Life and Kraya by Stephen Ramsay
Posts tagged Stephen ramsay
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.
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 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.
Security Bulletin – Adobe Reader and Acrobat
May 14th
Below is an update to Security Bulletin – Adobe – April 09
Adobe have published a new Security Bulletin and provided updates for Adobe Reader and Acrobat patches. These updates resolve the previously reported vulnerabilities in Adobe Reader 9.1 and Acrobat 9.1 and earlier versions. This vulnerability (CVE-2009-1492) would cause the application to crash and could potentially allow an attacker to take control of the affected system remotely and install Malicious code.
We have already recommended that user consider using alternatives to Adobe reader, this continues to be our current advice. However users still using Adobe should now update and install these patches as soon as practical.
Adobe recommends users of Adobe Reader 9.1 and Acrobat 9.1 and earlier versions update to Adobe Reader 9.1.1 and Acrobat 9.1.1. Adobe recommends users of Acrobat 8 update to Acrobat 8.1.5, and users of Acrobat 7 update to Acrobat 7.1.2. For Adobe Reader users who can’t update to Adobe Reader 9.1.1, Adobe has provided the Adobe Reader 8.1.5 and Adobe Reader 7.1.2 updates.
Kerio Mail Server – Feedback and Updates
May 14th
Posted by stephen in Linux
Kerio have recently introduced a new update for the Kerio MailServer (KMS), which has fast become krayatec’s favoured mail server.
We have now deployed Kerio MailServer 6.2 to most of our clients and despite a handful of teething problems, most are now seeing advantages over Exchange and their previous IMAP based systems.
Feedback from clients has generally been positive, however for two of our clients the switch has not been as pain free as we would have liked and they are still experiencing several issues:
The release notes for the new Update to Kerio MailServer 6.7 suggests that this upgrade will fix most of these issues. The update has now been deployed to our own Kerio system and we are currently testing this in full prior to deployment to our clients systems. After discussing the updates with the Kerio team, we are very hopeful of resolving the above issues. However, it is indisputable that issues may remain with legacy systems, particularity Windows 2000.
Feedback / comments and suggestions for the above issues are always welcome.