Life and Kraya by Stephen Ramsay
Posts tagged Kraya
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
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.
Busy and Exciting times at krayatec
Jun 10th
Well I have struggled to post much over the last few weeks just because it has been such a busy and exciting time for us. So before publishing the monthly security bulletin I wanted to share some of what we have achieved over the last few weeks.
Nine Clients have had new network or servers installed a massive feet and a lot of migration work, all of these are now using Cent OS 5 (Linux) servers and all are using Kerio mailserver. So far so good, a handful of teething issues left and one or two bumps on the road but all in all relatively smooth and no major hick-ups. I think the biggest issue for everyone is that all of this work is included in our unique Strategic Technology Partnership, thus these clients have the best and most up-to-date systems and with no capital out lay for our clients.
Two Windows Servers died, I would say unexpectedly but is the death of a windows server ever unexpected?
The first Windows server to die was during a scheduled and upgrade of their other windows server to Linux this was completely unrelated to Migration as the server that died was not being touched. Unfortunately because of some proprietary software used by the client it had to stay as windows. It turned out to be a hard drive failure, never simple to fix under windows, but luckily they were set up with mirrored drives.
The second Windows failure was more severe and I am really proud of the team, the (new) Client phoned us to say there server had died could we help. Their motherboard was dead and as you may know on windows that’s terminal, and you are looking at a complete server rebuild (3 – 5 days). Well 24 hours later we had completed a full migration and they had a Linux server operational on site. All of their files and documents were recovered, the domain control was restored (samba) and all of their email imported to Kerio Mailserver. Unsurprisingly the clients are very happy and have signed up right away to our Strategic Technology Partnership.
On top of all that we have had a total of four new clients join our Strategic Technology Partnership, which is excellent news and they are all already seeing the benefits of working closely with krayatec and benefiting from our unique style and approach.
So interesting times at krayatec. Now on with the boring monthly security bulletins.
Kerio Mailserver Upgrade from 6.6 to 6.7
May 18th
Over the next few weeks Kraya will be upgrading everyone who currently uses Kerio to the latest version of the mail server software. If you have been directed to this blog post, it is probably because your upgrade is happening soon. Please read below to understand how this might affect you.
The latest update to Kerio Mailserver fixes a number of bugs including slow response times when using Outlook and the issues with the Kerio Offline Outlook connector consuming large amounts of RAM. It also fixes an issue with Thunderbird incorrectly mapping default folders such as trash and junk.
More detailed information on all of the changes can be found in the release notes for Kerio Mail server 6.7.0 here. However you should note that this information is aimed at techies not users.
Information for each user base:
Thunderbird and other users using IMAP accounts
- You should notice no changes to your email client. We will be looking at users accounts where duplicate folders have been highlighted to us over the next few weeks to ensure these are removed and mapped correctly.
Web Mail users
- No action is needed, when you next log in you may notice a few minor adjustments to the operations in web mail.
Outlook Users
- A new version of the Kerio Outlook Connector needs to be installed. When you open Outlook for the first time you will be greeted by a message asking you if you want you upgrade now, the answer is YES. The upgrade will take a few minutes and your Outlook will restart. Please take a look at the Screen shot links below for both Windows XP and Vista.
Windows XP Screenshots and Upgrade walk through
Windows VISTA Screenshots and Upgrade walk through
As always if you have any issues or questions please do not hesitate to get in touch.
