Some time ago, I said I wanted to do some posts about mobile technology and the problems that come along with it. Mobile technology is huge right now, and will continue to get bigger as people give up their desktops in favor of notebooks, and increasingly, smart phones. The problem is that businesses still need traditional computer networks, and for people who operate them, mobile technology presents such a shift in assumptions that no one has really figured out how to make it all work together. A lot of work, and therefore money, goes into tying those traditional computer systems together, but mobile computing has a way of undoing all of that effort as soon as you unplug. Mobility will continue to grow in popularity, and we’ve got to find ways to bring the benefits of integrated computing to the mobile world, or risk falling back a few steps and losing some of the capabilities that we enjoyed in the past.

I’ve built lots of these networks, and many types of problems arise in them, even without mobility. But when mobile devices become part of the business requirements, the problems can become show-stoppers. After swearing my share of oaths and vendettas, I’ve come to pin the blame on a feature that appears in every major operating system today: the profile. Your profile is the part of your computer account that stores all of your personal application settings and files. Your desktop background is stored in your profile, for example. The profile also stores your email account settings, your web browser bookmarks, your option preferences for office software, and many other things.

The profile has become so intimately connected to our concept of a user account, that they have come to effectively mean the same thing. Most systems provide only one profile per user, and most applications assume that their settings will be in one particular place in the user’s one-and-only profile. But what if you want to access your files and settings from several different places? In a wired network, we have a few different options to allow this, but it boils down to all the computers sharing some networked store of user accounts and profiles, usually centrally managed by the owners of the network. Each computer can access your profile, so you can use your files and applications from any computer in the system. But mobile users also have mobile computers. Their devices commonly go places where the central network is unavailable, and their users still need to access their data from outside the LAN. They may need to continue working, even when there is no internet access at all. The result is usually some hair-brained scheme where you try to figure out what files you’ll need ahead of time, and remember to take separate copies on your mobile device when you leave. Some people forgo the office desktop altogether, and only use their laptops, while some shuttle their files back and forth with flash drives wherever they go.

I know, some of you are thinking “roaming profiles”. Let me explain, for those fortunate enough to have never worked with them. Microsoft created roaming profiles to address this exact problem. They work by keeping the profile on a central server, and whenever you log onto a Windows computer on your network, your profile is automatically copied to it as part of the logon process. When you log out, the files that you’ve changed are “synced” back to the server’s master copy. That way, you’ve always got a full copy of your profile that you can use if the computer ever leaves the network and can’t reach the server. Unfortunately, the point of this aside is that roaming profiles suck – they’re the most hair-brained scheme of all because they offer the worst possible trade-offs. The sync process is automatic and mandatory, with only the most ham-fisted ways to pick and choose what to sync and what not to sync. Windows profiles tend to get large- large enough that this scheme is not feasible with a VPN over the open internet (we’ll get into that in a later post). Roaming profiles are all-or-nothing, and there’s no way to pick and choose different parts of the profile based on which computer you’re on. Got a 12 GB music collection that you only want in the office? Congratulations, that’s why it takes ten minutes to log in every morning. Also, what happens if you log into two or more computers at the same time? When you log out, they’ll each overwrite the others’ changes, and possibly corrupt the central profile, causing your next login to fail. Profiles can even get corrupted for no apparent reason at all; in roaming profile environments, “delete your profile” is as common a cure-all as “reboot the computer”.

So, if roaming profiles are out, what options do we have left? I’ll be covering some of them in my next post. What’s your take? How do tke your work with you when you go mobile?

This post isn’t so much an opinion piece, as an update on the GCTS business strategy. After much work and preparation, I’m very happy to announce that GCTS will be branching out into a new type of service – GCTS Web Hosting. We’ve been playing with this idea for some time, debating about whether it would be wise to step into such a large and competitive market, and we eventually concluded that we have the resources and opportunity to provide our customers with a service that they need, but often cannot find. Above all, we are very good at hosting websites, and we enjoy doing it.

We wanted to design a hosting service that’s different. Most simply provide a network address and a web server for you to run your site from, with little assistance beyond keeping the power on, and (maybe) providing backups. They don’t offer much guidance on what types of site software to use, and the details of it’s operation is entirely in your hands. Some of the more fully-featured web hosts provide simple web pages for you to add services and files, and manage your own databases, but if you don’t really know anything about web applications, or databases, or DNS records, they are of little help.

Our solution is not to offer a host for websites in general, but a management service for the specific types of websites that we know our customers need. Rather than spending their time trying to figure out which content management system they should use, they give us a description of what they want in a web site, and we handle the details. We have a repertoire of known software and systems that we can customize to build promotional web sites, blogs, online shopping carts, and other types of sites. Because we take over the management of the sites’ administrative issues, we can ensure things like security. In the end, we’re happy because all of our web sites are managed the way we know they should be, and our customers are happy because they’re free to concentrate on their businesses.

So, if you want to take your business online, or you’d like to simplify the management of an existing site, click on the “Email” link on your left, and let us fill in some details for you.

As time goes on, I’m seeing the GCTS blog evolve in my mind from a little “tips and tricks” customer newsletter to a journal of thoughts and commentary on developing the consulting business. This time, I’m going to talk about one of my favorite parts of that business: automation. It’s the process of using, and usually creating, software to make computers take care of themselves, while bothering the human users as little as necessary. This is actually a huge topic, and touches deep academic subjects like cryptography and artificial intelligence. It’s also a central part of the services that we’re developing, to be offered to our current and future customers. If automation is such an important part of our strategy, why would I be talking it up on a public blog? Shouldn’t I keep it a secret, so that the competition can’t copy us? Not really. The most important rule of blogging is to write something you really care about, and I think I’ll drum up a lot more business by showing how much enthusiasm I really have for my work. There’s another reason I’m not worried: our competitors would have a very hard time rolling out the kind of guns that we have. Automation techniques are a lot like diet and exercise. Everybody knows they should do it, but very few actually do effectively. It takes a lot of training and investment before you learn to do anything useful, and most of the consultants working at the small and medium business level just aren’t that advanced.

You’re already familiar with some simple types of system automation. If you have a backup system, it’s at least partially automatic; once it has a new tape, the computer should choose for itself what needs to be saved. If you have an online backup, you don’t even need to change the tape. Most of us (hopefully) have anti-virus and anti-spyware programs that scan the files on our systems and neutralize threats on their own. Programs like Firefox and Adobe can also install new versions of themselves and most PCs have Windows Update activated to automatically apply security patches.

But automation can go a lot further to help you manage your office network. What if you could buy a new computer, plug it into your network, and have it automatically configure its operating system and install all of the software that you use in your office, without any attention from you? What if each day you receive an email containing some business information that you need to save for your records, and you could have the computer recognize it, reformat it, and store it away for you in the proper place, without being prompted? Suppose that you wanted to be informed any time an employee touches a certain file, or that you wanted your computer guy to get a text any time a hard drive got too full. These are automation tasks that each require a different type of software to make them work. One is a problem of configuration management, one requires a custom mail filter, and the other two are matters of system monitoring. There are many other types, and knowing about them is where we specialize.

Why is this stuff so hard? It turns out that getting a computer to just do the right thing is a lot more complicated than it sounds. Since every office is different, canned programs are hardly ever written to meet a specific set of requirements, so automation almost always requires some amount of custom computer programming. Those of you who are familiar with large corporate PC networks or Unix environments are not surprised by any of this; your systems would be impossible to run without automation, and this is all old news to you. But because these options require a lot of sophistication, smaller businesses almost never get the chance to benefit from them. Bridging that gap is one of the primary goals of GCTS.

We are investing our time into researching some very smart and very powerful automation systems, but there are plenty of ways you can explore the technique on your own to help you look after your office and it’s computer system. Here are some ways you can start.

1. Use what you’ve got. You probably already have at least some of the software that I mentioned in my examples earlier, but they might not have all of their features activated yet. Make sure your anti-virus and anti-spyware systems are set to automatically update their signature databases, and make sure they are set to do system scans each day. Also, go to Windows Security Center in your Windows control panel (assuming Windows XP), and turn on Automatic Updates. If you leave your computers on at night, it’s a good idea to schedule the systems to carry out all this activity then, when no one is using them.

2. Automate your backups. Yes, as always, it’s important enough to get it’s own point. If you specifically purchased a backup program, it has a scheduling system that lets you configure regular backups ahead of time. If not, you can fall back on the in-the-box backup feature that comes with Windows. Find it in Windows XP by opening the start menu and looking under Accessories -> System Tools -> Backup. The wizard will let you set the backup to run at regular intervals, and if possible, try to back your data up to a location on a second hard drive, flash drive, or network share.

3. Batch files. Windows batch files are an easy way to script out simple tasks like moving and deleting files or even attaching mapped drives. The technique has been around forever, and is not very sophisticated, but a surprising amount of work is still done by batch files, even today. If you’re familiar with the Windows command line, ask Google for a couple of reference guides and jump in.

4. Scheduled tasks. Use Windows’ scheduled tasks facility (also under Accessories -> System Tools) to run commands on a regular basis. This is the same facility that is used by the Windows backup system in point 2, and it’s good to combine with your batch files from point 3.

5. Macros. Macros are little programs that can control applications like Microsoft Office or Photoshop. They can often be created without actually writing any program code, simply by “recording” your actions in the application and having it replay them. If you want to get into more advanced application macros, check out Visual Basic or Applications.

There’s a famous quote by Larry Wall, the creator of the Perl programming language, saying that one of the great virtues of a programmer is Impatience, the anger you feel when the computer is being lazy. That is the reason we look to automate so much of the computer management business; the machines should be expected to do this stuff anyway! Can you think of any other places where you would like to see automation handle more of the work? Do you know of other types of programs that can be applied to the problem? We’d love to hear from you, so leave a comment below!

A couple of days ago, I said that I was going to start a blog series on tech trends that have been affecting my own computer systems, and how I think those of you who have office networks are feeling the heat, perhaps without realizing it. I planned to do this post on the effects of mobile computing technology, but everything I wrote came out like an 11th grade research paper. So, I’ve decided to set that aside for a little while and write about an experience I had a few days ago.

I went out to a job on an office network, and one of the things I had to work on was a router/firewall with a VPN connection that the client absolutely needed to continue operating. If you don’t know what a VPN is, just know that that they needed it as in “if this thing quits, we can just close the office until we get it back”. The problem is that the device was about 9 years old. They didn’t have the password for it, they’d lost the install disks, and they didn’t know what any of the VPN encryption keys were. Reinstalling the thing from scratch with known settings would require the same work to be repeated on the other end of the connection, in a building on the other side of town. I found a copy of the manual on the internet that said the install disk had a utility to back everything up in case someone accidentally wiped it out, but the program isn’t available anywhere online (natch). This situation is going to take a lot of work, and it’s going to cost them.

Now, please understand that while I certainly like getting paid, I don’t like this to be the reason, and I won’t be any happier than they will. It’s unpleasant to do this kind of work – stressful with no guarantees, and worst of all, completely unnecessary. The disks and passwords can be kept safe in a known location, and the cost to replace that hardware is pretty small, considering that their business depends on it so much. Unfortunately, the situation is also very common, and I see it a lot. As long as the machinery works, it’s far too easy to to assume that it will just continue. People nurse old systems along, thinking that they are saving money, and for a while it looks like they’re right. But when the stuff finally fails, they find out that they were just putting the expenses off. The longer they wait, and the older the machines get, they more hours it’s going to take to fix and replace them, and that translates to higher bills from people like me.

So I’m begging you: please, please, please keep your stuff up to date. Don’t just carry on, hoping that no problems today means there will never be any trouble tomorrow. Be proactive about maintaining your computer systems. If you plan for regular replacements you greatly reduce the surprise and fallout of technical failures because you get them before they get you. Planning ahead also makes your computer consultants a lot happier. Instead of walking into a high stress, DEFCON 1, failure-is-not-an-option situation with an unknown problem and a bunch of angry, desperate people, we can carry out well rehearsed, well understood installations after business hours.

It also helps to be ready for the “computer guy” when things do occasionally go wrong. Get a “computer stuff” cabinet for those manuals and install disks, and don’t throw them out until you get rid of the products that they came with. Also, if you trust your computer consultant enough, ask them to safeguard copies of your administrative passwords in case you somehow lose them. Be sure to ask them how they properly store and encrypt such sensitive information. A competent professional will either have software in mind to do it, or already have such capabilities in place (I do!).

Don’t just run backups; test your backups. Yeah, it’s important enough to get its own little paragraph.

Finally, if you’re not sure how to proceed with planning your upgrades or testing your backups or any of this other stuff, you’re welcome to give us a call. I’d love to have you as a customer.

-A

Hello, my name is Alan, and I’m one of the founders of Green Country Technical Services.

After a few months of Other Things To Do, I’ve finally dusted off the GCTS website, fixed up the design, and now I’m getting on with regular posting. I started this blog intending to talk about trends and observations on the world of technology, but we’ll see where it goes; computer consulting can go very far afield! As with many things, my success here will depend on overcoming perfectionism and just getting something on the screen. So, please bear with me if these first posts are a little rough. I hope you’ll find my perspective interesting enough to return.

To start out, I’ve decided to tackle a few technology issues that have been affecting my own computing experience in a big way, and which I think might figure into your life more than you realize.

I’ll post the first in the series later this week.

-A

Hello, and happy Halloween everyone! Starting a new business is full of exciting and interesting things, and I’m pleased at how cool one recent experience has turned out to be: our new GCTS TV commercial. We started airing it a couple of weeks ago, and it’s been pretty awesome to see our logo pop up on broadcast:

This is one very positive aspect of being an entrepreneur, and I highly recommend it. So go out there and get your business license… and hire us to run your computer network!

-A

Welcome to the newly launched Green Country Technical Services blog! This is where we will be making announcements about our services and new developments at GCTS. Check back soon or subscribe to our RSS feed, and be sure to click on the Home link to check out the main GCTS site.

-Alan

Check back here soon for technical articles provided by Green Country Technical Services.