Life and Kraya by Stephen Ramsay
Posts tagged Kraya
How to view and forward your Full email Message headers
Mar 25th
Full Message Header or Internet Headers as they are often called is the section of an email that most email applications hide from a user but are very useful for technical teams in working out what went wrong in email process or how an email made its way from one user to another.
Below is a quick guide on how to retrieve your mail headers dependent on your mail system:
Microsoft Outlook:
Either right click on the message and select ‘message options’ or open the message by double clicking on it and then select message options, from the tools menu or the Ribbon as below:
Outlook Message ribbon
From message options copy all of the info in the Internet headers section, as highlighted below copy and paste that into an email to send to us.
Copy the text from the box highlighted above
Thunderbird:
If you are using Thunderbird simply open the message and select message source from the view menu as seen below. Pressing Control and U may also work dependent on the version of Thunderbird you are using. When the message source window opens please copy and past all of the text into an email to send to us.
View Message Source in Thunderbird
Kerio WebMail:
If you are using Kerio connect webmail simply right click on the message and select view source from the menu as seen below. When the message source window opens please copy and past all of the text into an email to send to us.
view message source
Other Web Mail Clients
Hotmail, Gmail and yahoo are all similar to the Kerio webmail and if you have any issues you can always call us.
Moving mail to Junk email with Kerio
Mar 25th
If some spam does hit your in box please please put it into the “Junk Email” folder (and not a Junk or spam folder) and THEN delete it. This helps the Spam filters learn from your actions. More instructions and guidance below:
Outlook and Webmail users please use the Kerio Outlook connector Tool bar:
Kerio outlook connector tool bar
Simply highlight the message and Click the ’spam’ button as shown above.
If a message has been delivered to your ‘Junk Email’ folder and it is not junk please hit the not spam button as shown below:
Kerio Outlook Connector Tool bar
Thunderbird and other mail applications:
Simply drag the message to the “Junk Email” folder. Be careful though Thunderbird often creates a “Junk” folder of its own and other applications use a spam folder but the only folder that helps to teach the filters is the “Junk Email folder”
Thunderbird:
Thunderbird two junk folders
You also need to be careful with the Thunderbird Junk Button: 
this will often move spam into the Junk and not the “Junk Email” folder, this can be changed in the junk settings tab of mail account properties window. Right click on the mail account name and select properties.
Please also remember to empty your “Junk Email” folder every now and again.
Microsoft Internet Explorer Popularity vote
Mar 1st
Those of you who follow the news may be aware of minor but major changes to Microsoft Internet Explorer.
All Windows 7, Vista and XP users who currently use internet explorer will be offered a choice as part of the deal Microsoft reached with European Commission.
Microsoft IE sits awaiting the worlds judgment, like the American high school cheerleader who’s inexplicable popularity is for the first time being put to the test, as the not so popular kids elect a new leader.
A pop-up window will prompt people to choose and install one of 12 different browsers or let them stick with Microsoft’s Internet Explorer.
Kraya recommends users choose anything but Internet explorer. Users are able to select any browser of their own choosing however we would strongly recommend users pick from our top picks:
Mozilla Firefox http://www.mozilla.com/firefox/
Google Chrome http://www.google.com/chrome
Apple Safari http://www.apple.com/safari/
The big question is will the Anti-trust agreement and the fines totaling 1.68bn euros ($2.44bn, £1.5bn) that have been imposed by the EU on Microsoft make any difference? Take a look at the BBC graphic below, IE has a massive dominance in the browser market in the main due to the sheer ambivalence and ignorance of its users, no one (or very few) choose to use IE it was the default, what they had to use and by the point they had learned that there might be a choose out there with had learned IE, so stuck with it not because it was superior but because its what they know.
Browser market share
Firefox has for some time been catching on IE but it still has a long way to go. Its progress has been at lest in part due to its superiority as a browser over IE. However recent updates have left Firefox slower and buggier than ever before. For a browser that has never been advertised in main stream media, unlike Google Chrome, its rise to control a quarter of the browser market has been purely viral.
Google on the other hand has in anticipation of today’s changes embarked on a massive advertising campaign to push Chrome and gain even more control over the Internet, only time will tell just how successful Google ad spending has made it. The question now is will it be money well spent, or will Google find itself the next target of the EU competition and anti-trust regulators?
Only time will tell as is the case of Microsoft, I for one will be eagerly waiting updated browser market share statistics, as I’m sure Mr Gates will be. However I cant help but feel that we have in no way seen the beginning of the end of IE, undoubtedly its share will slip, I just don’t think the EUs Settlement can break what are now years of ingrained habit and apathy.
Further information:
ACER Travelmate 6592 screen fault
Feb 23rd
Folks, I know I said I would blog more in the new year and I will but in the mean time I just wanted to share an interesting point about my laptop screen.
I have an ACER Travelmate 6592, the power supply blew for it last week and after buying what I thought was a genuine replacement only to find it was a dud, I now have the genuine part (from a different supplier). I have now started having issues with the back-light of the LCD display, it would hiss and flicker before dieing completely. I should say this problem occurred on both Windows vista & 7 and on Ubuntu Linux regardless of kernel version.
Thinking the un-clean power from the dodgie replacement power adapter may have damaged the back light bulb I was all for buying a new one and embarking on the daunting task of changing the back-light, until that is I discovered this blog post by Aral Balkan
Running the laptop on mains with the battery in causes screen flicker / black screen, where as running it with just mains or just battery it works fine.
I should also say that if you are running a laptop on mains all of the time you will shorten the life of your battery, therefore removing the battery from all laptops whilst running on mains for a long period of time is not necessarily a bad thing.
The only question is do I want to pay acer to repair my now out of warranty acer travelmate 6592?
Hope this helps some others out there and a massive thanks to Aral Balkan for his blog post.
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.
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
