IT Support

A customer of mine called me late Saturday night to say they couldn’t login to their office server and they had not received some important emails due. I tried to login and sure enough I could not access the server.

The following Sunday morning I drove to their office at 7:30 am to reboot the server, but the server was fine, so checked the normal stuff like remote access, exchange services etc and again all was fine. So then decided to check the internet connection and there found that BT had changed the static IP address to the site.

This site is a shopping centre with footfall services, car park services, 24/7 security, etc and BT decided that it is acceptable to paralyse a business because of an outstanding sum of £87.00.

I spoke at length with BT on Monday morning, why wait until Monday I hear you ask, well believe it or not BT do not have business support on a Sunday, so they can paralyse you and then stop you contacting them unless it is a weekday. I spoke to an overseas call centre as per usual and they were quick to blame their automated systems for the static IP address service being withdrawn over the outstanding amount. They refused point blank to do anything about it until the bill was paid.

BT are untouchable and sadly have no ethics. Why didn’t someone call the shopping centre and say your service will be withdrawn in the next x days unless this bill is paid. Nope they just sit there and pull the plug at their discretion.

I have recommended they move away from BT at their earliest opportunity to a company that has ethics, 24/7 business support and will speak to you if there is a billing issue.

I strongly advise all my customers to avoid BT unless it is the only option available to them, they are the worst and most difficult company I have the displeasure in dealing with.

Further to this and to add insult to injury, the bill had been paid on time and it was BT’s system that failed to pick up the payment. Brilliant. I’ve suggested the customer claim free time and my costs for going to site on a Sunday. We now have to wait up to 2 hours before service is restored.

A while ago a got an urgent call from a customer to say that they fear that their system had been hacked because when sat in front of their computers, the cursor could be seen to be moving around the screen and clicking on ‘things’.

Well this was really odd I thought, so off I went to visit the customer. They were concerned about the security of patient data. Sure enough I sat on one of their computers and the cursor was moving, clicking on boxes and the text was changing.

But it was all too organised. The cursor wasn’t looking for anything important, it just appeared to be doing every day tasks.

Bizarrely the customer had recently replaced all of their old wired keyboard and mouse kit with new wireless kit and guess what, 5 of the wireless devices had connected together, so movement of the mouse and keyboard in one office was showing and cursor movements and keyboard input in another, and because they all had the same PC equipment with the same screens, all the movements tied up exactly with the boxes and text on the screen.

Now I didn’t think this was possible, but sure enough it was happening. A quick tour around the offices and pressing the wireless sync button on each device sorted out the problem. I had never seen this issue before and certainly never seen it since.

I realise that laptops have been around a long long time, but I still think that referring to laptops as laptops rather than mobile computers is a mistake. You see we refer to desktop computers as well, desktop computers, to me it makes sense and here is why.

Essentially, laptops are not designed for your lap, they are portable computers to be used at a desk.

Recently I’ve had a number of laptop users having hardware issues ranging from overheating, crashed hard discs, knackered batteries, broken screens and damaged power sockets and power leads.

The worst place to use a laptop is on your lap. Every time you move you risk tugging the jack socket when plugged into the mains or bouncing the heads on the hard disc when you jolt the laptop. Some have protection against this, but moving a laptop whilst it is turned on can subject the HDD to gyroscopic forces across the axises of the drive. I never recommend moving a laptop whilst it is turned on.

Next is overheating. There is evidence around of people suffering quite serious burns or reactions to the heat generated by a charging laptop. When the heat becomes uncomfortable many people will grab a cushion or pillow to insulate themselves from the heat. The problem with this is that a cushion or pillow is an insulator and will cause the laptop to get hotter and hotter especially if the side vents are covered by said cushion or pillow. If the fans are running full speed on a laptop, then the vents may well be blocked by fluff or a physical barrier such as clothes or cushions. Do not place a laptop onto a cushion or your bed to use it, move to a table and allow the air to circulate around the base of the laptop. Heat will also damage the battery and shorten its life.

Now I know not everyone is an Apple fan, but one of the best design features on their laptop range is the Magsafe power adapter, the slightest tug on it and the magnetic power connector disconnects from the laptop charging port, unlike non Apple laptops where a tug on the power lead can result in broken leads or at worst a dislodged or broken power socket on the motherboard of the laptop. Again this is another reason why a laptop should not be used on your lap especially when charging..

Batteries are another issue, you should charge and discharge a laptop battery, not leave it plugged in permanently. Never attempt to charge a battery that is already at 100% charged even if your device has charge protection. You see the systems needs to apply a charge before the circuitry knows it is full, this process can cause over charging. This applies to most modern devices. Also never fully discharge and recharge a lithium ion battery regularly. It should only be necessary to do a deep cycle to re-calibrate a battery every 30 or 40 charges. I recommend letting a battery discharge by at least 60% to 70% before attempting to recharge. This allows the circuitry to work correctly. If you want to have your laptop permanently attached to the mains, you may be able to remove the battery. This will prevent potential overcharging and overheating the battery. Remember though, if you have a power failure you will not be protected.

Sadly a friends son had the feared HDD clicking noise and it finally died. When I told him he had lost everything on the computer he was lost for words. He kept asking have I lost my music, have I lost my photos. Of course the response is yes, if the HDD fails you will loose everything on your computer. Unfortunately he had not even created the manufacturers recovery discs. I will have to talk to the manufacturer to find out if they will sell him a set of recovery discs. This was a hard lesson to learn, especially where photos are concerned as they a irreplaceable. Music can be downloaded again (Assuming you own the original of course.).

I’m afraid that I blame the manufacturers and retailers for not explaining the importance of creating recovery discs. It should be the first thing you do when you start you laptop for the first time. This can also apply to desktop computers where the manufacturer has not included any recovery discs in your package. Buy some DVD’s (You normally need 2 or 3) and following the instructions to create your restore discs then at least you can restore the computers operating system should you suffer a hardware failure. Manufactures should continually bug you to create these discs until it is done.

My customer was having a new broadband service installed. I get a call from BT as the on site contact, to confirm the installation date, mind you that took 3 calls from BT from different departments before the date. Anyway router arrives by courier and BT ring to ask me to confirm the router had arrived and arrange installation. An Openreach engineer duly  arrives and installs the router, where is the ADSL filter he asks. No idea he is told, the box was not opened, shouldn’t there be one with the router. Yes he said. When asked if he had one on his van he said no. What!!! an Openreach engineer who’s sole job is the installation of broadband services does not carry spare ADSL filters on his van, I don’t believe it. So he contacts his office and they arrange shipment of said ADSL filter. One arrives in the post in a little jiffy bag within a few days and a second one arrives in a bloody great box sent by courier, how expensive was that. I then get a phone call to ask if the ADSL filters had arrived and if so can I install it. Cheeky sods.

A while ago I mentioned about a customer with broadband supplied by the Post Office, a company that employs support staff that do not know what a static IP address is.

Well this customer decided to move from the Post Office to BT. Now you know I’m not a great fan of BT, but hey ho, the customer wanted the BT TV services including the sports channels and BT were the only company offering fibre broadband in his area.

The customer placed an order by telephone with BT but heard nothing for 2 or 3 weeks. When they rang BT to find out where their broadband service was they said that the order had been cancelled because of incomplete information, why they didn’t ring the customer and ask for the information I have know idea. Anyway they place the order again. Now this customer also runs his office from home so the telephone is extremely important. During the ordering phase BT said that there was a likelihood that the telephone number might change but the customer could request that this doesn’t happen. Why would a customer want to change their telephone number anyway and why say it will happen but they can keep their old number, doesn’t make sense. Anyway the order was placed with a request to keep the existing telephone number, but guess what, it didn’t happen they now have a new telephone number, so BT ignored the request anyway, well done BT for screwing someones business over. I haven’t heard of this before especially when the service is from the same cabinet in the same village, only when a circuit is moved to a new exchange.

I’ve got to go over to the customers tomorrow to check things out and see if BT can give them back their number (Doubt it) and configure the routing between his office and the new broadband connection. Oh BT.

Update: The customer did get his number back. Remember above I mentioned that BT had cancelled his order well guess what his number was allocated to the cancelled order which is why he could not have it associated with his new order and why he ended up with a new telephone number. Wouldn’t you think that if BT cancelled their own order they would release any associated numbers etc so this doesn’t happen. Well I guess not it is BT after all.

Back on 4th Jan 2014, I posted a story about how the Post Office tech support guy didn’t know what a static IP address was, well on Wednesday this week the same customer had to ring the Post Office again because his broadband was down. He had had an engineer visit the day before to fix a very noisy line but his broadband was still down.

So, he calls the Post Office and a lady on the tech support desk suggested that he reset his router and then leave it for a couple of hours for things to settle down. However, his broadband never reconnected and he rang me is desperation. So I drive a 50 mile round trip to sort out the problem.

When I get there I login to the router and check the logs which quite clearly pointed to an authentication error, meaning the username and password were likely incorrect. So I ring the Post Office. I speak to a very apologetic lady on the telephone who confirmed to me that authentication was in fact correct although I hadn’t confirmed nor asked for the username and password at this point. She could see on the logs their end that the account was OK, but the connection was failing to give out an IP address which is why the internet connection was down, and indeed I could see on the router that there was no public IP address. Because of the problem the customer was experiencing it was beyond her capabilities (Well off script shall we say) and she would have to push the query through to 2nd tier support.

At this point I say, can you give me the username and password of the broadband account please so that I can confirm that they are correct. Well she did, and they weren’t. When resetting the router of coarse, the username and password were reset. Once I had entered the correct values, up comes the connection. It turns out that the authentication log files she had looked at were before the customer had been asked to reset his router which of coarse would have been correct at the time and before the reset.

It really pee’s me off how tech support can ask people to reset devices then effectively walk away without going through how to check that the connection is correct, and I have never come across a situation where waiting a couple of hours after a reset is needed before the connection is re-established. Very poor service indeed.

So we have a new customer. They have decided to invest heavily in an Apple solution, lots of iMacs, lots of MacBooks and Apple Xserver and Apple RAID, all good you would think except both Xserver and the Apple RAID are end of life with no replacement available from Apple since they withdrew from the server market. Their solution of installing server on a Mini Mac is not really a commercially viable option in a mission critical environment, however I digress.

What backup procedures do you have? I ask, “Oh we use Time Machine on the server, then we take a backup of the Time Machine files as a secondary backup”.

Really I say and how reliable would you say that is. “Its very reliable,” came the response, “we have never had to do a restore.”

Wait a minute I say, that is not what I asked, what is the reliability of you backups, are they sound are they free from corruption, is the backup media is a good state, how do you know the backups will restore when you need them if you have never had to do a restore. He looked perplexed, we have never had to do a restore so everything is good.

No it is not I reply, I suggest you try restoring some as soon as possible, not only that, but you restore from a backup of your time machine. He still hasn’t done it yet, I’m keeping my fingers cross that they don’t suffer a catastrophic failure any time soon. I will keep reminding him until he has done it.

Had a rather annoyed customer wanting to return a nice new HP notebook/tablet the other day.

Whats wrong with it, it is no good he replied, when it boots up it keeps asking for a password.

At what point is it asking for a password?.

When its booting up its rubbish, it never used to ask for a password, send it back and get it replaced.

Let me take a look I ask.

So I get my hands on the nice new laptop in perfect working order and sure enough it does ask a password, after it boots up and his son tries to login. His son had being playing around and set a password on his account but couldn’t remember it, so as far as they were concern the laptop was broken and no good. More amazingly his dad who bought the laptop to me uses a laptop for work, I was going to suggest that the best coarse of action would be to find the box, package it up, sell it and return to pen and paper, but I guess it keeps me busy.

Back on September 17th 2014 I wrote about a customer waiting on some BT hole diggers to dig up their carpark ready for an installation of Fibre. Well, they finally turned up and guess what, they had a bit of soft digging to do, basically across a bit of flowerbed to the wall of the office and they removed a few block pavers, and there was BT saying they would have to dig up the carpark, this that and the other, hence the dispute with the landlord and when they finally arrive on site it is nothing like was predicted. So much for the BT surveyor that had turned up previously an said what needed to be done.

So the cable is installed, but talk about the easy route, they placed the incoming connection in the middle of a meeting room wall about 300mm up from the floor a real eyesore. No trunking either.

Why didn’t they route the cable to the corner of the room or where the existing BT services enter the office near to the DP. There was already ducting in place for that.

BT subsequently rock up to do their bit, sadly I was not on site because they would have had a rocket had I been there. The company was installing some CCTV around their own premises and routing the cable back to the server room. This involved removing a ceiling tile to access the roof space and bring the cables in. So the BT engineer (I use the term loosely) decided, in his infinite wisdom, it would be acceptable to drop the fibre tube straight through the same opening, straight through the top of the server cabinet and install the hardware, what a complete mess, there it was a piece of white tubing hanging in mid air resting on the suspended ceiling frame, not in trunking, not clipped to the wall, not routed along the floor and up through the bottom of the cabinet as is the normal method.

When the 2nd BT guy turned up to fit the final bit of hardware he was told not to do anything until he had routed the fibre cable correctly. Much to his annoyance he did the job, but he could not disconnect the fibre as it wasn’t his job, so there he was trying to manipulate a 1U rack mounted fibre unit through all the other cables and hardware in the cabinet, you couldn’t make it up. He was getting grumpy, but I reminded him that he wouldn’t be doing this extra work if his colleagues had bothered to install it correctly in the first place.

A few years back I got an urgent call to se if I could sort out a server problem at what would become a new customers.

Now this was a family run business that had spent little on IT, but the person running it (The IT that is) had somewhat lost focus. Essentially the call was, can you get here urgently our server is broken and we don’t know what to do.

When I arrived, there was the IT guy sat in his office with the server is pieces while he forensically tried to identify the cause of the problem. Now essentially what had happened was that they had had a major virus attack on the server. It had blue screened and would not reboot. Norman AntiVirus had failed miserably to stop the attack. The IT guy had removed the drives and was scanning them on his laptop via an external adapter hoping to isolate the problem. I’m not sure quite to what end though.

While he was doing this the whole business was going down the pan. I arrived 3 days, yep 3 days after the problem occurred and this guy had made no attempt to rebuild the server and get the business running. There were 4 office staff and 3 engineers and 2 sales guys sat around twiddling their thumbs.

I ordered 4 new discs and the following day returned to rebuild the server. Sadly their backup policies were shoddy but I managed to recover about 70% of their business files and get the business up and running. We priced up a new shiny rack mounted server with RAID and proper file management, accounting and backup which was installed the following month.

Well, further to my post on the 14th November, BT OpenReach did indeed turn up to install our new fibre lines, except when I said lines (Plural) to the BT guy he said nope, only got one on my job sheet. Well would you believe it, about 15 minutes later another guy turns up from Quinns, a subcontractor to BT to do the other socket. So there they where sat side by side on the floor of the new server room each working away on their own socket. I cannot believe that when an order is placed on BT for a service to the same address at the same time that they cannot determine that a single engineer visit will cover both jobs, how inefficient and expensive must that have been. When I spoke to the Quinns guy he said that he regularly has to travel from Gloucestershire to South Wales to do installations. Remember back on 2nd September I mentioned a guy who worked for Kelly’s (Another BT subcontractor) now he told me that he regularly travelled up from Cardiff to do work in Gloucestershire. OK these subcontractors work for different companies, but surely it cannot be difficult to regionalise the areas these companies have to cover. No wonder our line installation, line rental and other BT service costs are going up and up when you have the total and utter disorganisation that is BT.

Well the engineer turned up and it was the chap who I mentioned in my post on 2nd September 2014. I ask him if he is doing both lines at the same time, nope only one on my job list, well that is until he looked further through his job list and sure enough he was down to do both lines.

So the good news is both lines installed, the better news is BT have confirmed we can have FTTC, hooray. We also have an FTTC install date as well so so far so good.

So, the order for 2 analog lines has been accepted by BT. These lines were ordered at the same time going to the same building.

Now the best bit. BT have given an install time on one line for Friday 7th November between 8am and 1pm and the second line between 1pm and 6pm. Now anyone in their right mind would think hang on, an engineer could install both these lines at the same time.

I’m hoping the the BT engineer is the same for each install and will see the error in BT’s plan. We shall see.

Over the last few years I’ve lost count of the number of times I have emailed staff and customers to make them aware of opening attachments from an unknown source.

One customer even suffered at the hands of the CryptoLocker which started to encrypt a network share. Once I had recovered the data I locked down the TMP folders to ensure that ZIP files and EXE files could not run from these locations. This does have a knock on affect of stopping legitimate applications installing if the try to run from these locations, however that is easily overcome.

Last week I had a frantic call from a lady who had received an email purporting to contain an invoice, but the email was from an unknown source. So she proceeded to open the attachment which was in the form of a word document and then was prompted to enable macros’. Instead of contacting me first to find out if this was a safe thing to to, she continued, her PC started to behave erratically then blue screened on her. My advice was to turn off the computer and leave it until I could take a look.

I’m not sure if it is more to do with curiosity than anything else when it comes to attachments. There seems to be this external force telling you you must open this attachment whether you know it is legitimate or not. Still I suppose if IT was plain and simple and these problems did not exist then I might well be out of a job.

I need to order 2 FTTC services for a customer as part of a new network installation and VOIP telephone service in preparation for an office move.

The customer is moving into a large industrial estate, so I used the customers existing ADSL service provider to do a service check on FTTC based on the postcode and actual address to narrow it down and yes according to their systems we can get FTTC at between 25Mbps and 35Mbps down and 6.1Mpbs and 7.7Mbps up. Fantastic and a vast improvement on their current bonded ADSL solution which as best provides about 5.5Mbps down a 1Mbps up. Even BT’s wholesale checker says it is available and even gives the cabinet number associated with the service and the potential speeds we will get.

Now here is the rub, BT cannot and will not confirm that FTTC is available until they have a telephone number on which to run a test, WHAT!!!, This is BT, they own everything telecom but they cannot tell you what services are available in a particular area. Even BT say they are not sure the service is available and won’t until the lines are installed. So I now have to order 2 x analog lines which may be wasted if FTTC is not available. I have no choice but to order these on a 12 months minimum contract at a cost of £210 to find out if I can purchase the rest of the services I require. I will also be expected to start paying line rental as soon as the lines are live. Non of the service providers will give us a cast iron certainty that we can get the services. In this day and age this sucks. If BT cannot deliver I will then have to order another 2 analog lines with bonded ADSL to get a half decent service that may or may not be good enough to support both data and VOIP. The lead time is critical for us moving but if, after installing the lines, the FTTC service is not available, then my lead times go out of the window.

We have spent weeks speccing a telephone system, costing it and deciding on a provider and it could all go out of the window because BT don’t know their arse from their elbow. Its beggars belief that we as a country have to put up this this crap from the only supplier in the country that can supposedly deliver the goods. ARRRRRGGHHHHHH!.

I found out today that a customer who as been negotiating with the office landlords to get fibre installed to his office finally got the go ahead. He confirmed with with ….. wait for it …… BT. BT confirm a date for the hole diggers to arrive on site. The customer made sure that the car park was kept clear so the hole diggers would have a clear run at the weekend. He waited patiently for them to arrive, but sadly they didn’t. Not sure if it was BT or Carrilion that let the side down this time. Either way BT is in the mix.

Update:- The ISP has told the customer that the BT contractors arrived on site on a particular day. The provider was insistant that the contractors arrived but no one was there. When the customer told them that they were a security company and that neither their office CCTV or 24 hours guards had any evidence of a visit from the BT contractors, they didn’t know what to say. The customer is still waiting.

Now you might think by now that I had it in for BT, well yes I suppose so, seeing as most of the telecoms problems I have, do indeed involve BT. Anyway a customer needed a static IP address on the broadband connection to access a server. Their broadband is provided by BT. So I speak to them and order said static IP address and the lady I spoke to was very helpful and even gave me the static IP address that would be allocated. I updated the customers DNS records with a new A record to point to the new IP address, rebooted the router as they suggest (after waiting 24 Hours) and it didn’t work.

I checked the email then the lady sent through to confirm the transaction and this email also confirm the IP address we were to use. So I ring customer services and after 25 minutes on the phone the guy I was speaking to was struggling to find any details. From the chuntering I could hear on the line he was trying this system and that system, but could not find the IP address in question, so he suggested he would put the order through again. OK I said, will the IP address stay the same as I have updated the DNS records I say. Don’t know came the reply. OK, I said what will the IP address be. Oh I can’t tell you that you will have to wait to see what is allocated. Hang on a minute I say, the lady that I dealt with before gave me the IP address as we spoke on the phone, whats changed. Then he says, no problem, I’ve found it now.

In the meantime there was a link on the email from BT confirming the transaction and the IP address to allow me to track my order, so this I did and the order said completed, but the completed date was the 16th September, a whole 8 days in the future, clever BT. So I tell the guy on the phone and after he searched for more details, finally gave up and suggested I ring broadband tech support.

OK so another call this time to Tech Support and again, BT struggled to find any details of my static IP address on the system. Trying this, trying that until eventually the lady says. You will have to reboot the router again, perhaps do a factory reset first, and that was that.

Another reboot was all that was required in the end, but why did it take BT nearly an hour of my time to find information on their own systems. AAAARGGGHHH.

Well its been a while since my last post so here goes.

A customer is moving to a new warehouse and requires broadband for the staff. So I contact their telecoms company and order the service, typically allowing 2 weeks for the line and 2 weeks for the broadband. Any how I get a date for the installation which is today, the 2nd September 2014 between 1pm and 6pm. I have some IT work to do at the warehouse so busy myself there waiting for BT to arrive. Around 2pm I get a call from the customers head office about ¼ mile away to say that the BT engineer is waiting for me. Well this made me start thinking, anyway I say that the engineer needs to be at the warehouse can they direct him. I thought I would drive over to the entrance to the estate to ensure he doesn’t get lost, and the person sending him had drawn him a map. So I drive over and wait just inside the main gate. 10 minutes later (yes 10) I see the BT subcontractors van sail past, past the entrance to the estate off into the distance. Great!. So I continue to wait and he finally arrives and I lead him into the estate where the warehouse is located. The BT engineer proceeds to fit the BT socket and connect it up and turns to me and said this isn’t going to work. You are joking I said, whats the problem. Then it dawned on me. He had gone to the head office because that is the address and post code he had been given. Consequently the telephone number that had been allocated, had be allocated to the street box closest to the address and postcode he had been given, not to the street box closest to where the actual installation was to take place. He assured me that an engineer at the exchange can easily switch the number to the correct street box but he could not tell me how long it will take. So the customer has a nice new BT socket is the warehouse that currently has no telephone number. Lets see how long it takes to sort out.

Well here is an update, next available appointment from BT to fix the problem is 2 weeks on 23rd September, I don’t think so guys.

Also the Engineer in nice big black numbers wrote on the front of the socket the head office main number, not the number of the new line, oh joy.

Well after no reply to my email for 24 hours I rang the Telecoms company to ask about progress. “I am going to escalate the problem now that we have a date (23rd). If I cannot escalate to a date in the next seven days I will order a new line as we can get those installed in seven days”.

Bloody marvellous a new line installed quicker than a switch of the street box at the exchange, you couldn’t make it up.

Well on the 11th September I get an update after chasing the telecoms company for a progress report. BT had said they can install a new line on, yep, the 23rd September the same date they said they could sort out the originally installed line, and the reason for this delay. The address of the unit is not on their database so it will have to be surveyed and agreed before work can commence. Apparently the fact that the ware house has 7 BT underground cables running to the building and back to the street cabinet makes no difference, because the building does not exist on their database thats it, the job cannot be done any quicker. Holly crap, why do we have to put up with this crap from BT. Get you act together will you.

Well its been confirmed, the 23rd it is, sometime in the morning, well up to 13:00 which apparently is still the morning according to BT. I’m also told that the ADSL service will go live at the same time, but will have to wait until the 24th to get all the VOIP services configured and installed. Lets see whats happens.

Well the engineer arrived but got completely lost. He had driven up from Cardiff to do a job in Tewkesbury. He was from a BT subcontractor called Kelly’s. Eventually I had to drive out to meet him. So I tell the engineer that his colleague 3 weeks earlier had tagged a pair in the street cabinet indicating the pair he had tested and sure enough, this engineer confirmed that to be the case. But the MDF Number (I think that is correct) he had been given didn’t exist in the cab. So he has to ring BT support, not BT control, BT support and get through to an indian call centre after around 15 minutes on the line, the support guy on the end of the phone tells him that the circuit number he has been given goes direct to the exchange. Now previous cable length tests have indicated that the cable length is close on 7 to 10km from to the exchange, even though he is there with his head in a big green box, the support guy was insistent that the line goes direct to the exchange. If he need more details the engineer would have to speak to BT control, which he has not had to do in the past. So he has another colleague who is BT Exchange trained and he is on route to the same area for another job. My engineer calls him to see if they can work something out, he is then told that he has been given another 2 jobs on route and it will be later afternoon before he arrives. So my engineer rings support again, another 15 minutes in the queue he final gets a list of some potentially free lines that can be used, so he pairs up the cables. Now I have to wait to see if they can reroute the allocated number to the correct cabinet back at the exchange. Just for the record, the installation engineers are from a BT subcontractor not BT, so it looks like they have to deal with the same inefficient crap from BT in the same way as the customers do. WTF BT, this is a joke.

Well the subcontractors did manage to get me a line connected. Well done to them, now the telecoms company have to configure the VoIP and broadband services which they assure me will be done tomorrow. I hope so.

It is now 11:30am the day following the line installation. No sign of any engineers here to install the remaining services. I have emailed the company concerned at 11:00 am and have yet to get a reply. Another terse email sent. Still waiting on a reply to my first. Midland Communications, you are not doing yourself any favours. Finally I get a phone call to tell me that the engineer was only ever going to arrive after 2pm, totally contrary to the information I received from technical support. However they did in the end arrive  on site and I am pleased to say we now have a functioning internet and VoIP telephone service. A woeful reflection on BT again and lack of communication from both parties considering this order was raised on the 8th August 2014 and here we are on the 24th September 2014, a whole 7 weeks later.

Well folks, Microsoft has removed the Small Business solution from their server offerings. For those that don’t know the SBS products, it is a complete small business solution out of the box and includes file sharing, Sharepoint, Exchange and SQL. It runs on a single box and supports upto 75 users. Microsoft expects their current SBS user base to move to cloud storage and email solutions or install Server 2012 on one box and Exchange Server on another at huge cost.

The UK is one of the worst countries for poor internet speeds. Some of my customers can barely get 2mb internet speeds, no fibre is available and they are 2 miles from a very large city. Can you imagine using Office365 along will all the files and expecting 8 users to work day in, day out on a 2mb internet connection to access all their files. No. It would take the best part on a month to upload the data in the first place, then what happens if the internet goes down, as it does at least 3 or 4 times a year, you cannot operate your business. Microsoft are about to loose a large number of small businesses who will look to migrate away from Microsoft current offerings in favour of Linux solutions which are often cheaper and sometimes more reliable. I have 1 customer currently using SBS 2003 and it looking to upgrade. I’m thinking maybe Server 2012 R2 Standard with Kerio for email, or USC with perhaps Zarafa or Kerio for email. Those currently running SBS 2011 will, in a few years, be looking to upgrade as well.

Either way it looks like I have some reading to do. It maybe goodbye Microsoft if the Linux solutions I’m about to install and test prove successful.

A customer of mine has a new server at his home office. Now ideally it is preferable to have a static IP address on your internet connection when you have a server as it makes life a hell of a lot easier. Yes I know you can use dynamic dns services, but I have to say that I do not find them that reliable.

This customers ISP is, well I won’t say, but they have big red vans and delivery our letters. I suggested he ring them and ask about getting a static IP address applied to his account. To be honest I did not hold much hope on the basis of the account being a consumer account and not a business account. This ISP does not have a business account option.

So my customer makes the call and the conversation goes like this.

Customer: Hello, is it possible to add a static IP address to my broadband account please.

ISP: What is a static IP address?

Customer: Are you serious, you are an ISP.

ISP: I have never been asked that before, please wait while I talk to my line manager.

ISP: I have spoken to my line manager and we do not provide that service, but you can set one up in your router yourself.

Customer: How do I do that.

ISP: Sorry we can’t help you there.

Well what a load of crock. Where do they get these people from. If you need anything other than very basic services then do not us the big red van company.

I’m now looking for a new ISP for my customer.

Back in the 90’s we used to do exhibitions for the company I worked for. This time we were at the NEC in Birmingham.

We had built our own stand in black as money was tight so thought it would save us a few quid. When we built the stand ready for the exhibition we realised that we had forgotten to take some extension leads to plug in all the equipment. At the time the NEC wanted something like £25 for an extension lead so one of our sales guys volunteered to go find some at a local shop. Before he left I suggested that if he could get black ones they would look better against the black stand. OK he said and off he went.

So this guy is gone for ages and I mean 3 hours or more so we start to get worried as we haven’t heard from him, (This was before the advent of mobile phones for sales guys).

Eventually he rolls up after about 4 hours. “Bloody hell that was a nightmare he said, I couldn’t get any black extension leads anywhere”.

“Never mind I said white will have to do, how many did you get”.

“Oh I didn’t get any white ones because you said you wanted black, I’ll have to go and get some”. And with that he walked off.

In the end we bought the ones from the NEC as this plonker of a sales guys had already cost us enough time and he would have probably been gone for another 4 hours.

Another time in the days of 5.25″ floppy disks, my friend got called out to fix a 5.25″ floppy drive. Yes they used to fix them because they were so expensive. Anyway, he removed the top from the drive and the read head and mechanics where covered in a very sticky red substance. He could not successfully clean the drive so had to write it off, explaining to the customer that he could not determine what the substance was or where it had come from. He said to the customer that they would need to purchase a replacement at considerable cost.

As he was leaving, a lady asked him if he could look at here floppy drive as it was getting very slow and unreliable. There was a disk in the drive so he removed it and noticed that in the little window where the disks magnetic media is exposed (So data can be read from and written to the Disk) there appeared to be the same substance that he had found in the other drive smeared across the surface.

He decided that the only way he would find out what it was, was to taste it. Well he thought, since when have they started lubricating floppy drives with strawberry jam, yep strawberry jam.

He stood up and announced to the office the cause of the failures and a women standing across from him went bright red and decided that maybe she should come clean.

A few days earlier they were celebrating one of the staffs birthdays and that person had bought in the obligatory cakes for everyone in the office. This lady returned to her desk to eat her jam doughnut. As she bit into it, the jam decided to exit the doughnut in one gloop, so rather than get it on her dress, grabbed the first thing she could find which happened to be a 5.25″ floppy disk. She saved her dress and caught the gloop on the disk. Now rather than land on the outer sleeve, the jam hit the little window I mentioned above and realising her mistake decided to hide the evidence by manually turning the disk inside the sleeve. She wiped the remainder of the jam from the sleeve and put the disk back on her desk.

Now these disks contained various office files and eventually this disk was used on some of the office PC’s with the resulting jammy gloop on the disk surface being transferred to the innards of the disk drive.

That little exercise cost her company quite a few hundred quid rather than a few quid to have her dress cleaned.

Many years ago a friend of mine worked for a company that supplied software (as did many others) on this fantastic media of the day called the floppy disk.

For your information, these discs came in various formats:-

Single sided 8 sector a whopping 160kb capacity

Single sided 9 sector with a massive 180kb capacity

Double sided capable of storing 360kb and finally HD or High Density with a super duper capacity of 1.2mb.

Well my last few posts probably sum up my frustration in dealing with BT, no matter how large or small the project they just seem able to screw it up in one way or another.

Sadly we have little or no choice when it comes to telephone services over copper unless you are lucky enough to live in a cabled area with services provided by the trains planes and space ship people, but they too could do with a few lessons in customer support.

A number of years ago a customer decided to upgrade their broadband connection because the business used new technology that required a number of office workers to have a reliable fast internet connection.

It was at this time they decided to go with  a bonded broadband solution purely on the grounds of cost as fibre was and still is extremely expensive. Also this solution provided some failover as the system would still operate even with three of the fours lines down.

We placed the order and BT tell us we can expect speeds of up to 4mb on each of the 4 lines giving a potential bandwidth of 16mb. Now I  know this was unlikely, but hey ho lets see what happens.

BT arrive on site and install the four lines, the Cisco router with 4 ADSL WICS is supplied and connected, but you’ve guessed it the speed was appalling.

I monitor the speeds over a period of weeks and one line is particularly poor. It regularly sync’d between 800kbps and 1.5mbps. The other three hover around 3.5 to 4.5mbps.

Now for those that may not understand the bonding technology, this means that all lines must effectively sync at the lowest common denominator, so we now have 4 x 800kbps at its worst. So we have a 2 grand Cisco router 4 brand new ADSL lines and speed equal to about 3.2mbps. Wow the excitement.

I call the service provider and explain the situation. OK they say (To be honest they have been very helpful so my gripe it not with them), maybe there is excessive noise on the internal cabling. The ADSL lines where about 50 metres from the DP.

We agree to move the ADSL sockets downstairs right next to the DP thus removing the cable factor. Back come BT and duly oblige by moving the lines as discussed. Guess what, it did not make a blind bit of difference.

So now on a bad day by removing the slowest line from the bonding I can actually get a better average speed across the connection as the slowest speed is higher.

It never ceases to amaze me that in this day and age, BT are totally incapable of providing rock steady fast links running at the same speed, fed from the same street box to the same exchange. Why are we still having to put up with third world speeds and quality of service in this country.