Archive for June, 2011

Do you really need server maintenance?

Thursday, June 30th, 2011

I’m sure that many of you will have the same experience we have with our clients when they tell us that they fail to see the value in regular maintenance of their computers.  More specifically most clients in the small business space think that if the computer is running fine then why should they touch it?  Typically it’s these same clients that will have their cars (normally a BMW or an Audi or a Mercedes) serviced routinely just to ensure it’s running in peak condition – I mean they would not want their precious car to breakdown now would they?

Why then is it so hard to sell the client on the benefits of regular server maintenance?  Maybe the photo below can help you convince your customers that their server needs maintenance.  This is from one a customer we picked up recently.  Yes that is DUST that has accumulated inside the server over a period of years. 

DirtyServer

What’s wrong with this picture?

Servers and carpet floors do not mix – even raising it a few inches from the floor could have helped.  Preferably having it sitting on top of a desk would be better than direct on the floor.

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How NOT to get a job!

Wednesday, June 29th, 2011

This week has been an interesting week.  Yesterday I walked out of a job interview we had with a potential staff member after 21 minutes.  In 15 years, I’ve never done that before.  I don’t know who was more surprised, Ryan, our CEO or David, our Service Manager – but the candidate certainly realised he made a mistake when I did.  What did he do that was so bad?

  1. Body Language –from the very start of the interview, this guy did not look like he wanted to be there.  He was slouched back in his chair, he was fiddling with his phone, his entire manner made me think that he’d rather be anywhere but here in this interview.
  2. Failure to qualify who he was talking to – there were three of us that interviewed him – David our service manager introduced himself and his position as he walked into the room.  I introduced myself by name only as did Ryan.  Now he probably knew Ryan was our Managing Director from the phone interview, but he had no idea who or what role I played in the interview and he didn’t bother asking either.
  3. Failure to complete the basic questions – we have a standard set of questions we ask people to complete when they come for a face to face interview.  These questions are both technical to understand what level of knowledge they have right off the bat as well as some thought provoking questions like “How many cars are there in Australia and why”.  The idea being to get an idea on how they think.  Well this guy came in and answered one or two of them and then when we asked him why he had not done more, he told us that they were irrelevant to the job and he should not have to do them.  Bad move.
  4. Lack of research – When going for a job, you would think it logical to peruse the company website of the company you are seeing.  This will give you an idea of who you might be talking to, the type of company they are, the products they focus on and so on.  This guy said that he didn’t have time to check our company website initially and then later suggested he had done so briefly.
  5. Desperation – this guy focused on the fact that he needed a job quickly, and was “just looking for a job”.  In some lines of work, that’s totally fine.  However in most professional jobs like ours, we’re not looking for someone who is “just looking for a job” – we want someone who has a passion to succeed and the desire to apply themselves to grow.  Someone just looking for a job to put food on the table is not always going to be focused on delivering great customer service.  Come 5 o’clock – they are likely to be out the door without a second glance at the customers interests.
  6. Argumentative – this is where he really came unstuck.  When I questioned him about his body language, and asked if he was interested in the interview at all, he started attacking my body language and told us that once more the questions given to him were irrelevant.  He told us that he wanted us to give him a go and he would prove that he was a good worker and knew his stuff.  Sorry mate – but being a good technician is not JUST about knowing how to fix a problem – it’s also a fair degree of customer service skills and being argumentative with someone who you do not know what they do in the company, or their skill set is really not the way to go.  What would have happened had he actually been allowed to talk to our customers?

It was at that point that I’d had enough – I walked out of the interview much to his surprise.  Ryan and David persisted with him and his attitude changed and he then wanted to look at the questions again – and whilst we let him do that, he’d well and truly blown his chance.

Ok – so how about some tips on getting a job?

  1. Be prompt for the appointment – if you are running late then call ahead BEFORE the time – not 5 minutes AFTER you were supposed to be there (this guy above was not late).
  2. Know the company – check out the company website, use Google to do some research – in 15 minutes you will get a good idea of who this company is and what they do.  If there are staff names mentioned on the website, then check them out on LinkedIn – you can get some valuable information there that will help you prepare for the interview.  Someone who knows about our company before they come in is always going to have a better chance than someone who knows nothing about our company.  It also shows that you are very much interested in not only the position, but the company itself.
  3. Introduce yourself AND find out who you are talking to – when you meet the people conducting the interview, ask what their job role is within the business.  Understanding this can help you determine who you need to ask specific questions to as well as who the people are you need to be focusing your attention on.  Be careful though – just because someone is the CEO of a company, does not mean they are the one making the final decision.  As is the case with our team, we have a few of us input our thoughts and discuss how the applicant responded before we decide on a job offer or not.
  4. Be calm – easier said than done.  If you are nervous it’s ok to admit to that – most interviewers expect a little nerves.  Say you are nervous, but don’t keep going on about it as it detracts from your overall appearance.  Take a few deep breaths and go in with your best face on.
  5. Don’t exaggerate – if you have played as part of a team doing a particular project – be upfront about it – don’t claim you’ve been the Team Leader and come up with all the cool decision yourself.  Also if you’ve had part in a design of something – speak up – but don’t claim that the entire idea was yours unless it was – you will be found out.  This is not the time to try to talk up your achievements beyond what they are
  6. Be honest – if it’s not true – then don’t say it.  The number of people that I’ve interviewed over the years that tell me all about these fantastic things that they’ve done with product X and product Y, only to come unstuck when I start questioning them deeply about the claims they have made.  I’ve had people try to tell me they know more about product X than I do – now I’m not saying that’s possible, but surely I would be interviewing to get a job for THEIR company if that was the case?
  7. Don’t claim to know it all – one of the things most people are afraid to say in an interview is that they do not know something.  I walk into an interview knowing that I do not know everything and I’m looking for the person to say much the same.  If you claim to know it all you will get found out.
  8. Clarify the questions – if you do not understand a question – ask them to repeat it.  If it’s still not clear then say you are not sure about the question.  Ask them to reword the question too if you need to.  Giving incorrect answers to questions can make you look silly if you have misunderstood the question in the first place.
  9. Be careful for dead ends – some interviewers might ask questions that lead you down a dead end path – they ask them to see if you are being truthful or not.
  10. Don’t discuss salary until near the end – I’ve noticed that people that want to talk about salary right up front in the interview, are normally not the ones we hire as they are more focused on the money than the job itself.  These people tend not to last too long at all.  Salary discussions are really only appropriate if both parties are feeling like there is a good fit.  Also – it may be that not all the people in the interview will be on the same salary as you – some may be lower than you and therefore you need to understand where you fit.  This comes back to point 3 above.

They are a few of my tips for the Interview process – it’s actually been over 15 years since I was on “the other side” of the desk so to speak as I’ve been running my own businesses for so long, so that gives you an idea of the things we employers are looking for.  I hope this helps some of you Smile

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PowerShell Tip #3 – Filtering Output

Monday, June 27th, 2011

When you issue PowerShell commands you can get quite a bit of information back from it.  Last weeks tip showed how to format the output and to do a very basic filter to show specific columns only. 

Today we’ll be a little more specific.  Lets say that I wanted to list all the processes on a computer where the Process Name begins with svc* – this is how I would do it.  Sounds simple right?  Well it is – it’s almost plain English.

get-process | where-object { $_.ProcessName –match “^svc*”}

image

There’s a bit more you can do with the where-object command as well which we will cover off in our next tip.

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Have you said Thank You today?

Friday, June 24th, 2011

Too often in the busy world we live in, we forget the simple things in life.  Simple things include saying a heartfelt “Thank You” for something that has been done for you makes so much difference to a persons day.

I recently helped a friends father out – he was about to purchase a copy of Windows XP from a local computer market as he needed it for his older computer.  He called me because it looked a little shonky (Aussie term for “not right”).  I suggested he not buy it, and as I had a couple of copies here given to me by a Microsoft person many years ago, that were fully legitimate, I’d be happy to give him a copy.  He offered to pay for it but given it was given to me, I really wouldn’t accept payment.

So he came over – I gave him a copy of Windows XP and he said thank you.  He really meant it and it felt good.  What I didn’t expect however was that the next time we met a few months later, he had a small gift for me.  The gift was the very cool custom made pen you can see below.  What is even cooler is that Ken made this for me himself.  This simple Thank you made a massive difference to my day.  Thanks Ken – you didn’t need to do this but I love it – Thank You.

Now – as a thank you to Ken – I’ve found out that he’s trying to start a new business making these custom pens.  If you are interested in having a custom pen made for you like this one – send him an email HERE and have a chat to him.

_MG_3433

So – my question to you is… Have you said Thank You today or had someone else do it?

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Hyper-V Clusters and iSCSI

Thursday, June 23rd, 2011

If you like me have little experience with Hyper-V, Clustering and iSCSI, then you will appreciate how much “fun” we can have in getting it all working.  Thankfully, I stumbled across this blog post from Ben Armstrong and a further blog from Aidan Finn with detailed step by step guide on how to use the Microsoft iSCSI Software Target to create a Hyper-V cluster.

If you need to get into iSCSI and Hyper-V Clustering then check out these two guys blogs – there’s a heap of good information there.

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And they say that Tape Backups are dead…

Wednesday, June 22nd, 2011

There’s a lot of news in the media at the moment about massive system hacks by a number of rogue hacker groups.  One of the local ones recently has been domain registrar DistributeIT based here in Australia.  Their systems were not only hacked, but totally and utterly destroyed by the hackers.  The most recent news article on this has DistributeIT talking about how even there backups were erased.  And based on that we can assume a few things.

  1. Is that they ONLY had image based backups of their systems that were stored online.
  2. They did nothing to protect the image backups or provide for the scenario that their image backups would become compromised.
  3. They did not have any form of offline backup of their systems – not even a week old backup that could have helped them recover.

No don’t get me wrong – I’m not saying they got what they deserved.  No one deserves to have their business decimated in the way that I’m sure DistributeIT is right now.  But they did not fully consider the potential ramifications that could happen should a deep compromise of their systems occur.

Now personally I’ve used image based backup products like StorageCraft for quite some time and I love them.  I also use products that work specifically with tape such as BackupAssist as well.  However if you are to use an image based product alone here, then you need to consider what would happen in the event that your backups are erased.  How can you prevent that from occurring?  If you have some form of replication to replicate the data offsite, then that replication is also potentially likely to replicate the deletion (depending on how you have it configured).  Particular attention needs to be paid here and this is where some form off offline backup comes into play.  Be it tapes or offline hard drives, you need to ensure that you have a way that will prevent hackers from getting in overnight and killing your business.

Why tapes I hear you ask?  How’s this for a few reasons to start with…

  1. Tapes are pretty much “hacker proof” because you can’t just erase or format a tape.  That can only be done via the tape backup software and if you don’t have an autoloader then there is only one tape in the drive at a time – therefore limiting the potential damage a hacker could do
  2. Compared to disk – you can have all your backups on a single disk/NAS/SAN and they can be lost or corrupted with a single erase operation.  Heck – look at my recent experiences here where I had corruption of the data yet the disks were “ok”.
  3. Viruses can infect a disk and corrupt existing backups – but they can’t infect tapes.

If you were to change your offline media on a daily basis then you limit what they can do to your business?  What are you doing to prevent this for yourself and customers?

So – I ask you – is Tape really dead?  If you are thinking more about this then check out BackupAssist as an option as they can support tape on versions of Windows that don’t have native tape support which is basically everything from Windows Server 2008 or SBS 2008 onwards.

Nope – for me – I’m seriously revisiting how my backup strategies are maintained and am looking to develop some new ideas and practices around this.

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PowerShell– Hyper-V Scripting

Wednesday, June 22nd, 2011

Whilst digging for PowerShell scripts for Hyper-V, I found this very cool resource on the Microsoft TechNet Wiki site so I thought I would share it here.

The Wiki has a load of scripts that will do basic things as well as more complex items such as compacting VHDs.  Basically I’m looking to put a few scripts together to enable me to quickly create entire VMs for testing purposes and it looks like I will be able to do it using the knowledge on this wiki.

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Are you sorry for what you do?

Tuesday, June 21st, 2011

Ever had someone apologise to you when they totally screw things up?  Have you ever done the same to your customers and admit it when you cause unexpected problems?  I’ll be the answers were yes and no from most of you.  Sadly that is the truth.  So many so called IT Professionals out there will never admit their mistakes to their peers, let alone admitting them to their customers.  I’m sure we’ve all been to the new client that we’ve just picked up to find all the issues that “That IT Guy” left behind… the backups not configured, the Antivirus software that expired months ago and so on.

However – if you’ve ever screwed up and told the client… then that client is normally one you will get to keep for life (provided you don’t screw up too many times that is).  Thinking back around 10 years now, we had a client with an SBS 2000 server.  Back then we sent one of our engineers out to the client site to upgrade their Trend Antivirus software to the most current version.  The upgrade went fine and everyone was happy.  Roll forward a few months and the client complained that their Application Vendor could no longer VPN in and connect to the 2nd server that had for the Line Of Business Application.  We looked at the problem but could not figure out what was going wrong.  In the end we lodged a call with Microsoft PSS to get their help.  Microsoft took a look at all the information we sent them and then asked us to stop the Trend Firewall service… I said indignantly that there is no Trend Firewall service in this version of Trend… the Microsoft guy must be wrong… the Microsoft guy patiently pointed out the exact service and then we did the face slap.. Dohhh… Our engineer had upgrade the customer to the corporate version of Trend which did indeed have a firewall.  This was the source of the problem.  Ok – so we had the technical fix – which was to remove the wrong Trend product and install the right one.  Now for the customer call… it went something like this…

Wayne: Hello Customer… we’ve been investigating the source of the problem and we have found the solution

Customer: Great – what will it cost?

Wayne: Well actually – I need to apologise for it – we made a mistake and need to rectify this for you at our cost

Customer: Great – how much will it cost?

Wayne: No … it’s our mistake and we will wear it – once again I’m sorry for the issue.

Customer: ….. silence…..

Wayne: Hello????

Customer: … it’s your mistake and you will fix it at no charge….

Wayne: Yes – that’s right.  When is a good time for us to do this work for you?

Customer: … I’m still getting over the fact that an IT guy admitted his mistake….

Wayne: Yes – well we’re not like other IT Guys…

Customer: You’re not bloody wrong… – how’s Tuesday after hours sound

Wayne: No problems –we’ll have the Engineer out there at 5pm – it should take about 1 hour to do

Customer: and at no cost to me right?

Wayne: Yes – once again – sorry for the issue.

Customer: Great – we’ll have a beer afterwards.

Ok – so end result of that was that this customer has been one of ours for over 10 years now.  He’s referred numerous business associates to us because he knows he can trust us.  Trust is something that no amount of money can buy.  It’s easy to lose if you abuse it though.  Saying sorry for your mistakes is hard too – it takes a bit to swallow ones pride and admit you were wrong. 

At the same time though, here’s another view on being focused on doing a good job.  UberGeekGirl had an experience she posted here that she had recently… the consequences for her poor baby could have been disastrous.  Did the Doctor apologise? No.  I’m guessing he could not do that for fear of voiding his insurance.  I love it though that the Pharmacist was worried enough to double check things.  Take a note – we should all do things like this to help improve our customer service.  It takes but a minute to review things and make sure we do a better job.  That will avoid the mistakes and help retain your customers for a very long time.

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SBS 2011 Licensing in Upgrade and Downgrade Scenarios

Tuesday, June 21st, 2011

Microsoft have produced a number of learning bite webcasts – this one is focused on the upgrade and downgrade scenarios around SBS 2011.

They also go into depth about the Premium add-on so that it’s easier to understand how to get to SBS 2011 from the various previous versions of SBS.

 

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SBS 2011 Licensing in Virtualisation Scenarios

Monday, June 20th, 2011

Microsoft have produced a number of learning bite webcasts – this one is focused on the Virtualisation Scenarios that can be built around SBS 2011.  They make it simple to understand the potential that exists here and how you can correctly license it for SBS 2011 Standard, SBS 2011 Essentials and SBS 2011 Premium.  Specifically they clarify that you cannot use SBS 2011 Essentials or SBS 2011 Standard as a Hyper-V host machine.

 

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