With the influx of wireless technology into the world, and especially the home, the idea of actually protecting your personal information becomes more important.

In the days in which you simply ran a cable from your router to your computer, security wasn’t as drastically important. There was only a physical link to your network, so it was vastly more difficult to gain access to that network. Effectively someone would have to break into your house and plug a cable into your router to get access to what was on there. That wasn’t the only way, but it was essentially the only equivalent to what is possible today with wireless technology.

Now with wireless hot spots all over the globe, and laptops integrating such capabilities, security has become much more important.

There is a concept called “piggybacking.”  This involves driving around and searching for wireless networks throughout the world. This is quite often mislabeled as “wardriving.”  Wardrivers are generally just out to collect information—they don’t actually use the network resources they find. “Piggybacking” is the access and use of someone else’s wireless connection. This could be used to describe someone leeching off of their neighbor’s wireless access point, or someone sitting outside a coffee shop’s hotspot and using their network without actually giving them any business.

Piggybacking is what you’d want to prevent people from doing, and there are two main reasons I would like to highlight:

• Protection of your personal information. On your home network, you may or may not have documents, folders, and other files shared out to other users on the network. You might give your significant other or your children access to music or video files on your computer. There are many ways to do this, but by sharing files there is the potential that someone you didn’t intend to access your home network could see things you don’t want to be seen.
• Protection of your resources. With the idea of ISPs putting limits on the amount of traffic home users can use over the course of a month, having someone leech off your wireless signal could potentially cost you a lot of money. If a neighbor gets access and starts using it to download DVDs, this could cause a problem from a financial standpoint, as well as legal. You could be held responsible for copyrighted material that is downloaded by a rogue user on your network.

If you don’t secure your home network, connecting to it is as simple as selecting it from a list and clicking “Connect,” and suddenly a person unknown to you has capabilities you’d rather them not to have. However, since the influx of home users taking advantage of wireless technology, setting up security has become very user-friendly. Instruction manuals that come with your routers provide the necessary information to secure your network, but I would like to highlight three common methods here:

• WEP. WEP stands for Wired-Equivalent Privacy. It encrypts your data using a security key that you must apply at all computers accessing your network so they can read the data being sent. It isn’t the most secure method, and you can argue that the encryption is weak, but it is widespread and very easy to set up. This will require a password from users that wish to access your network. Despites its weakness based on other methods, it will prevent most unauthorized access to your network.
• WPA. Wi-Fi Protected Access. WPA answers a lot of the issues that WEP has-it is much more secure and takes measures to prevent the encryption from being broken so easily. It is not as widespread as WEP, but is relatively easy to set up if you have equipment that is compatible. It cannot be used in conjunction with WEP-you must pick one or the other.
• MAC Filtering. Every PC and network device has a unique number called a MAC address (MAC stands for Media Access Control, incidentally). It is very important in the world of networking. Most modern day routers have the ability to filter network traffic by checking the computer’s MAC address against a list of allowed addresses. If it does not match, the computer will not be able to access the network. This sort of setup is more advanced and calls for a little bit more administration—it requires you to obtain the MAC address of each device on the network and enter it into the router. By itself it isn’t the most secure method (it doesn’t encrypt data for instance, just prevents access), but used in conjunction with WEP or WPA it can help add a layer of security.

One more thing that I would like to point out: for most home networks, having multiple layers of security isn’t something to worry about. My suggestion is that you should just make sure that a random person will not be able to access your network. Secure your network, but use the method that is easiest for you (which in most cases is WEP).

None of the methods I described above are fool-proof: every single one has a way it can be cracked. But chances are very good that most people that understand how to break through these security measures aren’t going to have much interest in the average home network.

I’d like to share with you a recent customer service interaction I experienced. My father just turned—let’s say a significant age—and I wanted to get him something special. When I was home last August, I spotted three old sheriff’s badges mounted artfully in a shadow box in one of our favorite shops. (My dad is a cowboy trapped in a CPA’s body.) Since it had been the better part of a year since I had been there I wasn’t sure if it was still available. I called the store a couple of weeks ago to inquire, and the woman, Sarah, assured me she had enough stock for me to figure out whether I should ship it or if my aunt could pick it up.

The day before the big birthday, I called Sarah back to purchase. She had already pulled the best one from stock and held it for me, and she didn’t even know exactly when my dad’s birthday was. We completed the credit card transaction when she offered to wrap it for me and have it ready in an hour for my aunt to pick up. In all, we spent over 5 minutes on the phone making small-talk, laughing, and figuring out that Sarah used to work with my parents at the resort where they had their coffee shop! My dad loved the gift, was completely surprised I remembered it from last summer, and was impressed I coordinated the exchange from 800 miles away.

I believe that excellent customer service principles translate across all business, so I can adapt this example from retail to our work in IT at Fandotech:

• She anticipated my needs and pulled the best sheriff’s badge shadow box for me. Whenever possible, the field technicians and I try to anticipate what parts they should bring onsite based on the symptoms we’re hearing. We don’t have shelves full of parts ready to go out the door, but we often have at least a test modem, video card, patch cables, etc. that the techs can use to help troubleshoot with a minimum of wasted time for you.
• She made me feel like a valued customer even though what I was buying wasn’t expensive. There are items in that store that reach and exceed $1,000 and would warrant special gift wrap and a little extra attention. Fandotech has customers that range from spending very little with us to using us for their entire network and hardware solutions. Our goal is to help all our customers feel valued regardless of what they pay. We never know when attention to the smaller items will translate to a bigger project.
• She established immediate rapport and created a certain trust and comfort level that continues even now. When I go back to Northern Michigan this summer, I already have on my itinerary to visit Tampico in Leland and hopefully meet Sarah in person and buy some beautiful Mexican jewelry from her. It can be difficult to establish rapport with a customer who is dealing with a major server or hosting meltdown, but we still try to match that sense of urgency, assure the customer we are doing our best, and deliver a quick resolution. Then when the customer is dealing with a less urgent issue we can continue to demonstrate our professionalism—maybe even have a couple of laughs!
• My positive experience has renewed my loyalty to her business. Not only do I plan to purchase from that store this summer, but I know I can call Sarah to help me with upcoming present ideas for my entire family. Her level of service encourages me to tell my friends and family how helpful she was and hopefully create more business for her store. At Fandotech, we hope that when you have a positive customer service experience you’ll share that with us as well as your friends and colleagues. Even more important, if you ever feel you’ve received a negative service experience please let us know. We always welcome your feedback and want the chance to make a wrong situation right.

A new feature of our website is “Dear Sarah” where you can email me questions or comments related to IT and customer service. I encourage you to contact me to introduce yourself if we haven’t corresponded yet, share ideas about how I, along with the rest of the Fandotech team, can make your experience better, or what kinds of information would be useful for me to share in the column. As for Tampico in Leland, MI I think I need to have a conversation with Sarah about having us create and host their website and e-commerce so I can order what I want online any time of day…

Sarah C. Marino

Basically, anything that is executable (able to run). You’re generally safe with picture files, text files, and the like. However, it still pays to scan first.

Here is a very short list of the most common file types to watch out for:

• exe
• zip
• scr
• vbs
• bat
• com
• pif
• asp
• doc
• xls

Now this doesn’t mean that if you get one of these files it’s automatically a virus. A “.zip” file may be nothing more than a set of compressed files your friend sent you to look at. A “doc” or “xls” file may simply be an MS Office file. It’s just that these file types could also be viruses.

A couple other virus tricks you need to be aware of:

1.) MS Office files can contain what are called “Macro Viruses.” Without getting into too much detail, these files can run a “macro” (a macro is a mini-program run from within another program) that can be as destructive as any “regular” virus. So, my advice on MS Office attachments is not to open them unless you are expecting them. If they just show up, verify with the sender first.

2.) You need to look out for extra extensions added to an attached file. For example, you may have something like “mypicture.jpg.vbs”. In fact, if you don’t have your computer set to view file extensions, it may just look like “mypicture.jpg” and omit that last “vbs” part, thus appearing to be just a jpg picture file, when actually its a Visual Basic Script file. If executed, it will happily infect your computer with a virus.

So, be careful out there!

Rob Ljunggren

When we are thinking about disaster recovery (DR), we all fall into the trap of thinking that we can send data anywhere in the world that we want and that it will happen at the “speed of light,” literally instantaneously.

As it turns out, the speed of light in the digital age is surprisingly limited. Admiral Grace Hopper (USN), in explaining this problem to Admiral Richter, told him the problem is that it takes information, at the speed of light, 1 nanosecond to travel 11.24 inches. That means that it takes 20 milliseconds for information to go from Boston to LA, it takes 375 milliseconds to travel from Boston to India and back. Note that communications equipment has miles of logic circuits inside and it can take up to 10 milliseconds to traverse a complex router. This fixed relationship between time and distance is called latency.

Latency accumulates between two end points of information transmission due to distance, number of equipment nodal points and the efficiency of the I/O software at each end. It adds up fast to make transmission of distance slow.

So why do we care? Most backup software does billions of reads and writes in an hour to copy information to the other disk system. If the other disk system is simply moved 3000 miles away, every write function is now waiting 40 milliseconds (round trip latency) for the acknowledgement the action was completed and thus can move on to the next write function of the copy. The distance factor has just slowed down the copy by increasing the amount of time it will take to complete the copy.

If it takes 1 billion “writes” in 1 hour to copy a database, now the same number of write functions will take 1 billion times 20 milliseconds, or 55.5 hours!

So how far is fast? The answer is that most backup software can run without extending the wait time effectively over a distance of about 100-120 kilometers (60-80 miles).

This means that real-time backups are still a local design issue, that’s why Fandotech is your local data center.

John W. Boyd, Jr.

“It’s the ECONOMY stupid!”

James Carville wrote the above message on the whiteboard where the then candidate, Bill Clinton, would see it every day before he went out on the stump to campaign for office. The point of this exercise? Bill would get wrapped up in talking about whatever came to his mind each day and lose focus on the real issues. This daily reminder was meant to help reel him in.

It’s even more important today for each business to stay focused on the real issue—It’s the Economy!

We at Fandotech are no different than any other small business and we have to stay focused on the fundamentals: cash flow. Cash flow is the equivalent to a loan for us. If we deliver a service to a customer this week and pay our people this week, but our customer doesn’t pay for 90 days, we have to borrow money to cover the difference in time. If everyone delayed payments for 90 days we’re missing a quarter of annual revenues.

MSP businesses cannot assume the liability of being the bank for the clients. Therefore we need to put both incentives and penalties into contracts to insure timely collections for our valuable services.

When clients pay ahead, we can entice them with a point or two of discount.

When they delay, we must be business-like and disciplined; ready to enforce the late fees and collection fees. Every time we compromise on these when a client is excessively late in paying us, we are losing money and devaluing our services in the client’s eyes.

Even in tough times, good clients value our service enough to want us to be their MSP next year. BUT if we don’t manage cash flow this year, your MSP may be the one to provide the service next year.

John Boyd