Managing Skype in business

Skype means free or cheap calls but it’s based on peer-to-peer file sharing principles. How can you tame consumer VoIP tools for use in a business network?

Rebuilding a NAS appliance RAID array

Disks fail, and RAID arrays need rebuilding. Be prepared for the worst – and keep your clients’ data safe.

Netbooks: Networking and Managing a Linux portable

Linux netbooks are cheap, popular and probably on a customer site already. How can you connect them to an existing network and make them work with Windows servers and applications?

Saving power, saving money with a green energy audit: cut printer costs and create power plans

Cold mornings and the clocks going back are going to put up heating and lighting bills for businesses as winter draws in, but increasingly IT is putting up the electricity bill too. Power prices have increased significantly this year and it’s not yet clear whether they have peaked. Offer customers a power audit that covers printing, servers, desktop PCs, storage and peripherals or include it when you’re planning a new deployment to sweeten the deal — and try it out in your own office to find out how much you can save by managing IT power.

Optimising wireless access for the small business - tips for site surveying and analysis

Most people share the same idea of Office Hell. A plain, bland and featureless big room, with open desks that give no privacy or peace. At best, a maze of little cubicles with walls no higher than five feet eight, no door and no ceilings.

Backup goes online and offsite

Remote backup services can offer the speed of disk, the security of tape, and the simplicity of a consumer service. But how do you ensure that remote backup services comply with your clients’ data policies and integrate with their existing IT set-ups?

Failover, not fall over - how to keep running when the hardware fails

Failure is not an option in business and redundancy is the solution. You can offer customers systems that keep running when the hardware fails.

Server failure used to mean widespread panic and a scramble to find backup tapes and a spare server to restore onto. Inevitably this meant business interruption, user frustration and even data loss. Recovering from a backup can take hours; even planned maintenance can take the server down during business hours leaving users unable to work. Today there is no excuse for this situation.

Mac printing in a Windows world

When a Mac turns up at a previously Windows customer, one of the things you’ll need to help them do is get it to print to the existing network printers rather than buying a new printer just for the Mac.

How to spoof a MAC address (and why)

MAC spoofing is one of those odd tricks: it’s not very useful most of the time (and it can be extremely awkward in a well-managed environment) but sometimes it’s the only technique that will solve the problem.

Macs in a Windows world

Helping your Apple users become full-time network citizens – without doing a lot of extra work

We IT professionals are seeing more and more Apple Mac computers on our comfortably Windows-based networks. In the past, it’s been easy to ignore them – after all, in many cases they belonged to just one or two users, none of whom tended to be an influential manager or executive. But today it’s just as likely to be the boss with a new Mac.