Life and Kraya by Stephen Ramsay
Intermittent ADSL Internet Faults in Edinburgh
Dec 16th
We are receiving reports of Intermittent Internet Faults from our clients in the Edinburgh area.
There Internet simply goes down for anything between 1 and 30 minutes.
As we suspected this morning this has now been confirmed as a BT Fault affecting all Customers on the BT Wholesale ADSL network.
More info from zen internet here http://status.zensupport.co.uk/index.php?serviceid=5&incidentid=1616&simple=1
As a result of work to rectify this fault some customers may have limited or no internet connectivity overnight tonight and early tomorrow morning. BT have given an estimate of 6am on Thursday 17th December for resumption of normal service.
We will continue to monitor the situation and bring you updates as we get them.
Adobe update – excessive traffic to ardownload.adobe.com
Dec 16th
Adobe has not been without its problems of late, and whilst there have been security issues that could have lead to losses, so far none of our clients have suffered financially from Adobe’s failings. Until now that is.
One of our Clients had their ADSL cut off this week as they had exceeded the usage policy. Why? Adobe Update Manager on one Windows XP PC had decided to download over 70GB of data over the course of a 7 day period. It would appear that it was getting itself in a loop and just kept trying to update continuously, 70GB worth of continuously.
The Adobe website serves the update MSI binary files as content type Text/Plain, the Adobe Update client has a very short timeout and immediately opens another connection to re-start the download. Hence if there is a slow connection or the caching server does not return the whole file in a timely manner the Adobe Update client enters the infinite loop of retries, causing the excessive bandwidth consumption witnessed here.
There are several forum threads including on Adobe’s own site http://forums.adobe.com/thread/392129 all linking this issue to a conflict between and old version of WebMarshall and Adobe updater; however our machines do not use WebMarshall and we do not have it installed anywhere on our networks.
We do however use Squid caching on our CentOS 5 servers. The server in this instance seems to be fulfilling the requests on each occasion in a timely manner – the issue is that each time Adobe updater passes a URL it is different in key areas, which Squid interprets as a separate request. This is not abnormal and we have seen this before when we have tried to configure squid to cache Windows updates. However rather than enter a loop of requests, Windows updates simply fail. Other automatic updaters work well with caching systems and indeed most ISPs are now implementing different forms of web caching on their own networks. Dose this mean the Adobe issue is affecting them in the same way?
The issue seems to only affect PCs (or at least we have seen no affected Mac users as yet), and it also seems to affect most Adobe products.
For now Adobe and the ISPs have remained quiet on the issue, however we have 3 other clients (and my own home ADSL ) who cannot update Adobe at all, access to ardownload.adobe.com appears to have been blocked by the ISP. Quite when the Adobe update issue will be resolved is unknown; however we have also taken the decision to block access to ardownload.adobe.com from all of our networks, for the moment.
Richard, one of our Systems Admin Team has published a more detailed account of the technicalities involved here: http://richard.blog.kraya.co.uk/2009/12/16/a-big-adobe-problem/
Its been a while………
Dec 15th
It has been a while since I posted to my blog – sorry about that.
There have been a number of reasons: Firstly, things have been very busy here at krayatec and more importantly, Angela and I got married. Thanks to all who came to our wedding and I do hope you all had a good time. We certainly enjoyed ourselves and I’m glad to report that after his wee trip to hospital my grandfather is well; one operation over and waiting on his second.
So what’s been happening around here?
Due to family illness Andrei has decided to return to Canada, so we are now recruiting for his position. To help cover while we recruit a replacement, David will shortly return for Christmas, it’ll be nice to have him back for a while.
We have had some new clients come on stream in the last few months and have seen an large increase in the number of computers covered via our existing clients.
With the VAT changes coming to an end this month, we have also seen a number of large hardware purchases as people seek to take advantage before the VAT rate returns to 17.5%.
There has been lots of other exciting news, some of which I will blog about over the next few months and some of which is already on twitter.
As we approach Christmas, I have also been thinking about new year’s resolutions and well, along with the usual ones like diet and putting the toilet seat down (can’t believe how much that annoys her – such a cliché! ), I have made myself a work resolution to Blog at least once a fortnight and tweet once a day.
We’ll see how I get on… As always, comments welcome.
Day Spa Photos and Video
Nov 5th
When I meet new and existing clients one thing that always gets a Laugh is the Krayatec Day Spa. Everyone not only finds the whole description rather amusing, they love the effects it has on their PC’s.
You can read more about it here http://stephen.blog.kraya.co.uk/2009/03/13/computer-day-spa/ but one thing everyone wants to know is how dirty as the inside of my computer and whats the worst that you have seen. So attached below are some photos and videos, not of the worst we have every seen but of a some examples of an old dirty PC.
You Shouldn’t look if your easily disgusted!
A PC Being cleaned as part of the Krayatec DaySpa http://stephen.blog.kraya.co.uk/2009/03/13/computer-day-spa/
A PC Being cleaned as part of the Krayatec DaySpa http://stephen.blog.kraya.co.uk/2009/03/13/computer-day-spa/
A PC Being cleaned as part of the Krayatec DaySpa http://stephen.blog.kraya.co.uk/2009/03/13/computer-day-spa/
A PC Being cleaned as part of the Krayatec DaySpa http://stephen.blog.kraya.co.uk/2009/03/13/computer-day-spa/
A PC Being cleaned as part of the Krayatec DaySpa http://stephen.blog.kraya.co.uk/2009/03/13/computer-day-spa/
Warning the Videos bellow are worse and sorry about the mobile phone quality
Blog Blog Blog!
Oct 16th
Well I’ve been incredibly quiet on here for a while and whilst I would like to say its because I’ve been tweeting instead, it’s not, the simple truth is lack of time!
Things have been very very busy in the office and on top of it all Angela and I get married in 4 weeks! When we set a date I joked that I wasn’t helping planning the wedding, in fact I said tell me when It is, I’ll go out with the boys a few weeks before and turn up on the day in a kilt and that’ll be the limit of my involvement!
Well the reality could not have been further from the truth. We have just this week finished sending out the invites to everyone and we still haven’t arranged a honeymoon yet, the stress of it all.
I am very pleased to say, things have also been amazingly busy at krayatec, with new clients joining, we are looking at some interesting acquisitions and as if that’s not enough, we have been working hard to complete the transitions I started when I joined Kraya. I am very proud to say that a project I told Shri would take me a year is almost finished 9 months in. All clients now have new email systems and thanks to some great work by the krayanet boys the behind the scenes email systems have all also been upgraded. The effect of this has been amazing, one of our clients is now
having 98% of their mail rejected as Spam! That’s over 100,000 messages a week! What’s more amazing is not a single report of a false positive (that’s a message getting blocked that
should get trough).
The last of our clients will be moved to new servers in the next 4 weeks and we have now begun rolling out our VPN system to all clients. This will make a massive difference to clients that use VPN and I’ll write about that separately later.
We have also had Dave move to Glasgow and Andrei join us form Canada. Andrei and Richard are busy working on our new document management system, testing is underway and I hope to roll it out before Christmas.
Well the phone is ringing and we have a lot to do today, but I do promise that before Christmas I will start writing regularly again.
Till then ………
Krayatec & Krayanet Scheduled Maintenance
Aug 21st
As Part of the Krayatec Scheduled Maintenance Program it is necessary to take every server off line for testing at least once a year.
All of our internal servers will therefore be unavailable between 23:00 BST on Thursday 27th August and 04:00 BST Friday 28th August.
This will have the following Impact:
Email Services;
Some clients will be unable to send or receive email’s from external sources during this time. Email’s sent during this period will however be derived within a few hours of service returning to normal at 04:00
Web Sites:
Our own and some client Web Sites will be unavailable during this time.
Support Services:
Our team will be unable to provide some Support Services during the Maintenance period. We will however be after the maintenance has been completed, in line with standard out of hours support terms.
Please accept our apologies for any inconvenience caused, we have deliberately chosen this timing to limit the impact to all customers.
If you have any questions or concerns please do not hesitate to call me directly.
Krayatec are Hiring
Aug 6th
Are you a geek at heart looking for your first Real IT job?
Do you have what it takes to join the krayatec team?
Krayatec are currently looking for a Junior IT Support Engineer, to join our team. This is an opportunity for someone with a good general IT and computing skills who is looking for one of their first jobs in IT. Qualifications are not top of our wish list, most important of all is the right attitude and aptitude, someone who is articulate with good customer service skills. They must be a quick learner with good problem solving skills and a great telephone manner.
Krayatec is not your run of the mill IT Company and we’re not looking for a run of the mill person.
To tell us why you’re as unique as we are and apply, or for more information and to read the formal job Advert please see http://www.krayatec.co.uk/careers/
For more info on Kraya see http://www.kraya.co.uk/
Stephen Ramsay
Head of Krayatec
Update I have added an Application Closing Date of 9am, Friday 14th August 2009
Changing your password in Kerio Mailserver
Jun 16th
Changing your passwords is very easy.
Under your Windows computer press Crtl + Alt + Del and select change password.
To Change your email password, simply log into your Web Mail (call us if you don’t know the address)
Then Select change password from the Settings drop down menu as below
settings menu in kerio webmail
And then enter your old and new passwords in the box below.
kerio password change dialog box
Remember to make it something secure that no one will guess, no kids, partners or team names and no dictionary words. Random Numbers and letters, remember capitals and lower case combinations are best, or try a sentence like “Why can 1 never remember 555″ you can use spaces. Remember the best passwords are ones that can not be are easy to remember and would not be easily broken using a dictionary or password list attack (this is where a system tires every word in the dictionary or in a common password list, things like Rang3rs or C3lt1c or to easy.
reCAPTCHA fail!
Oct 16th
Posted by stephen in Kraya
We have been adding reCAPTCHA to the comment system on our blog in order to reduce the amount of comment spam we get.
During testing I came across this:
reCAPTCHA fail
Enough said!