Services Provided
File, printer and application sharing for small and medium-sized offices, using OpenBSD and Microsoft products. I handle both new installations and retrofitting, upgrading, and fixing existing systems.
A good internal office network should have very minimal routine maintenance needed, should stay running, and should be easily and quickly repaired when the unfortunate does happen. It should be designed to tolerate the inevitable problem, not designed hoping the problem won't happen.
The Internet is a wonderfully useful resource for business, however it is also a very dangerous threat to your business. Through training and intelligent design, I can help you minimize the risks, yet utilize the resources the Internet offers to your business.
It has become painfully clear in the last few years that free and uncontrolled access to the 'net by untrained users is NOT a wise idea. While training and technology can minimize the risks considerably, the days of users thinking they can do anything they wish with the computer on their desk is over. Many companies are spending way more than they should be on cleaning up problems that just shouldn't be.
Things break. You have to be ready for it.
Lots of people can get a system to work. The real trick is keeping it working and repairing it when it does fail. Given a long enough period of time, things WILL break. One advantage of giving me your business is that when I design a system for you, I pretty well know who is going to be expected to fix it when it breaks.
Fault tolerance is the ability of a system to withstand things breaking and being able to rapidly repair a system. The systems I prefer to implement are designed for "Rapid Repair" -- where whatever happens can be fixed or repaired quickly, but not using exotic or expensive technologies. My experience has been that simple solutions rarely fail, and when they do, they are easily repaired. Complex solutions that are never supposed to fail often do, and often in a most spectacular way. Worse, few people have any significant experience with these systems as they change rapidly, and you never really know a system until it has failed in a few different ways. Experience has shown you can not trust a vendor to have experience recovering a system that wasn't supposed to break in the first place. Their job is to say, "Don't worry, it will work", and get your money.
Training is an important part of using any tool. I want you to learn as much about your system as you are willing to learn. In some cases, i may have you build your own machine with my supervision, rather than handing you a completed computer you have never seen before. This should help to "de-mystify" the system to the people who have to do the day-to-day maintenance of the system. I have no secret tricks -- you are welcome to look over my shoulder and ask any questions about what I am doing, or you are welcome to do it yourself. Some of my clients now do virtually all their own maintenance, and I support this entirely.
In addition to training on the systems put into place, I also offer Internet Safety training classes. More than any firewall, antivirus software or security policy, I believe understanding and education is most effective way to minimize your support costs and problems.
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