Over the past few weeks, we have had a number of cases where support tickets needed to be opened to resolve issues where end-users were reporting “inability to access the Internet.” These can be frustrating and stressful for both end-users and the responding techs.
A constant frustration of ours is ensuring “clean” backups. If you corrupt your data or have a server failure, we need to reliably get that data back. There are a few types of backups. Image backups are popular with virtualization. File system backups have always been the gold standard since the dawn of backups.
Hopefully, you all had a relatively sane and productive summer. Security-related topics have been in the news for most of the summer with several incidents hitting fairly close to home. Perhaps the question I have been asked the most over the last month or so has been “what do I need to do to protect […]
Just when you thought it was safe to move along to other technical topics, along comes Scott Quimby’s Hardening Active Directory Part III to scare you even more. If you haven’t watched Part I and Part II, you can find them here. In Part III we will do a little review of some core topics […]
We harp on the fact that if you have *ANY* VPN, or remote access capabilities into your district, you *MUST* use a commercial SSL certificate and not a self-signed SSL – no exceptions. However, an area of growing frustration is that many current browsers are starting to give warnings about whether or not you should […]
All of us at CSI are techs at heart. We love talking about technical topics. However, we do also sell products. As you go into finalizing your 2019-2020 budgets and summer purchases I just wanted to point out that in 2018 CSI dramatically expanded the products and services we can directly offer you under valid […]
Hopefully for most of you, this is old news, but I know how busy everyone gets, especially this time of year with the end of school coming upon us. So, in case you missed it Microsoft RDP has been back in the news again as the source in yet another serious vulnerability – dubbed BlueKeep […]
I was recently reading a security study that said that 25% of applications are unpatched for an entire year! As you approach the summer remember that you need to patch not only the operating system but also all your applications. Many of our biggest threats are application based: Adobe Flash Oracle Java Adobe Reader (PDFs) […]
Now that we have shifted to predominantly remote workers and remote teaching and learning, we have a number of new challenges as well as increased threats. Challenge #1 – Remote File Access. The solution is moving files from traditional home directories and traditional common drives to cloud-based shared folders and home directories.
One of the most important principles of a good network design is accurate time. Windows time is a whole lot like the 1960s car clock – always drifting away from true time. However, very weird things start to happen if time on your network and servers and workstations is left to fend for itself.
