The IT Guys Blog

Full Story at the Telegraph

Major PC Manufacturers such as Dell have begun to offer alternatives to Windows Vista. Vista was launched in January of this year with great hype. Like all new “must have” products people camped out in the parking lots of retailers to be the first to get their hands on a copy of this ground breaking operating system. You know times aren’t tough when thousands of people pitch tents to wait for a freaking operating system or a cell phone Here we are 8 months later and the verdict is in, Vista sucks.

Sorry Bill, good security isn’t asking me every 15 seconds if I want to let something happen. If I click on something, guess what, I want it to happen! Vista for the workplace is an even worse idea. Most business users aren’t computer savvy enough to know if they want kulsvc124.exe to run anyway. Half the time IT Guys don’t know off hand what a particular process or application is. Case and point: we use Trend Micro Officescan for our corporate desktop protection. It does a pretty good job but it has an application that runs as a random name every time the system boots to prevent malware from disabling it. How would our users ever know if they could trust a random name? Lastly don’t require me to run special hardware or tons of RAM. America is the land of the free and the home of the brave but it’s also the land of the cheap and the home of Walmart. Americans want things cheap, simple, and worry free. Apple does so well because they mastered the last two. Microsoft decided to flip the table and make it expensive, complicated, and a pain.

The secret to a secure operating system isn’t in validating every program or process that may startup. It’s in eliminating the vulnerabilities in the first place. Sure protect the files that the system relies on but do it in a way that doesn’t cause me to make a decision about every little thing. When major manufacturers like Dell start offering Windows XP in place of the new Vista take note, because people want new technology. If they aren’t getting it from Microsoft they’ll get it somewhere else.

Contrary to popular opinion IT Guy’s actually have lives outside of their digital worlds. It’s scary, I know, to think that the guy who fixes your PC at work also manages to maintain a few hobbies on the side. Most IT Guys I know (and I know a lot) have hobbies that don’t involve computers. Personally I enjoy anything with a lot of horsepower. Which is probably why I have a 200 mph motorcycle, a Mustang on N20, and a turbo awd daily driver. Computers are something I typically avoid outside of work. My PC at home (yeah, I only have 1 at home.. I know you were thinking I had a server farm in my living room) is your run of the mill dell dimension. It’s not some home built super computer that causes half the block to go dark when I turn it on. Other IT Guy’s I know are into OffRoading their trucks, motorcycles, golf, and hiking. I will admit I know a few that play a game or two on their home computer too but the biggest geeks I know aren’t IT Guys!

Dymo, the guys that make the expensive labelers that us IT Guys love! (I use the Rhino PRO 5000) Just introduced a CD Labeler that *Drum Roll Please* prints directly on the CD/DVD Disc. These printers have existed before but they were, well the price of a honda civic.

Source: Engadget

Most IT Guys sit down and think about security in terms of firewalls and service packs and all the geeky stuff that they learned in that neat seminar on arp cache poisoning. So it’s no surprise that from a purely digital stand point, most companies are fairly secure

The little followed rule in enterprise is that security must scale evenly across all fronts. Think about it in terms of a mansion you just bought with your lottery winnings. You buy the best security system in the world. It features infrared cameras and perimeter sensors capable of detecting a pin drop. Only you know the code to the alarm. But you don’t even bother to lock your front door. The alarm may go off but it’s probably too late. You may even have video of the thieves but a lot of times they don’t care. In security just like in a fight the most committed wins. There is always somebody more committed to breaking in than you are to keeping them out. The trick is to put enough hurdles in front of these people that they move on to easier prey. Read the rest of this entry »

This one will have the Apple folks up in arms. I say no to the iPhone for business use.

I’m not here to say the iPhone isn’t beautiful or user friendly or any of that. I love the look and feel and it works excellent as a phone/ internet browser. The issue for me is the lack of physical buttons and lack of support for direct push.

Without buttons how would I ever be able to answer all those e-mails while driving my car? I’m sure the State Troopers love that one… But in all seriousness the lack of physical buttons makes the iPhone very tough to use in certain situations. Imagine your keyboard at your desk was a flat sheet of glass. How well would you be able to type without looking at it? Business users like to multi-task and they need tools that allow them to write an e-mail while on the go and still be able to listen to the people in the board room or pretend to.

My other gripe is the lack of direct push technology supported. This is something non-business users wont understand but it’s important for mobile devices to support this. Especially when your company has already spent a dump truck full of money on Exchange or Domino. Devices like Black Berries and Windows Mobile Devices support direct push in some fashion or another. Black Berry makes you pay for enterprise software while Exchange has built in support for direct push. Direct Push gives you the nice link between contacts, calendar, e-mail, notes, etc. So when you get to your work computer it’s already sync’d or if you get your phone stolen you didn’t lose anything. Direct push also has a certain management aspect to it that I won’t go into. But when you support multiple wireless devices it’s nice to be able to centrally manage them.

Hopefully after reading this you don’t have the urge to hunt me down and throw your iMac at me. But if you do, just remember the IT Guy LOVES his iPod.

There comes a time in every IT Guy’s life when he has to suck it up and go to every single computer in the company. It’s something we try to avoid at all costs but some things such as Windows SBS or needing to change a domain name force this dreadful task on us. Many small businesses go with Windows SBS because it’s a good deal, little do they know it makes upgrading when you need to add additional servers a nightmare. There is a tool that will automatically join the new domain and copy the user profile for you all in one click. The User Profile Wizard by ForensiT.

Check it out, it’s one of those use it once in a million tools but it just might save you from spending 30 minutes a computer. When you have to do this to 50+ desktops you’ll thank me.

According to a study recently published by Gartner Open source will be in 80% of software by 2011. Full Article

Do we really want Open Source software anyway? YES! because open source translates to reduced cost. Open Source software is a great thing.

Obviously it leads to increased collaboration and improvement by individuals who otherwise wouldn’t be able to contribute due to those pesky little copyrights and source code they can’t see. But I’ll go up against Gartner’s research and argue that 80% wont be open source by 2011. I would be surprised if 80% of Windows users were using Vista cough, cough disaster cough by 2011. Don’t get me wrong I’m not someone that loves to hang on to old antiquated software and systems. I’m not the admin at your company that can’t part with my NT 4 server running Exchange 5.5 just because “the upgrade to 2003 causes too much down-time.” I love new software and tools but Open Source’s greatest benefit is also it’s biggest pitfall. With everybody making their little contributions to software you end up with a mess of people contributing and they aren’t all working together. This giant developer network is something like a big tree. All the contributers started in the same place, the trunk but by the time you get to the top of the tree there are so many branches along the way it’s a logistics nightmare to try and offer support. Look at Linux it’s been around for a while and it’s completely open source. So why isn’t every IT department in the world running it on their desktops? Corporate open source companies like Red Hat and Suse offer paid for support. The catch, the support is more expensive than traditional Windows/Apple solutions. That puts us back to the reason why we bought open source software in the first place, the price. Oh and by the way Red Hat and Suse don’t exactly give the corporate software away either. So as the head of an IT department why would I chose a harder to maintain, more expensive product? Open Source tools make it cheaper for very experienced home users to accomplish goals that would cost many thousands of dollars in a windows/apple environment. In the IT Department though they are used few and far between. For the record I do maintain and support a pair of linux servers that are basically the heart of our business. They run proprietary software

Swiss Army Wireless Mouse? Not sure why you would expect a knife company to make a good mouse but it sure looks cool! Full Story Here

Source: Engadget

What happened to just being the IT guy? Now we have more names for IT personnel than jobs for them to do. Undoubtedly you’ve heard the basic Systems Administrator, Network Administrator, Programmer, and Director of IT but what about the CIO, CITO, CISO, Computer Operator, Data Architect, Enterprise Operations Director, Add your acronym or funny title here… The sad part is that these names actually dictate the likelihood you will or wont get hired at your next job. By the way if your applying for a “Computer Operator” job, don’t be surprised when the job turns out to be working the deep fryer at Burger King! — You’ve been warned.

List your funny IT titles!

Grand opening of The IT Guy’s Blog! - Almost as exciting as that new server that just arrived…
What you can expect to find here

• Best Admin Advice / Tools
• Coolest New Gadgets
• Submissions from fellow IT Guys
• Interviews with some of the industries lesser known IT Guys. (You know the ones that really run the IT Dept. and not just the press conferences)