Computer Service Business Success and the Need to Focus

Do you own a small business computer service business that needs better marketing results?

Many computer consultants start out thinking the home user, or B2C (Business to Consumer) market is the right place to be; but they quickly realize the difficulty of making a profit as a one-person (maybe two-person) operation catering to the needs of home users.

If you own a computer service business that wants to provide solutions to small businesses, you need to realize that there are a lot of different types of small businesses out there.

#1: Know About Home-Based Businesses and Micro-Small Businesses. A home-based business typically just involves 1-2 computers and an individual. A micro-small business is just one very small step up from that in size, with 5-10 employees and that many or fewer computer systems. If you focus too much on home-based businesses and micro-small businesses, you’ll have a hard time selling a lot of ongoing services agreements. While both types of businesses are technically within the definition of “small business,” they may not be the best clients for your computer service business.

#2: Avoid Targeting Micro-Small and Home-Based Businesses. First off, these kinds of small businesses often have lots of consumer-grade PC’s, which will not be a big help for implementing sophisticated client/server networking solutions. Second, these kinds of small businesses often use pirated software, which will give you major problems when you start to develop long-term technology plans and complex networks. Third, most of these kinds of small businesses will be reluctant, and often unable, to pay for your sophisticated, high-end professional services. Fourth, these kinds of tiny small businesses often believe that IT is not that important to their company, so they don’t need the benefits you are offering. And finally, these kinds of tiny small businesses are usually too small to afford a real, dedicated server and a real client/server network, making your solutions overkill.

#3: Great Computer Service Business Success Resides in Small Businesses with 10 or More PCs. Computer service business owners that target companies with at least 10 PC’s are generally more successful at building strong businesses. At that point, small businesses cannot continue to run peer-to-peer networks. They also cannot afford to wait for volunteers and moonlighters to get around to responding to needs or emergencies. Small businesses services that have 10 or more systems start to get really serious about putting in real client server networks, dependable back-up solutions, reliable power protection and secure firewalls. At this size, small business decision makers usually understand the need for more sophisticated total business solutions.

Source: http://www.itworld.com/channel/58897/computer-service-business-success-and-need-focus

New Security Issues Raised by Server Virtualization

Many organizations are relying on the IT policies, processes and toolsets established in the “pre-virtual” datacenter to manage and protect virtual servers, which makes sense. However, virtualized environments do face the same operational threats and risks as traditional servers. But, there are also some specific server security implications that must be considered.

New Operating System

The virtualization layer, is effectively another operating system in the data center – the first in a long time that brings configuration and patching issues.

The good news is that hypervisors tend to carry a much smaller footprint than a traditional operating system with a correspondingly lower potential for security holes. And you will not find a hypervisor surfing the Internet and downloading code. But at the same time it is still relatively immature product, and vulnerabilities are continually found. These vulnerabilities are usually quickly fixed, but should be monitored and tracked.

The maturity of hypervisor technology also shows in its vetting and certificating infrastructure. Plug-ins and add-ons, for the most part, do not go through the testing and certification processes that we see on standard OS’s which can be problematic.

New Target in the Datacenter

Given its access to multiple Virtual Machines (VMs), the hypervisor is an obvious target for attackers, which if compromised could potentially provide access to a range of servers rather than a single “physical” server. And, you only have to look at the buzz coming out of the Black Hat conferences to understand how much of a target the hypervisor represents.

Intrahost threats

A successful guest breakout, would result in an attacker gain access to all traffic from the virtual machines. This was an attack in a lab, but you can bet these researchers are not the only ones in this race.

Referred to as “Hyperjacking”, an attack like this would lead to a compromised platform, allowing full access to all hosted guests. Malicious software could also disguise its presence from traditional security tools that reside in software layers above the hypervisor.

While from a pragmatic point of view, we have not yet heard of a working prototype or found a virus in the wild that attacks the hypervisor yet; - the writing is on the wall and it is only a matter of time before we do.

Existing Security Tools

The traffic inside the host effectively occurs on a “private LAN”, meaning that traditional network server security tools cannot see it, making it impossible to inspect or protect traffic inside this “dead zone.”

Also, many types of security and monitoring tools need to know what they are protecting and where it is in order to be effective - the mobility of VMS can be problematic here.

Other security technologies like IDS, IPS, Data Leak Prevention and Malware Prevention also can be impacted. The constant change enabled by virtualization can place dynamic demands on any “static” types of security solutions, in even small virtualized infrastructures.

Increased Risk of Sprawl

With virtualization we are now dealing with environments where traditional control systems and processes does not work very well, where IT staff is having to plug the gaps with manual process and tracking, and where new VMs can be deployed in minutes. This means a much higher risk of sprawl in the virtual world than in the physical.

In working with customers we have found that most organizations with reasonable control systems will still have around 30 percent of the VMs in their environment that are unnecessary or obsolete, but it takes an audit to figure out which ones and where they are.

Sprawl also increases complexity. Running more VMs in the environment than you need make it

* More difficult to spot the dangers
* More difficult to maintain configurations, and
* More difficult to troubleshoot

Source: itworld.com/virtualization/59445/new-security-issues-raised-server-virtualization

How To Create an MS-DOS Network Startup Disk in Windows Server 2003

Windows Server 2003 does not contain an equivalent to the Network Client Administrator tool that is included with Microsoft Windows NT Server 4.0. You can use the Network Client Administrator tool to create an MS-DOS network startup disk. You can run the Network Client Administrator tool for the x86 platform in Windows Server 2003.

Set Up the Network Client Administrator Program

• 1. Create a folder that is named Ncadmin in the root folder of drive C.
• 2. Copy the following files from the I386 folder on the Windows NT Server 4.0 CD-ROM to the c:\Ncadmin folder you created in step 1:
• Ncadmin.cn_
• Ncadmin.ex_
• Ncadmin.hl_
• NOTE: You also must have access to the CD-ROM drive letter:\Clients folder on the Windows NT 4.0 CD-ROM.
• 3. At a command prompt, change to the C:\Ncadmin folder.
• 4. Type expand -r ncadmin.*, and then press ENTER.
• 5. Double-click the Ncadmin.exe file in the c:\Ncadmin folder, and then follow the instructions on the screen to create an MS-DOS network startup disk.

Via: support.microsoft.com

some important features in Windows Server 2008 R2

Microsoft plans to release an R2 edition of Windows Server 2008 in 2009 or 2010. Here are the key features of the R2 release that you need to know.

The most prominent is that Windows Server 2008 will solely be an x64 platform with the R2 release. This will make the upgrade to x64 platforms not really a surprise, as all current server class hardware is capable of 64-bit computing.

There is one last window of time to get a 2008 release of Windows still on a 32-bit platform before R2 is released, so do it now for those difficult applications that don’t seem to play well on x64 platforms.

Beyond the processor changes, here are the other important features Windows Server 2008 R2:

Hyper-V improvements: The Hyper-V is planned to offer Live Migration as an improvement to the initial release of Quick Migration; Hyper-V will measure the migration time in milliseconds. This will be a solid point in the case for Hyper-V compared to VMware's ESX or other hypervisor platforms. Hyper-V will also include support for additional processors and Second Level Translation (SLAT).

PowerShell 2.0: PowerShell 2.0 has been out in a beta release and Customer Technology Preview capacity, but it will be fully baked into Windows Server 2008 R2 upon its release. PowerShell 2.0 includes over 240 new commands, as well as a graphical user interface. Further, PowerShell will be able to be installed on Windows Server Core.

Core parking: This feature of Windows Server 2008 will constantly assess the amount of processing across systems with multiple cores, and under certain configurations, suspend new work being sent to the cores. Then with the core idle, it can be sent to a sleep mode and reduce the overall power consumption of the system.

All of these new features will be welcome and add great functionality to the Windows Server admin. The removal of x86 support is not entirely a surprise, but the process needs to be set in motion now for how to address any legacy applications.

Source:zdnetasia.com/techguide/windows/0,39044904,62048917,00.htm