ends and enter the numbers from one into the other. This is what powers our GloRemote software.

WinRAR archiver
In the words of the creators: WinRAR is a powerful archive manager. It can backup your data and reduce the size of email attachments, decompress RAR, ZIP and other files downloaded from Internet and create new archives in RAR and ZIP file format.

Our thoughts: Very handy compression/decompression tool. Can be very effective at reducing the size of certain files for transferring or storage. Also useful for splitting and joining large files.

Skype
In the words of the creators: Skype is software that enables the world’s conversations. Millions of individuals and businesses use Skype on their PCs to make free video and voice calls, send instant messages and share files with other Skype users.
Our thoughts: Perfect communications tool for keeping in touch for free over the internet, whether by video, voice or text chat. Also able to call phones over the internet with purchasable credit.
Ultra Edit
In the words of the creators: Replacing Notepad or looking for a powerful text editor? UltraEdit is what you’re looking for. Versatile and easy to use, UltraEdit is the ideal text, hex, XML, HTML, PHP, Java, Javascript, Perl, and programmer’s editor.

Our thoughts: Very nice text editor, good macro functions for changing formatting. Put simply can do pretty much anything you may need to a text based file.

mIRC
In the words of the creators: mIRC is a popular Internet Relay Chat client used by millions of people, and thousands of organizations, to communicate, share, play and work with each other on IRC networks around the world.

Our thoughts: IRC has been a great simple way to keep in real time communication with a group of people over the internet since 1988. mIRC is one of the most popular IRC clients and not without good reason. Simple and incredibly versatile and extensible, we use this software extensively at Glo.

Filezilla Client:
In the words of the creators: FileZilla Client is a fast and reliable cross-platform FTP, FTPS and SFTP client with lots of useful features and an intuitive graphical user interface.

Our thoughts: The FileZilla FTP client is great for transferring files to and from FTP sites, the GUI is simple but has good range of features behind it.

DokuWiki
In the words of the creators: DokuWiki is a standards compliant, simple to use Wiki, mainly aimed at creating documentation of any kind. It is targeted at developer teams, workgroups and small companies. It has a simple but powerful syntax which makes sure the datafiles remain readable outside the Wiki and eases the creation of structured texts. All data is stored in plain text files – no database is required.

Our thoughts: Dokuwiki is pretty much exactly what it sounds like. A wiki. Nothing more nothing less. We love that. We use it for documenting our own and our customer’s systems. It’s uses flat files, which allows us to do some funky templating. In addition it provides the concept of namespacing. For those who aren’t programmers the best way to describe it is in comparison to folders in a file system, or if you want it in terms of wiki; a wiki within a wiki. The cherry on top is the fact that it allows you to use LDAP authentication, allowing us to link it in with our Active Directory. Sprinkle on a few custom and open source plugins and we have our documentation system.

Dropbox
In the words of the creators: Dropbox – Secure backup, sharing and sync made easy.

Our thoughts: Great for keeping your important files synced between several machines. Simply pop the file into the Dropbox folder on one machine and Dropbox will automatically sync the file to any other machines you have set it up on. Also provides a history for backup purposes and sharing functionality with which you can share files or folders over the internet.

Mac Software

Parallels Desktop
In the words of the creators: Parallels Desktop 6 for Mac is the #1 choice of customers worldwide to seamlessly run Windows applications on a Mac — without rebooting. Graphics intensive programs are a breeze with new and enhanced DirectX functionality.

Our thoughts: We like Macs, they’re powerful, quality built machines, but the biggest downside is not being able to use any Windows software. Parallels allows you to do both without feeling like a compromise. Whether you prefer the look and feel of OSX or Windows, Parallels will give you the experience you prefer with access to the software for both OS’s.

VMWare Fusion

In the words of the creators: Run the most demanding Mac and Windows applications side-by-side at maximum speeds without rebooting. With more than 80 new features in VMware Fusion 3, including 5X better 3D graphics performance and 35% faster end-to-end performance in version 3.1, it’s never been easier to run Windows on your Mac.

Our thoughts: As with Parallels above, VMWare Fusion is great for allowing you to run Windows applications on your Mac. As both are great products with lots of features shared between them choosing one over the over really comes down to preference (unless you’re looking for a specific feature only offered by one or the other product,  see this side-by-side feature list from Wikipedia)

Colloquy

In the words of the creators: Traditionally, chat clients on the Mac have been anything but glamorous. Colloquy is an advanced IRC, SILC & ICB client which aims to fill this void. By adhering to Mac OS X interface conventions, Colloquy has the look and feel of a quality Mac application.

Our thoughts:  Colloquy is a user friendly IRC client for Macs with a great interface.

Cyberduck

In the words of the creators:  Open source FTP, SFTP, WebDAV, Cloud Files, Google Docs & Amazon S3 Browser for Mac & Windows.

Our thoughts:  A nice feature rich, open source browser for remote files;  Cyberduck  integrates well with the OSX operating system. One cautionary note: we’ve found SFTP performance to be slow out of the box.

Posted by James in General | 1 Comment »

Recent research by hardware manufacturer Intel (and supported by the Confederation of British Industry) has highlighted the lack of investment and expertise in IT in small businesses in the UK. Their study of 3000 IT decision makers for businesses of 250 users or less shows:

• the majority still use fax machines more than smart phones
• a large percentage expose themselves to security risks by using personal laptops and mobile devices for work and are unaware of the data protection rules they’re potentially breaking by doing so
• most did not know what ‘the cloud’ is, even those that were using it already (e.g via Gmail)

There were several other worrying facts relating to investment in IT equipment (a third do not intend to buy new laptops or tablets for at least a year) and security (two thirds spend under 10% of their IT budget on protecting against attacks).

It’s disappointing that in this digital age many small businesses still do not appreciate the efficiency improvements that can be attained by updating IT infrastructure or the importance of maintaining IT security. At Glo Networks we are proud that none of our customers fall into this group (and those that may have previously have had our help to make the required improvements). Don’t let your business your business be one of those stuck in the IT ‘dark age’!

Posted by James in Desktop Hardware, Desktops and Laptops, General, Hardware, Laptop Hardware, Mobile, Servers, Small Business Software | No Comments »