Category : Best Practices
New Year’s Resolution: A cleaner and healthier… desk. What a Mess!
We spend 8 to 10 (or more) hours a day at work - more time than we spend anywhere else - and our desks/workspaces are becoming our kitchen tables. But, do you realize that our desks are covered in more bacteria than your average washroom?! (Jan 20, 2012)
AAACHOOO!
Yes indeed, it’s cold and flu season again. If you sit at your desk 5 days a week, and for long hours at a time, you are at a serious disadvantage when it comes to flu prevention. Yes you! While you sit there coding, eating, coughing and sneezing, your desk, keyboard, phone and even your monitor and ear-buds or headset have become a sea of germs. If you want to keep from getting sick over and over again, or stop your team members from passing bugs around, there are simple steps to take... (Dec 07, 2011)
Just Back It Up
Have you ever imagined what would happen if a medium to large business suffers massive data loss due to a hardware failure, and no backup procedures were in place? Tens of thousands of dollars - even millions - could be lost. (Nov 23, 2011)
Get Back!
Oh my aching back! Too many people who work seated for long hours at a stretch complain of aching, sore and stiff backs. If your posture is less than perfect, you may also be experiencing low energy levels and breathing trouble. (Nov 02, 2011)
“Bad” stuff that’s GOOD
There is plenty of "Bad" stuff that is actually good for you including peanut butter, eggs, beef, chocolate, nuts, and coffee... (Oct 18, 2011)
How to reproduce network errors (DNS, SMTP, ...) with NetCat
As an administrator, developer, support technician, or a quality analyst who works with email or network solutions, you probably often face issues caused by a network component that fails randomly. With NetCat for Windows you can reproduce network errors for troubleshooting. (Oct 04, 2011)
How to monitor application performance and send alerts when a threshold is breached
Before investing in an expensive tool to monitor the performance of your various applications, it’s important to know that Windows is equipped with many of the tools you need. If the applications provide performance counters, the Performance Monitor utility makes it easy to keep track of dynamically changing statistics. (Sep 21, 2011)
“Good” stuff that’s BAD
So you want to try to eat better? Well, as I always say, Caveat emptor - Buyer beware! Next month - "BAD" food that's Good! (Sep 09, 2011)
How To: A quick and easy way to move your SQL databases
We’re often asked about how to move SQL databases from one server to another. Here are some quick and easy guidelines to help out you out. Assuming you already installed SQL on your new server, your next step would be... (Aug 30, 2011)
The Pains of Eye Strain
Since people began staring at flickering screens, there have been many articles about Eye Strain. But many people aren’t seeing the bigger picture: you have to look at your office as well as your body. Monitors may have changed a great deal in the past decade but there are 3 fundamental things every computer user needs to do for the health of your eyes... (Aug 23, 2011)
SQL TCP/IP Configuration
SQL is installed on your server, but not all is as it seems. You begin to notice performance related issues and a delay in the transmission of data. This can be the result of having the configuration manager of SQL configured to use invalid IP addresses. (Aug 17, 2011)
Writing Effective E-Mail: Top 5 Tips
Which type of email are you sending? What is your desired outcome? The clearer your intention, the more focused you will be, the better you can cater the email for the intended result, and the more likely you will get your desired outcome. (Aug 10, 2011)
Stand up for your health!
IMPORTANT NOTICE regarding deep vein thrombosis (DVT)! Sadly, last weekend, a young man passed away due to a blood clot that had moved from his leg to his lungs. The blood clot was a direct result of deep vein thrombosis (DVT). Many SysOps and ITs spend far too much time seated (often in improperly configured chairs - see earlier posts about getting the right chair). (Aug 03, 2011)
Sure! My mobile number is…
Most major news events provide an open door for email exploits. You just need a little something to appeal to the voyeur in all of us, especially live video footage (remember the BIn Laden video a few months ago?). If you have security protection on your computer (and I really hope you do), you should be fine, as long as you have more than basic AV scanning. (Jul 27, 2011)
Energy consumption by email (and the Internet)
Depending on who you listen to, it seems there's always a study indicating that energy consumption driven by the Internet is bad. If you add up the energy consumed in the construction of our computers and networks, the operation of our servers and the transmission, storage and retrieval of all this information, you get the equivalent of from 4 - 19 grams of CO2 generated per email. (Jul 22, 2011)
No UPS system: No SQL connection
Your corporate data center is hit with a power outage. All UPS systems are running and operational... or are they? You soon realize that a faulty UPS system supporting your network’s database environment has not done its job. (Jul 19, 2011)
Worth your time #3: Tools, Tips, Tricks and Facts
A cool time management tool for busy IT staff, managing application permissions on the blackberry, an easy way to test your web page on a zillion browsers and a slew of computer forensic tools. (Jul 13, 2011)
Too much stuff!
To paraphrase George Carlin: An office is just a place to keep your stuff while you go online and get more stuff. At some point your “stuff” becomes broken, redundant or outmoded, and you have to get rid of it. But what do you do with all that stuff? (Jul 06, 2011)
$ Sudo Stay Alert
There are many studies indicating that if you turn off your screens (all of them - phones included) an hour or 2 before you go to sleep, you will sleep better – not necessarily longer but the quality will be better. (NB: Turning off your monitors when not in use can also save you a bundle in electricity.) (Jun 29, 2011)
Top 5 Email Management Tips
One of the roadblocks to employee productivity can be an overflowing email inbox. It’s easy to become overwhelmed when email alerts are flashing and inboxes grow to encompass dozens of messages that require attention. In fact, a study published by IBM revealed that 45 percent of 629 respondents, all of whom were management-level, said having too many emails in their inbox caused workplace stress. Fortunately, there are plenty of steps that employees can take to ease the email management tension. (Jun 28, 2011)
Worth your time #2: Tools, Tips, Tricks and Facts
In this issue: reasons why hackers try to break into your email server, some clarity on IPv6 from the experts at Cisco, a cool way to access all important config easily on Windows 7 and a bunch of security/hacking tools you can use to test your system for vulnerabilities. (Jun 22, 2011)
How to create a self-signed SSL certificate for Exchange 2003/2007/2010 on Windows Server
Here is a step-by-step guide and how to create your own self-signed certificate (for free) using Windows (I used 2003 but this should work on 2008 as well) and Exchange 2003-2007-2010. (Jun 21, 2011)
4 Parameters for your environment / Interface
MSiCS has begun to cover your hardware (desks, chairs) & software (food, exercise). Today we’ll look at your interface (environment). (Jun 17, 2011)
Improve SQL & NIC Performance
Have you ever found your SQL server drop packets or experience network latency when network traffic is at a minimum? Or perhaps searching through log files only to find the following error logs listed below. (Jun 15, 2011)
Snacks Rule & Snacking Rules
MSiCS has, so far, been dealing with your hardware (dust & workstation mechanics). Let’s take a look at programming (food). Too many people eat lunch (& even breakfast & supper) at their desks. Multi-tasking may be wonderful for some things but not for your body. If you’re feeding it when it thinks it’s supposed to be doing other things, you’ll find it’s inefficient and will slow you down. This defeats the purpose of ‘saving time’ & you’re back to square 1. In short – try not to eat at your workstation. (Jun 06, 2011)
It’s A Sitting Situation – Part 3 of 3
Kneeling chairs have been around since 1979 and have been quite popular. There are hundreds of varieties. Kneeling chairs, however beneficial, are not for everyone. This is definitely a case of try it out BEFORE you even consider buying one. (May 30, 2011)
Where are you, ASPNET account?
You are probably wondering why, after upgrading your Windows web server to 2008, that some of your websites are having difficulty rendering pages or are generating ASP.net errors. (May 25, 2011)
It’s A Sitting Situation – Part 2 of 3
Actually, you may be able to. Standing work stations have become very popular in the past couple of years. They even made the front page of the New York Times back in 2009. (May 18, 2011)
The Art of Customer Service
Customer service is the key to success for any business that has market competition. Some - if not most - companies don’t consider customer service a vital asset. But without good service, the company won’t be able to grow and expand. (May 17, 2011)
It’s a sitting situation - Part 1 of 3
IT workers are like snowflakes: no 2 are alike. Everyone is shaped differently and works differently. So, when it comes to your chair, you have to pick the one that’s right for you. Test drive different varieties before you choose an ergonomic chair. (May 09, 2011)
IT: Mens sana in corpore sano
Welcome to the first article of MSiCS : Mens sana in corpore sano (a healthy mind in a healthy body) which is a quote from the Roman Poet of the 1st century AD, Juvenal. I’ll be taking a look at the Best Practices of keeping you in shape so you can keep your systems in shape. (Apr 29, 2011)
Exchange 2010 Distribution Lists Block Messages from External Senders
The process of creating a distribution list and making it receive email from all senders (local and external) wasn't a big deal in Exchange 2003. But things changed in Exchange 2007 and 2010, causing external senders to get a 550 5.7.1 error. (Apr 27, 2011)
Worth your time #1: Tools, Tips, Tricks and Facts
Explanation of how tiny errors and assumptions in the past can cause major repercussions in the future, a great little support tool for identifying browser config, a nifty tool for creating virtual desktops in Windows and a site to help you search for hoaxes. (Apr 21, 2011)
SSL/TLS Part 2: How to Create and Configure a Certificate
In the first article, How to use SSL/TLS to Secure Your Communications: The Basics, I wrote about what SSL/TLS was about. In this new article, I will show you how to create and setup a certificate on IIS. (Apr 18, 2011)
The Art of Listening
Hearing: one of the 5 senses that most individuals take for granted. But hearing and listening are very separate things. Listening allows you to hear and absorb what the other person is saying - not only the words, but what underlies them. It can also be the key to finding solutions to problems, and that's important for anyone who works in a call center or complaint department. (Apr 15, 2011)
Where do you hide your porn?
Yet again, a Hollywood star's Gmail account has been hacked, exposing Vanessa Hudgens' private pictures on the Net. This follows similar public airings of Ali Larter, Busy Phillips, Scarlett Johansson, Miley Cyrus, Emma Caulfield, Addison Timlin, Renee Olstead and ...you? (Apr 02, 2011)
What to do about Spam: Best Practices
You can't really prevent spam from reaching you altogether; however, there are some things that you can do to minimize how much you receive. (Mar 30, 2011)
Virtual Desktop Organizer: Get rid of your Windows Desktop clutter
If you’re a busy administrator, you no doubt spend your days having to multi-task. So if you’re like me, you keep a lot of windows and applications open all the time, causing a cluttered, overwhelming desktop. To solve this problem, I began using a Windows SysInternals tool from Microsoft called Desktops. (Mar 25, 2011)
Keep Control of your Mailboxes in Microsoft Exchange
It’s always a good idea to keep control of how many mailboxes you have in Microsoft Exchange. Why? There are several types of objects in Exchange that have mailbox-like behaviors, so they can receive mail from the outside world. (Mar 16, 2011)
How to properly handle email marketing opt-out
It is very important to make it easy for your recipients to opt-out from your email marketing communications. (Mar 09, 2011)
Facebook Account Hack: Spam 80,000 friends
Social media is hot. 140 characters is the way to communicate these days and it’s not unusual to hear someone say, I have 3000 friends. We often hear about the success stories, but what about the unsuccessful ones? (Feb 28, 2011)
Top 5 Reasons Why Data Security Matters
Data is at the heart of every business, but is your company’s data secure? The implications of data loss can be significant: from lost business to damage to your reputation. (Feb 21, 2011)
Troubleshooting your mail server part 1
It’s not unusual to get an end-user complaint about problems sending email or login attempts timing out. These issues often point to a specific client configuration or browser setting. But what if the situation involves more than a simple client feature, and has been reported by many end users? The first step is to determine if there is indeed a server communication problem. (Jan 17, 2011)
How To “Gently” Switch People to SMTP Authentication
There are still quite a few small and medium sized ISPs out there who use technology such as “POP before SMTP” to allow mail relaying. However as threats increase, it’s become standard operating procedure to require proper authentication from end-users to allow outbound mail relay. One of my customers came up with a fairly gentle way to ease their user base into using SMTP Authentication (SMTP AUTH). (Jan 04, 2011)
Et tu, SAP? How not to handle email marketing opt-out!
I get a lot of email from legitimate companies trying to stay in touch with me, with my consent. Unfortunately, in too many cases I find that even the good citizens miss when I try to opt-out of their mailings, by simply making it too difficult for me to do so. SAP is just one of too many such examples. (Dec 29, 2010)
Phishing alert: you’ve got 1 hour!
John P Mello Jr reports that criminals use the first hour after an attack to harvest valuable info, then disappear. How fast is your anti-phishing response? (Dec 24, 2010)
How to prep your email system for the holidays
About to leave for the Christmas and New Year's holidays? Don't forget about your holiday admin checklist! (Dec 22, 2010)
Slow Mail Server? Not so Fast!
You just completed installing a brand new mail server, and the mailboxes have been configured and enabled. The newly mounted server is a monster: able to take punishment, heavy loads, and process data in a flash. (Dec 01, 2010)
How to keep your company’s name off Wikileaks
The Wikileaks document dump has been all over the news this past week. How was this enormous security breach possible? Because so many people had access to a huge network that was not well secured. Have you looked at your own security procedures recently? (Nov 30, 2010)
Is my hard drive healthy?
The hard drive is rarely considered the primary cause in bottleneck cases; we usually tend to suspect the applications installed on the server. People often think the source of system performance issues is either disk corruption or insufficient disk space, but Physical Disk: %disk time and Physical Disk: Current Disk Queue Length are equally important metrics that work in parallel. There are few other ways to detect hard drive problems using other metrics, but for now I will only focus on these two performance counters. (Nov 17, 2010)
How to troubleshoot “Insufficient system resources” errors on Exchange
Your email gateway server is unable to deliver messages to your backend Exchange mail server because of an “Insufficient system resources” error. Here's some troubleshooting help: (Oct 28, 2010)
Quick and dirty database replication with MS-SQL
Microsoft SQL and SQL Express both provide a T-SQL (Transact SQL) command-line interpreter that you can use to automate backup and restore processes. It enables you to utilize publisher/publishee configurations for real-time or near real-time replication. Sometimes, though, all you may want to do is run a daily backup of the database on one SQL Server and restore it to a second SQL Server to keep a "warm standby" available. This can be done easily with a pair of simple batch files. Here’s how you do it: (Oct 18, 2010)
Cool Tool: IMAPCOPY
Have you ever had to migrate mailboxes from server X to server Y? Unfortunately, each type of MTA natively stores mailboxes and folders differently from other MTAs (Sep 08, 2010)
Share NTFS USB Hard Drive on VMware vSphere/ESX 4
The other day, I was discussing virtualization in email security (for example, anti spam virtual appliance). One of the drawbacks of ESX (and ESXi) is the lack of support for external data storage (non Data Store). Of course, you can add a multitude of data stores, local and remote, and it is THE way to go. But I needed to be able to backup my virtual appliances to an external hard drive using NTFS (so that it can be read on my Windows machines). (Jun 29, 2010)
Interesting question from a customer: “Why should we block .EXEs?”
The majority of phishing attempts with drive-by-downloads try to entice you to download EXE files and run them locally. EXE files should always be blocked. You can open certain files on a case-by-case basis and in a very controlled fashion, but that’s the extent of it. (May 26, 2010)
Most Common Support Issue: Whitelist = Spoofed Spam
No one likes to see spam in their Inbox, especially when it comes from themselves! Users often get confused and even worry that their identity has been stolen. The main cause for this is that they have whitelisted their own email address to bypass scanning for outbound traffic. Users do not realize (or understand) that spammers can spoof their email address and send spam that appears to be from themselves. (May 14, 2010)
Deep header inspection: use with caution
Some anti-spam tools will actually look at the reputation of IP addresses in each of the received headers of an email. Reputation mechanisms usually involve multiple sources, e.g., DNSBLs and Honeypot-driven reputation services. (Apr 19, 2010)
Simple Admin Tricks: Quick & Dirty Monitoring
From time to time, you’ll need to monitor a port to see if there's a problem brewing. For smaller companies, it can be quite a chore to deploy some sort of commercial or open-source monitoring solution (e.g., NAGIOS-based stuff), when all you want to do is do some quick and dirty monitoring. (Mar 26, 2010)
Cool Tool: WinSCP
I just wanted to share with you a very useful tool that’s been around for a while now, and it helped me solve a problem on a customer’s machine. To properly investigate, I had to extract several logs from the customer’s server on a scheduled basis and have them FTP'd here so that I could keep tabs on the server's behavior. (Feb 26, 2010)
Blocked by RFC-IGNORANT ... Now what?
From time to time, customers wind up getting blocked by a seldom seen blacklist called "RFC-Ignorant." Unlike classical blacklists that are usually honeypot driven, this one is driven by people who have manually reported you as violating RFC. (Jan 22, 2010)
Welcome back, dear Customer!
Email Security product and solution vendors rely heavily on customer loyalty and retention. The recipe for achieving this is different for every company. What never changes is the total joy of winning back a customer that left for some reason, tried the competition and then returned. (Jan 15, 2010)
10 Resolutions You Shouldn’t Break This Year
It's that time of the year again..time to make (and break) resolutions. Here are some things to help you keep your email and network safe from malicious attacks. Resolutions you don't want to break! (Jan 08, 2010)
How do you fix a bad reputation?
In an earlier post, I had written about the various security measures to take to prevent losing your good reputation.But what happens if you find yourself on someone’s blacklist? What do you do? (Jan 06, 2010)
Spoofing: are you who you say you are?
Spammers often play games with the 'From' field but there are Internet standards that can help you easily determine whether the sender is who he claims to be. (Dec 11, 2009)
Reverse DNS checking: Is it safe to use?
Every time I do a setup with a customer, the question always comes up: Should we use Reverse DNS checking or not when configuring connection-level blocking security measures? (Dec 04, 2009)
You only have one reputation – don’t lose it
Having a bad reputation might have seemed cool when you were a teenager, but if your email server has been given a bad rap, it’s definitely UNcool – especially if your business depends on delivering email. Trying to get your reputation back can be time consuming and costly, so the best approach is to do your utmost not to lose it in the first place. (Dec 02, 2009)
Country-Based Blocking
Is it good or bad? Well the answer is "it depends." If your organization only operates within North-America, for instance, blocking the more prolific spam sources by country may be a very good way to reduce the amount of traffic hitting your MTA. (Oct 30, 2009)
Email Security Gateway Deployment: Avoid These Common Mistakes
Don't declare your primary mail server (MTA) as a secondary MX. (Oct 02, 2009)
SPF woes with third party services … a workaround.
Many people use SPF (Sender Policy Framework) as an anti-spoofing measure. They create an SPF record in their DNS zone for their domain. From time to time though, some customers will do business or use third party services that will send out Email on their domain's behalf and unfortunately, this will cause recipient MTAs to hard-fail or soft-fail these messages. (Sep 04, 2009)
Security Back to Basics
You can use Windows Routing and Remote Access (RRAS) for firewalling purposes. It's fairly simple to setup as well. (Aug 21, 2009)
More Recent News
Recent Spam Survey Winners
We are extremely pleased with the tremendous response that we have received to this point from our Fight Email Spam survey. As promised we have randomly selected winners of our gift card prizes. (Jan 23, 2012)
New Year's Resolution
We spend 8 to 10 (or more) hours a day at work - more time than we spend anywhere else - and our desks/workspaces are becoming our kitchen tables. But, do you realize that our desks are covered in more bacteria... (Jan 20, 2012)
Email Usage Survey
We are currently conducting a market research on email usage at work. Thank you for filling our this very short survey. (Jan 12, 2012)
