How to write an IT service-level agreement

Dirtection Inc: episode 7

In which the Secret Service gets to grips with bonkers boffins and hallucinogenic horseflies.

Unplugging the PBX to sell a VoIP installation or hosted VoIP

Unless your clients have just returned from a stint on Mars, there is every chance they will already have used VoIP, though they may not call it that. VoIP, or Internet telephony, has been one of the undoubted technology success stories of the last few years. Skype alone claims 200 million users, many of whom work in small and mid-sized businesses.

Stopping Spam for Exchange Users

Spam doesn’t have to be a way of life; add to the built-in spam tools in Exchange Server with services that can almost banish spam from the inbox.

How, why and when to defragment your Windows Server disks

Servers are particularly susceptible to file fragmentation as they deal with multiple requests from a wide range of users and often have more complicated drive setups such as RAIDs and SANs.

All-Access Pass

Good security requires good passwords. But good security is as much about ensuring access by authorised users as it is about preventing access by interlopers. Recovering, resetting, or removing passwords is sometimes a necessity. Here’s how.

PDF Security: obfuscated code, hackers and other threats

Hackers are finding increasingly inventive ways of exploiting holes in Acrobat.
The same rich content that makes PDF so useful to businesses can also make it a security risk. Embedding links, images, tables and media uses JavaScript and that allows PDF files to be exploited as an attack vector for hackers.

Setting up false volumes in TrueCrypt

TrueCrypt is a free tool to create virtual encrypted disks housed within individual files, or a ‘volume within a volume’ – a hidden operating system and set of files that is invisibly housed in an encrypted file.

Staying up while you recover: Double-Take Cloud provides easy server protection

Building a backup and disaster recovery service can be time consuming and costly. You need access to a data centre where you can site racks, servers, storage and have sufficient bandwidth to support the service. Alternatively, you could just take advantage of the cloud and leave your cloud supplier to take care of all that.

Backup Tools

Backup software
Simplification is the most important thing when designing a backup system. Look for software that runs across all the operating systems you are backing up and that has the right agents and plug-ins for the applications your customer uses.