Another one for our AutoCAD users out there.

It looks as though the AutoCAD update 2 causes the software to crash frequently!  Autodesk have released another update (2.01) to replace the original version 2.0 update.  Another point to note is that the software and the Add/Remove programs list reports the original faulty update (2.00) as English Version 3.

This is text taken from a discussion found at the Autodesk website
http://discussion.autodesk.com/forums/message.jspa?messageID=6050093

Straight from the mouth of Autodesk: uninstall update 2.

“Early this morning I was made aware of a new change request that is tracking incidences of random crashes like your’s in AutoCAD LT 2009 after Update 2 has been applied. Currently we are rapidly receiving error reports ranging from New Zealand to the UK at the current rate of 37 reports over the past 24 hours.

Development is asking for a reproducible case to unravel what the root cause is. If you can reliably duplicate the conditions where the crash occurs that we can relay to development, please send details. Otherwise, you should uninstall the Update 2 that appears as “AutoCAD LT 2009 - English Version 3″ in the Add or Remove Program applet until we can correct the problems you’ve been seeing.

We apologize for the inconvenience. This has become a hot issue that development is actively attempting to resolve.”

Here’s a heads up for all our AutoCAD users out there.

The AutoCAD 2009 portfolio is now shipping and until 15th January 2009 there are offers for customers upgrading. The AutoCAD 2006 products will be retired by Autodesk on 13th March 2009. After this date there will be no upgrade option for this product line.

The company is not our favourite for their approach to forcing the upgrade process, but if you have invested in their software and it is in your strategic business plan to use their tools now may be a good time to protect that investment.

This month I want to discuss your Christmas business continuity measures. With the Christmas holidays rapidly approaching, and everyone keen to leave the office promptly for that well earned break, spare a thought for that poor old server you leave behind at the office

Okay, a little dramatic but the point of the message is that the server, and all your other IT assets that make your business operate smoothly (and if they don’t help you operate smoothly please put a note in your diary to talk to us first thing in the New Year!) are going to be sitting there in the office, totally unattended.

What better way to upset the Christmas roast and gathered relations, or that trip abroad, than to receive a call from the police or your security company (or us if we are monitoring your server) advising you that the office has been broken into and you have just been relieved of all your electronic gizmo’s.

What could be worse? Well how about that water leak, that last time around it happened you managed to “dodge the bullet” as someone was there to lift the server to safety in the nick of time. No one there at this time of year to do that. At least if it’s stolen you will know pretty quickly that you’ve got your work cut-out to get replacements up and running before everyone returns from their Christmas break. If it’s under a few inches of water you may not realise until the first person back in the office in the New Year arrives to fish it out. That’s when the speed at which you can implement your disaster recovery and business continuity plan comes into its own.

You do have a plan, don’t you?

Of course IT isn’t the be-all and end-all of continuity planning as it should extend to all aspects of your business. There is plenty of knowledge and free templates on the web on which to base your plan, here are a couple of links to get you started:

• Expecting the unexpected
• London Chamber of Commerce - Crisis Management and Business Continuity Planning
• Business Link - Practical advice for business

However thinking about, and having a few templates, doesn’t get you very far – you need to actually implement them for your business and more importantly test that the plan actually works. Testing often exposes weaknesses or omissions that merely thinking it through does not.

For those that have difficulty getting this type of exercise going and on a tight budget I would suggest taking a look at this excellent program from Value Generation to kick-start your plan:

• Continuity10

Hot off the press! This week we have just signed the contract to move our office into Charwell House in Alton, Hampshire. Over the next six months we will work towards making this the hub of our remote management operations.

Contact details will remain unchanged and you can reach us on our usual 0845 680 1041 number.

This month it is with great delight that we can announce that our team member Michal Pankanin has sat and passed the CompTIA Network+ certification exam.

As part of D S Baker IT Ltd’s staff development and incentive programme we offer a bonus scheme and provide training material for taking and obtaining industry recognised IT certification qualification.

Well done Michal!

This month I am going to pass on some wisdom about one of the cornerstones of all our managed service packages, patch management.

What is it?
Patches are a way of distributing fixes for known security vulnerabilities and also corrections for the way data is passed and handled in an application or operating system. Occasionally, as is the case with Microsoft Service Packs (SP) it is a way of introducing enhancements and new features.

Software applications and operating system code or, at its most basic level, binary code are inherently flexible and capable of being programmed to handle many varied tasks. Because the types of data that are handled and the methods of passing it from one process to are so varied it has been noted that it may never be possible to make software totally safe and secure.

I couldn’t really comment about this as I don’t get involved with it at such a fundamental level. In fact, it has been said that the only way to make a computer secure is not let it communicate with anything else or let anyone access it – which isn’t very useful.

In the real world, weaknesses are found in the software and patches are created to solve this problem. New versions of an application will often eliminate a weakness but more often than not will also introduce new unknown issues.

Why we do it
Best practice suggests that the best way to stay safe is to make sure your systems and applications are patched. If a weakness has been publicly announced, the bad guys will know about it just as well as the rest of the world. In fact, they will probably have a greater understanding of its implications and how it can be exploited than the majority of the world.

Making sure you have the patches in place is no silver bullet and is only one part of the security equation. However, having the most up-to-date patches will make your system more secure and the more difficult it is to compromise your systems, the more determined someone would have to be to do it.
Implications of not doing it

So what happens if we don’t bother patching? Well, immediately, probably nothing. You will certainly avoid the possibility of any software conflicts arising by introducing new patches into your environment. You do however leave your system open to a known and well documented issue.  This information can used by would-be attackers and can save them hours of researching methods to get in to your system.

How software vendors do it
Most large software vendors now have an automated way in which the installed application can check back to a centralised system to see if there are any updates available. These applications can automatically download and, if given permissions, install the update.

Microsoft has a number of update methods available. At the basic level for a standalone machine the Automatic Updates service will periodically check with the Microsoft Updates website to see if there is anything available for updating. In recent years, they have extended this beyond just their operating systems to include a large proportion of their applications as well (e.g. Microsoft Office Suite).

For small and medium server based networks they provide a freely downloadable application called WSUS (currently version 3.0 SP1) which can centrally manage the approval and distribution of patches into your environment.

For large organisations that really take the process of patch management seriously, there are specialist, paid-for products from Microsoft and other companies.

What happens when it goes wrong
Why bother with an approval process? Set the automatic service to download and install the patch, job done. This is great if all the patches are flawless. Back in the real world history has shown this is not the case and the automatic download and install method could wipe out your entire business in one round of updates.
If you are more cautious, automatically download and manually install at a convenient time. This gives the opportunity to at least see if there are any problems on a test system first.

To be realistic, most of the time nothing goes wrong. However there have been some spectacular disasters in the past, especially where operating system fixes are concerned which have resulted in computers displaying a fatal system error which is referred to as the “Blue Screen of Death” (BSoD). In recent years Microsoft, have had a much better track record in this department.

Also, to be fair to software vendors it, would be unrealistic and unviable to expect them to test a patch against every application, or combination of software ever installed. As a result problems do occur after applying updates. It can be internally with the application that was patched, or more commonly with another application that used a service affected by the patch.

Why we manage the process
Patch management is one of the cornerstones of our managed services. The process of handling the deployment process can consume a significant amount of time, especially if it goes wrong. In addition, how much of the technical documentation does your on-site IT person really understand and do they realise the implications for your site?

Before we approve a patch for deployment on a client site we test it internally for any catastrophic disasters. Like the vendors, we can’t possibly test every combination and permutation of software installation and updates. We do however get to know our clients’ environments.  We look at what the fix is changing so we can understand whether there are any interdependencies. We will phase the deployment of a patch on larger client sites to avoid the possibility that a faulty patch will take down the whole company.

Best of all we are available to help pick up the pieces should there be a problem with a deployed patch which is INCLUSIVE in our service.

This is a follow-up article to the last post about power protection. Interestingly we surveyed a prospective client’s network recently and it was pleasing to see that they did have a UPS unit. It was great to see that they had at least received some valuable input from their existing IT support company. However upon closer inspection and questioning, several things were revealed.

1. There was no communication cable linking the UPS to the server
2.  The unit was over 3 years old
3. When asked when the failover and runtime tests were last conducted the owner’s blank expression said it all!

So the unit in question may have stopped power surges from damaging the protected equipment, their only server in this case, and would have possibly protected it against a momentary power sag or brief outage.

What it would not have been able to do is tell the server that it had reached its runtime limit and it was time to shutdown cleanly before the batteries ran out of juice. What was also an unknown was whether the unit would actually still switch over to battery power at all, as it had not been tested recently as far as the owner could recall, and whether it had any capacity left in the batteries to run for more than a couple of seconds if it did actually manage to switch over.

Like a number of IT related things a UPS is not a “buy it once and forget about it” item. It is not simply a case of putting the tick in the checkbox – yep got one of those!

As part of our Pro-Active Essentials Plus and Managed Service support packages we make sure these units are tested regularly to ensure they switch over to battery power and have a reasonable amount of runtime left in them so the attached equipment has time to shutdown cleanly. A shutdown test is also of great importance as well. As each month passes, new software, and software updates get applied to the systems which may interfere with the UPS shutdown agent that runs on the system. The UPS agent also needs to be tested to ensure that when the UPS says its time to shutdown, the system responds and there are no running applications obstructing it.

When did you last test your UPS shutdown and runtime?

OK, I’m showing my musical tastes here by coining an album title from one of my favourite bands for this article (Ride the Lightning) but it is relevant to the subject namely power protection. We are here to make sure that your business can ride the lightning out.

As we move into spring and summer electrical storms often become more common. There are actually two threats that come with the storms, lightning strikes and flooding. The events in Gloucestershire in 2007 are probably an extreme but marked reminder of the damage flood water can cause (see the Google photo search photos here). The effects of this can be slightly more gradual that lightning strikes and are really part of a business’s Business Continuity Planning and Disaster Recovery (BC & DR) procedures. However those businesses supplied by the electrical sub-station which eventually got submerged during those floods of 2007 suffered the loss of power – probably a lot further a field that the flood waters area of effect.

The point of power protection is to avoid the power being over, or under, supplied spontaneously to your critical systems, or more specifically your servers. Over voltage can seriously damage your equipment, under voltage or what is known as a brownout, or dropout will cause unprotected systems to unceremoniously restart. Although the newer Microsoft operating systems (Windows 2003 Server) and database applications (Exchange Server and SQL Server) have tended to be more resilient to being simply turned off (rather than shutdown in an orderly process) than their earlier counter parts, it is still not good practice to do this. Better that they are shutdown through the proper procedure so that they can flush and close out their transaction data cleanly.

With a suitable Uninterruptable Power Supply (UPS) unit protecting your servers and orderly shutdown can be arranged for the systems in the event that the main power supply is taken out by a loss of power – caused by whatever means. The unit is also designed to protect the attached equipment from a lightning strike sending a spike down power lines which could seriously damage you systems. Also don’t forget that in areas with overhead telephone lines the voltage spikes can come down the telephone line as well wreaking as much damage as those that arrive down power lines.

Before we take on the role of supporting clients we conduct an initial assessment of a site to ensure that critical systems have some form of power protection. As part of our on-going Pro-Active Essentials Plus and Managed Service support services we regularly test those protection systems, making sure that the equipment is function properly and that the batteries have sufficient life left in them to do their job.

A timely subject with the approach of Easter. It is the time of year for dealing with bunnies, dust, not Easter bunnies that is. For those that don’t know a dust bunny is that ball of fluff that collects in the bottom of your computer case which blocks the inlets and cooling fans. These along with the dirt that builds up and settles on the electronic components impedes their ability to dissipate heat. As we round the end of the year and the environmental temperatures are low this does not present such an issue so any such build-ups generally go un-noticed. However as we reach Easter and beyond, and the outside temperature starts to rise this reduced cooling efficiency could be the last gasp of an old machine. 

One of the services we include in our Managed Service solution is the annual cleaning of dust bunnies, specifically conducted around this time of year. Removing the computer cover to inspect the state of dust build up, and to check that fans are still turning, could catch that event which could lead to the demise of your computer. Inspecting and replacing noisy fans could also remove that annoying background noise and restore the tranquility to your office (note: This service doesn’t cover noisy colleagues however!).

Catch those bunnies before they spell the end of your computer.

A close associate of mine Chris Clark of Clark Marketing posed some interesting questions about how ready Vista really is for the business world. He cited reports of poor performance and hibernation issues, a CD burning problem, issues with DRM and driver problems as just some of the gremlins plaguing Vista currently.

We have been working with Vista now for about 6 months and have not been presented with many of these issues. Our lack of exposure to these problems may have resulted from working with Vista on the right hardware platform – yes, the equipment expectations have been raised but having them in place does make the difference! Laptop hibernation has been one area where I would say Vista has improved substantially.

However I definitely concur on the driver issue; this has been our main pain point. I’m not entirely sure how much criticism for the lack of drivers should be levelled at Microsoft. Equipment manufacturers have known this was coming for a long time, but there seems to have been less preparation than that which was apparent during the Windows 2000 to XP transition era. Maybe it is simply our perception of the situation, or perhaps the equipment vendors sense a sales opportunity?

Having just completed a Vista workstation and Small Business Server network installation I would have to describe our relationship with Vista as love/hate. Some things are great; others just don’t work well at all (Drive mapping through Group Policy to name one).

How do I sum up my current thoughts on Vista? Vista is the immature teenager to XP’s mature and experienced adult – you can see Vista has a lot of promise and is the future, providing it doesn’t terminate itself before coming of age, but once in a while it leaves you thinking “what the heck are you doing now?” Maybe the imminent release of Service Pack 1 (SP1) will be Vista’s coming of age?