by Darragh | May 29, 2019 | Business, Disaster recovery, Firewalls, Linux, Monitoring, Regular checks, Security, System administration, Uncategorized, Web, Windows |
If a tree falls in an empty forest, does anyone hear it? IF a server falls at 3am, will your users notice when they start work that day? Computer Support Service would like the answer to this to be no. Implementing a monitoring system is simple. However, designing a monitoring and management solution is more complex. Computer Support Services have managed, monitored and maintained environments as small as three servers to large environments with over 3000 separate endpoints including workstations and servers. We know that down time of servers and workstations can mean a loss of productivity, embarrassment when deadlines are missed and ultimately damage to your bottom line. We take a user centric approach to monitoring. Here are just some of the questions we ask. What is the impact to users if a service is unavailable. What servers, networks, storage and processes are required for each service. What are the errors or warnings that a service might present before a problem affects users? What errors or warnings will it present when the service is unavailable? Who is responsible for each component that is required for the availability of the service. Who needs to be informed when a component required to provide a service is unavailable, over utilized or encountering unexpected errors. Based on these questions we define the following...
by Darragh | Aug 3, 2014 | At home, Business, Disaster recovery |
If you don’t, now is the time to start getting organized. A local company in Drogheda called me in a panic a few months ago. They had a type of virus called a crypto locker. This infection sits silently on your computer, encrypting all the files you save and open. Quietly preparing to block access to every file you are likely to open. If you get this virus, or as they are more commonly known as scamware, you have two choices. Either pay using a potentially dodgy pay method to have the decryption key sent to you to allow you to unlock the files or restore your files using a previous backup. The real problem comes when you don’t have a backup and you’ve paid to have the decryption key but it either doesn’t work, or worse, you pay over the money and no key is sent. You absolutely must have a backup. It isn’t just best practise, it’s vital. Please don’t think that this infection is only caught by a minority of Internet users. It is far too prevalent to be taken lightly. To make matters worse, this company had a central file share so when one person infected with the virus accessed a file on the shared directory, that file became encrypted so even if another computer on the network didn’t have the virus, on the day that the virus cut off access to the files it had encrypted, no user could access the file from any computer. This was having a major impact on the business and for five days they were unable to find someone...
by Darragh | May 5, 2014 | Disaster recovery, System administration |
When your systems are down and you have 6, 60 or 6000 clients unable to access your network, there’s only one thing you want to hear. “Leave it with me and I’ll get it fixed”. With the best system in the world, you must prepare for disasters. Have a plan in place so that when everything goes wrong, you know how you are going to handle it. Here are a few things that we advise: Define terms and language that you are going to use to describe this temporary setback. Explain that the problem is a temporary glitch. You will most likely be unable to provide a clear expectation as to how long it will take to resolve the problem but what you can assure customers is that you will call them back every hour to provide them with an update. When your customers need your systems to work, a call to say that no progress has been made is better than no call at all. Ensure that you don’t use words with bad connotations such as “crash, Corrupt or deleted” to describe the problem. Customers need to feel assured that you have things under control. Be assertive in your language. If you know that this will take four hours, don’t tell the customer that you think it will take four hours. This potentially shows that you don’t have enough exposure to the solution of the problem. Confidently communicate your message. Stay away from terms such as “I think, I’m not sure and I don’t know”. Don’t be afraid to use partial templates for calls and Emails to customers....
