Why zebras don’t get ulcers

This book by Robert M. Sapolsky is touted as being “The acclaimed guide to stress, stress-related diseases, and coping”. Overall the book is very informative and interesting but it tended to get bogged down in the medical lingo of the whole “stress causing problems” process. Sure, this maybe interesting to a medical student but generally it makes the book hard going for the casual reader.

The book has plenty of in depth research about the causes and results of stress on the human body. It show cases the fact that as humans we tend to stress for extended periods of time whereas animals ( read zebra being cased by a lion ) only get stressed for that short period when they either escape or become dinner. The result of humans continuing to stress over longer periods of times tends to cause all sorts of things inside our body to go haywire. This book provides great depth into the full range of afflictions that result from stress including : depression, ulcers, heart disease and more.

It was also disappointing that book spent more time detailing the issues that cause stress rather than the ways to combat then directly. However, the authors detail of stress afflictions certainly makes you stop and consider the damage that unnecessary stress is causing your body and you mind. There are many great insights and detailed analysis that certainly makes the book a worthwhile read but it is still rather heavy going.

Overall the book does accomplish what it sets out to. Our expectation may have been a little different after having the book recommended to us. If you really what an in depth analysis of the physical and mental problems that stress can wreak on your body then this is book for you. Our main criticism is that the in depth medical analysis can make the book tough to get through at times.

Rating = 6 out of 10

Some interesting things about Cougar

Been over reading Sean Daniel’s blog about the next version of SBS known as Cougar and the following points from the blogs struck us:

3. The SBS Backup solution is being completely re-vamped. However, we have made the full switch, and the backup solution will no longer support backing up to tape. Using snapshot technology, the backups will be extremely quick using incrementals that can be scheduled as often as every 30 minutes. A copy of NTBackup will be able to extract files from the old SBS 2003 format, but no new data can be added. If tape is super important to you, start sizing up 3rd party backup solutions.

So the next version of SBS will not only be 64 bit it will also not support tape drives. Backups appear to be moving to disk based snap shots. This is definitely the case with people like Symantec and Storagecraft developing excellent SBS offerings. No major surprise here but the interesting issue is how off site disaster recovery backups will be handled. One would guess that the most likely option when SBS Cougar becomes available is that off site backups will be done via the Internet. So you’ll do an regular backup image and this image will then be transferred offsite automatically. There are people that will do that now but it looks like we need to start getting up to speed with these sort of solutions before Cougar ships.

5. Cougar will need to be installed behind some kind of firewall and the single-NIC model will be the only mode. You must use a firewall in front of the SBS box, this can be a hardware router type item, or a software firewall such as ISA.

Now here’s something that we didn’t really know. There have been plenty of rumours that Cougar will allow you to migrate some of the SBS applications (typically ISA) onto seperate hardware and this makes good sense, but according to what Sean says this is going to be mandatory. So it appears that SBS willl come with any in built firewall and that you will have to use an external appliance for SBS Cougar Standard and ISA on a seperate box for SBS Cougar Premium.

The first ramification here is that any SBS Cougar sale is going to have include the sale of a dedicated hardware firewall or a new server to install ISA on. In summary, additional cost. Secondly, it means that there should be more memory for the remaining applications on the SBS Cougar box which is a good thing. More and more these days we are moving towards an SBS solution with a single NIC, for standard and premium, since it provides greater flexibility and removes the need for ISA on the SBS Premium box (which is already getting overloaded with applications now).

Interesting stuff but still needs to be taken with a pince of salt because thing certainly can and will change between now and release of Cougar. However, our take away is no more tape backups out of the box – so how do we handle offsite disaster recovery and secondly no more firewall on the SBS box – this means additional cost for systems. Luckily, we are already moving down those path and this information certainly confirms that we need to place more emphasis on this as Cougar gets closer to release.

Two ways to boost your productivity

Recently we’ve found two ways to really boost our productivity. The first is using dual screens on our desktops. Our new HP desktop machines not only came with Vista but also came with dual video outputs (digital and analogue). Initially we set up the analogue since it was easier but recently we have finally gotten around to also enabling the digital output. After a little bit of fiddling and locating a suitable monitor we are proud to say that we have it all working. Boy, what a difference extra screen real estate makes. On one screen we have our Outlook open so we can see all our emails and on the other we have all our other applications like web browser, word processor and the like. We can’t tell you how much easier it is to work with two documents at the same time if you can actually view them simultaneously. You can be doing research on the web while remoted into a client’s machine all without having to minimize windows. Totally brilliant and we recommend it to all. We now wonder whether adding more than two monitors to our desktops would increase productivity even further?

The second method we have found of increasing our productivity is by using Microsoft OneNote. Having used OneNote before we found that it really didn’t suit our needs but the new version is certainly and improvement. We have installed the OneNote data notebooks on a network drive and shared it between multiple machines. This now means we can simply cut and paste from one machine and retrieve it on another. Even better we can take ONeNote ‘offline’ and use it stand alone and then have it automatically resync when we return to the office. This make it particularly handy when we take our notebook PC offsite. We can pump all our client notes into it quickly and easily and then when we return to the office it is sync’ed with our other notebooks as well as being backed up. We think that it is a boon that lots of the information we used to jot down in paper notebooks can now be stored in OneNote, allowing it to be searchable.

As with any productivity improvement there is an upfront hit in getting the systems working but both duall displays and OneNote have begun to make a real impact to our productivity and we thus recommend them to all.

Do you reckon this will affect SBS sales?

If you don’t already know, Microsoft is soon to release a product is calling Home Server. Interestingly it will network up to 10 PC’s and provide some basic networking, backup and file sharing. Now if you think that only home users are going to use it then we would suggest you think again. We will bet that a significant number of the 1-10 user SBS space will seriously consider Home Server. What will that mean…ummm…well unless you need some of the specific SBS features why would a business now buy SBS? if you just want basic networking why would you now buy SBS when you can get Home Server pretty cheap?

In our experience most of the 1-10 size businesses don’t really need Exchange server, they can typically get away with POP email accounts, so what’s their need for SBS now? Now you can look at this in two ways. Firstly, you could view it in the light of tha fact that the demand from the 1-10 user business is going to decrease. Or secondly, you could say there is an opportunity to sell this product into businesses that may not have even considered a server (including some homes as well).

To our minds there is little doubt that Home Server is going to affect the low end sales of SBS and that if you are serious about your business then you need either to prepare for the short fall or the opportunity depending on your business model.

Unable to uninstall Livestate Desktop V3.0

Recently tried to update a customer from Livestate Desktop Recovery V3.0 to the latest Backup Exec Desktop System Recovery 7.0 and guess what? when you attempt to uninstall Livestate from Control Panel you get a message that you “must uninstall a previous version”. Say what? There was no prior version, so now what.

Well, you could go through the registry manually and remove all the entries to Livestate but let us tell you that there are heaps. A much better option is to call up Symantec Tech Support and tell them you are having issues. They will send you a batch file that uninstalls Livestate manually.

This was almost identical to the issue that we had with Livestate 6.0 Server recovery and the only solution was once again a batch file from Symantec. Hmm.. not impressed at all Symantec, not at all. We really hope that when it comes time to uninstall Backup Exec Desktop System Recovery 7.0 we don’t have the same issues.

Installing Small Business Server Video series

We have just uploaded the first YouTube video is a new series we are creating that will show you how to install Small Business Server on new hardware. This first video will show you how to boot to the initial blue screen (DOS) environment, then partition your hard disks and commence the Windows Graphical User Interface (GUI) installation. Click here for a direct YouTube link to our video or click here to go to our Supportweb site for a listing of all our video creations.

As always we welcome any feedback or questions you have have on our videos. Please stay tuned for more videos in this series.

If you find our videos at all beneficial we ask you to consider supporting us directly by making a donation via http://donation.saturnalliance.com.au. All donations allow us to devote more resources to the content we provide as well as improving its quality.

Web site security threats

We recently attended a security seminar presented by Trend Micro where they said that most of the security threats faced by computers these days are being delivered by web sites. Note how we didn’t say malicious web sites, why? Well, the example that Trend gave was that the web site for the Miami Dolphins football team in the US had been hacked and a small piece of code had been added to their front page that when opened would download a trojan to the viewers computer. Once the trojan was downloaded, it would then execute and download more malware, ultimately allowing the PC to be controlled by hackers for whatever purpose they deemed.

Now you might think that this is all a bit far fetched and only happens in places like America, well think again! The following report in the Sydney Morning Herald highlights how the same thing happened to the web site of the Sydney Opera House. According to the story :

The code would infect web browsers that were not patched with the latest security updates with Trojan software, most likely designed to capture sensitive information such as internet banking details from victims’ computers.

and

Ms Swaffield says NSW police were informed of the security breach, the incident was documented but no action was taken. The Sydney Opera House site is visited by more than 300,000 internet users every month.

Hmmm..interesting eh? If you want a reason to ensure that your workstations are up to date look no further than this story because as it says the trojan would “infect unpatched machines” and that up to 300,000 people use this legitimate web site every month.

So don’t just think that it is your emails that are your biggest security threat, it is all those network users surfing web sites on unpatched machines that can cause major problems.

For the full story see : http://www.smh.com.au/news/security/hackers-infected-opera-house-website/2007/06/11/1181414219766.html