RealTime, LLC.

DNS Service – beware of deceptive invoice

admin — Fri, 11 Jan 2013 21:18:17 +0000

Hi, RealTime wanted to let you know about a scam floating around. Two of our customers in the past week have received faux invoices from a company named DNS Services. A very legit looking invoice, complete w/ information obtained from public DNS records. Follow link for example of the “invoice” they send to you. Make sure your account payable folks are aware so they can watch out for this.

Using robocopy to copy files from old server to new server

admin — Mon, 17 Dec 2012 17:09:03 +0000

Have you ever copied files from one server to another, yet always ran into permission issues, or folders buried deep that had some customer permissions? After looking around and trying some product, Robocopy seems to handle this chore the best. This is built into Server 2008, in 2003 you need the resource kit tools installed.

What I needed to do was copy files from a 2003R2 server to a 2008R2 server, all while keeping the existing permissions intact.

Microsoft Technet has an article about robocopy. Unfortuately no examples are included. The MS technet wiki has some examples to get you going. The summary is this line in the cmd prompt took care of things for me: ROBOCOPY S:\ D:\Share\ /e /xd MyFolder /B /COPYALL /log:c:\CopyProject.txt /TEE

This was run from a command prompt w/ elevated rights on the target server. Robocopy is self explanatory, the syntax after the command is always the challenge for us non programmers. The first part, S:\ is the mapped drive that I want to copy all of the sub directories from on the old (source) server. You can use UNC paths, or a longer path, like “S:\My documents”, but remember if the path has any spaces, enclose it in quotes.

The next part, D:\Share is the target, where the files are to be copied.

/e needed this to copy all subdirectories.

/xd myfolder is optional. /xd is to not copy a directory. I was testing to make sure this worked as expected.

/B and the /COPYALL are what gets permissions migrated. /B treats it like backing up/restoring the files. /COPYALL grabs all of the file attributes (permissions, owner, archive, etc…)

/log:c:\CopyProject.txt /TEE this last part is also optional. It created a log file (names copyproject.txt) in the root of c: (in this case, but you can set the patch to create this anywhere). the TEE at the end? No idea, I didn’t look that far.

Good luck. I tried the microsoft file migration toolkit as well, but it wasn’t as useful. I imagine if we were migrating the DFS namespace from a old to new server, this product would be the ticket. Download and instructions

Email up to 10GB attachments in Gmail.

admin — Wed, 28 Nov 2012 19:38:38 +0000

Google announced an added feature that allows you to attach large files that are on your google drive to emails sent from your Gmail account. In short, Gmail users also using Google Drive for file storage will have an icon at the bottom of their composed emails that lets them insert a file from Drive. Not much different than just attaching a link to a document in the drive already, but save a step or two, plus notes any permissions adjustments required to allow the recipient to view the document.

Requirements

1. You need to be using Gmail’s new compose and reply experience.

2. Drive needs to be installed on your computer/mobile device for this to function, download here http://drive.google.com/

3. Patience. In trying this out, then searching google groups, it seems this feature will roll out over the next few days. Seems all the articles I read online left that detail out.

Article discussing new feature:

http://gmailblog.blogspot.com/2012/11/gmail-and-drive-new-way-to-send-files.html#!/2012/11/gmail-and-drive-new-way-to-send-files.html

Soon to be available on mobile devices too

Easier way to sync GMail contacts with iOS devices

admin — Fri, 28 Sep 2012 17:45:24 +0000

Now there is a better way to sync GMail contacts with your iPhone and iPad. Requires iOS5 or newer. Link to Google support page

Another weapon in the fight against malware

admin — Mon, 09 Jul 2012 17:53:40 +0000

HitMan Pro, I met these guys at an industry event last month and they have a pretty compelling product we are test driving right now. You can download HitMan Pro from: http://www.surfright.nl/en/downloads/ what they term a second change malware cleaner, is a lightweight, cloud powered malware detection and cleanup tool. Home users can use it once to clean up particularly nasty virus and malware infections on their computers.

Other tools to consider are Trend Micro’s house call: http://housecall.trendmicro.com/

For free protection, try Microsoft Security Essentials, available for download here: http://www.microsoft.com/en-us/download/details.aspx?id=5201

Other easy steps:

1. Turn on Windows Firewall

2. Turn on Automatic Updates

3. Surf using a non administrative (limited user) account on your computer. Simply setup a new account that isn’t an administrator and use that for normal surfing/email and the like. When you need to actually install software, utilize the administrative account. Malware can only install if allowed. If you are logged on w/ an administrator account, the rights to install software are already in place, making accidental infection much simpler

4. Practice safe internet habits: Don’t open unknown attachments and links in emails, don’t click every pop up that comes along, only browse reputable websites.

5. Consider using Firefox w/ privacy oriented add-ons or use Chrome in stealth mode. New version of IE will have some notable privacy features too.

6. Online banking. Use a separate browser for online transactions from what you normally surf with. Bonus points in security for using a browser in conjunction w/ Sandboxie; http://www.sandboxie.com/ If you surf w/ this tool, and regularly clear out the “sandbox”, malware can be a thing of the past for you. I put it on the computer my wife and kids use and they don’t even know it is there, but it keeps mistakes from occurring.

I follow most of these recommendations (sadly, I use admin rights regularly, shame on me) at home and have no problems on my Windows 7 computer. Your results may vary. Probably the largest way I avoid junk is that I just don’t browse to the biggest known malware infested websites.

Take care, Todd

Dothan Chamber event, June Networking Exchange

admin — Wed, 20 Jun 2012 17:24:29 +0000

I received an email Tuesday from the Chamber of Commerce here in Dothan and I see one of our customers, Dothan Magazine, is sponsoring the same event we are. We are a satisfied advertising and marketing customer of theirs. Patrick and his crew are a pretty great group of people. They do quality work for us with our ads and helping us w/ marketing materials, so we look forward to seeing what they are doing at the event. We invite everyone to come out to The Depot off Main on Thursday, June 21st, from 4:30 – 6:30 pm to network and socialize w/ some of your chamber peers.

Event Details

Our new website is up!

admin — Mon, 09 Jan 2012 21:05:04 +0000

After a couple of months of hard work, thank you Brandon at Strategy6, we are releasing our first website update in over two years. The motivation behind it was two-fold; utilize a simpler format for non webmasters like me to update content as needed, and to share information on some of the new offerings, more detail on services that we have had all along, or are adding in the coming months.

From a customer perspective,we have learned a lot about the process to setup a new website. looking back, I think the biggest things we could have done to improve the process were on our end; make sure we know what we wanted to communicate to our audience, understand how we wanted to site to look, navigation basics, what images to use, etc… Better to think this through early than in the middle of trying to get the page live. Working with pros who do this for a living does make a difference.