An IT contractor by design, is a person who can enter a client's site and very quickly become the expert within that entity, It is a requirement that we become the most knowledgeable person within that particular infrastructure or our clients would benifit more by training up an FTE.
In the words of Albert Einstien:
When asked for his telephone number, he walked over to a telephone directory, and looked it up saying to a rather surprised onlooker " An intelligent man is not a man who can store information, but a man who knows how to find it".
With experience we IT Contractors understand better than anyone how technology and heterogeneous environments communicate, and knowing how to find information makes us experts in our chosen fields.
This allows us to be the greatest benifit to our clients. I hope you enjoy this site.
I recently called Microsoft Customer Service and Support (CSS) to help resolve what I thought was an undocumented error. As it turns out, the error was documented—I just couldn't find a reference to it in the 80 PDF manuals that came with this particular Microsoft product. Luckily, the support engineer I talked with was familiar with the error and knew the exact manual that I had to reference.
After that support incident, I recalled that I had used the Adobe PDF IFilter plug-in for the Microsoft Indexing Service several years ago to search through PDF files. Back then, I had only a dozen Adobe PDF files in a directory of hundreds of .doc, .txt, .html and .mht files. However, I had to search every file for specific text strings, and IFilter served this purpose well.
With the propeller hat spinning full tilt, I decided to again use IFilter with the Indexing Service for the purpose of searching Adobe PDF files. But this time, I created a customized Microsoft Management Console (MMC) snap-in for the UI. Although you can use Adobe Acrobat Reader to search through PDF files in a specified directory, it takes an extremely long time if that directory is large (e.g., 65MB). With the MMC snap-in, the search is almost instantaneous. Here's how you can create this snap-in on your local computer:
If you've never used BES, you need to take some steps to prepare your environment before you install the product. Don't worry; the BES 4.0 Installation Guide details these steps, which include granting the BES service account privileges to read and write to user mailboxes and creating the necessary database environment. Moving to BES 4.0 from an earlier version is also easy and well-explained in the guide, so I won't go over the steps here. But I will warn you: If you have more than a couple hundred BlackBerry users—especially if you're running multiple BES Redirector instances or have multiple physical servers—don't just pop in the CD-ROM and start upgrading. You'll need to watch out for a few potential gotchas.
When you run multiple Redirector instances, each with a unique name and a RIM Server Routing Protocol (SRP) identifier, all those instances will be collapsed into one server name during the upgrade. For example, suppose you have four Redirector instances: BES01A, BES01B, BES01C, and BES01D. After the upgrade, you'll have only the BES01A instance. All the users assigned to the BES01B, BES01C, and BES01D instances will be migrated to the BES01A instance.
Prior to the upgrade, the configuration information in each user mailbox contains references to the individual server names and the specific SRP identifiers that are associated with each instance. Let's suppose the BES01A instance uses SRP identifier 1, BES01B uses identifier 2, BES01C uses identifier 3, and BES01D uses identifier 4. In earlier BES versions, changing the BES name or moving users to a new BES required that users recradle their handhelds to receive the new SRP identifiers and server names needed to restore wireless connectivity. During an upgrade to BES 4.0, the SRP identifiers and server names are moved into Microsoft SQL Server or the Microsoft SQL Server Desktop Engine (MSDE) BES management database, and BES continues to quietly use all the previously assigned SRP identifiers. I say "quietly" because the BlackBerry Manager and the BlackBerry Configuration Panel (replacement tools for the Microsoft Management Console—MMC—BlackBerry Enterprise Server Management snap-in) will show only the SRP identifier for the first server: SRP identifier 1, associated with BES01A. It appears that SRP identifiers 2, 3, and 4 have been discarded and are no longer being used. In reality, the BES slowly updates the handhelds, replacing SRP identifiers 2, 3, and 4 with identifier 1 over time. Handhelds that are running BlackBerry Handheld Software 4.0 receive the updated identifier immediately via wireless synchronization; other handhelds get the new identifier the next time they're cradled. This method prevents communications disruption, but you need to be aware that you can't immediately reuse the old SRP identifiers to install a new server. If you attempt to do so, the RIM SRP network will detect that two servers are trying to use the same SRP simultaneously and will disable the SRP. Any handhelds that are still using the SRP will cease to communicate until you call RIM, humbly explain what happened, and have the SRP re-enabled.
Connecting to the Internet while traveling can sometimes be dangerous, especially over open, unencrypted networks, such as those found at hotels, coffee shops, conventions, and sometimes even at client or business partner sites.
To give you an example, at the 2006 DEFCON 14 hacker convention in Las Vegas, hackers sniffed the public wireless network airwaves to discover all sorts of information from people who didn't bother to encrypt their network traffic. The hackers then posted those details on a "Wall of Shame" for everyone to see. As a result, a lot of people's sensitive information, including banking and business information, was compromised.
You can, of course, use a VPN to establish secure connectivity when you're mobile so that you don't fall victim to snoops. If you want a lightweight VPN solution that's easier to install and manage than other solutions, check out the OpenSSH VPN tool and the Squid for Windows proxy server (formerly SquidNT), both of which are free.
PROBLEM: You need a way to protect the network communications of client computers when those clients are using untrusted networks.
SOLUTION:Use OpenSSH and Squid for Windows to build a quick and simple VPN.
WHAT YOU NEED: OpenSSH, Squid for Windows, Kraken Config, server computer, client computer
