Life and Kraya by Stephen Ramsay
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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 ………
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 not necessarily easy to remember but they can be if your clever about it. Hackers offten use a dictionary or password list attack to crack passwords, this is where a system tires every word in the dictionary or in a common password list, things like Rangers, Rang3rs or Celtic, C3lt1c will be near the top of that list.
Busy Busy times
Apr 22nd
Goodness me, its been over a week again since I last posted, so much to do and talk about and so much to do. Firstly the reason for the gap, over the last 2 weeks we have been doing a lot to move towards the new improved Kraya service. This includes upgrading 4 companies networks and replaced their servers with new more powerful and more capable setups, 45 computers have also received the KrayaTec Day Spa treatment.
These exciting new changes that we have been making to clients setups are all part of the new look Kraya IT support, we have been working hard on a number of changes from our setup and processes to our new website, logos and corporate identity, the details of which Shri is announcing on Thursday night, if you have not received your invite and would like to come, please let me know.
I still have a lot to do over the next few days, not least of which includings planning a wedding and a lot to post here, so watch this space…
I don’t need Anti-virus, its just a scam and it slows me down!
Mar 12th
Over the years computer viruses have become so prevalent, rampant and infections that running Windows without anti-virus software has become, well, virtually suicidal. I am in the process of reviewing a number of our computer networks and one of the key things I have been changing is the anti-virus software and the way that it reports infections to my team. One thing stands out, I have had almost as many virus notifications as I have had notifications that the Anti-virus has been turned off by the user. WHY? Oh WHY?
It is almost entertaining, that most of these “Anti-virus protection has been disabled by user” notifications are followed, normally the next day (after the computer has been restarted and the anti virus with it) by a second email, “Trojan XXX has been detected on PC XXX”. What is interesting are reasons people give for trying to turn off anti-virus in the first place. Firstly on most of the computers we support we do limit the ability to turn anti-virus off, that just makes sense. But there are a few reasons why you would legitimately turn it off.
The best excuse so far today has been, ‘I have had an email sent to my webmail and Kaspersky wont let me open the picture attached’. Ok, first question who sent it to you? Do you know this person? Answer, No some random I have never heard of! Now I’m hoping by now you’ve realised that it wouldn’t let this person open it because it was infected. This is why all of email coming into your work email account is scanned at least twice (for Kraya clients).
The next big reason is that it slows my computer down, well that’s what happens when you insist on using Norton, look instead for a thin Anti virus that does just that, its Anti virus after all you don’t need it to make your coffee! It might also be because it has actually found 37 Infections on that USB key you brought in from home!
Ok so rant over, but there is a very serious point to this, unfortunately, Windows is not secure and without an anti-virus it is very susceptible to attack. You just need read BBC’s Clicks latest report to realise just how susceptible it can be to Bot Net and Virus attacks.
Yes the conspiracy theorists amongst us might wonder if some of these infections are not just caused by the Anti-virus company purely to justify their own products? I would however challenge this, just take a look at the headers of the next ten items of junk mail you receive, take the IP address that the mail originated form and look it up.
There is a good chance that it originates form a home users PC, the PC will have been infected with a Trojan which will be part of a bot net. The unsuspecting PC owner is now likely to be sending a few thousand emails every time they connect to the Internet, about who knows what, a blue pill, or that Russian bride that’s waiting for you.
If you currently don’t have any anti virus at home consider AVG free and if you have none at work, speak to whoever is responsible for your I.T. and suggest that they call us.
