Sure, that’s a bold statement, but we like working. We do our best work while… Um… Working.

So anyway, here’s the deal. If you find us a qualifying client, we’ll give you fifty bucks.

Here’s what we consider qualifying clients:
* Not fictitious
* Has actual short term computer consulting needs
* Is a business
* Has been known to pay bills
* Is somewhere on the Central Coast of California, or is willing to allow us to do remote work
* Is interested in a long-term client/vendor relationship. Long walks on the beach not necessary

If you have (or are) a qualifying client, please ask them to contact us at the contact information provided below… Or ask them if it’s alright to have us contact them. Let us know either way. We’ll believe you.

If they want to contact us, they can become a fan of this page, email us at info@rnoc.net, or call us at (805) 931 0912. If they want us to call them, it would be really helpful if you could provide us with the number. I’m just sayin’. We do pretty well with email too.

Once we’ve had a chance to do our initial consultation for the client, we’ll thank you profusely for the referral, and send you on your way with a freshly printed fifty dollar check.

On a more serious note – As always, thank you, and we truly appreciate you and all you do for us. If you think we’re a good fit for your associates, clients, whatever – We thank you big time in advance.

The guys at RNOC

According to CrunchBase, GMail entered private beta (very tightly limited number of users, with feedback expected from them) in April of 2004.

What Google appeared to be doing at the time was nothing more exciting than setting up a competitor for Hotmail, Yahoo, and the like. While that was initially true, as the product matured Google started to roll out new functionality – to the point where it is now included in a subscription version of Google Apps. The other apps will be detailed in future articles; for now we focus on GMail.

The free version of GMail gives its users ~6Gb of space to store their email. This is an astronomical amount of space for email. now sending more pictures, files, reports, spreadsheets and PDFs than they ever have before. While I am a fairly heavy user, I have never used more than 3Gb of email space – and that was when I was refusing to clean up my inbox.

Compare this to the paid-for version of GMail – 25Gb. Let’s take a look at what you are getting for your $50.00 per user per year.

Spam filtering

While I was hosting my own email, I was running a spam filter (I won’t name it here). It was catching about half of the spam… but it was also allowing nearly 200 articles of spam per day in to my inbox. Once I  moved to GMail, that flow was almost eradicated; Initially, I was seeing 4 or 5 spam messages a week. That number has climbed to two or three a day due to the neverending efforts of the spammers. It is still nowhere near the amount of spam I had been receiving before.

GMail’s offering for businesses has two spam filters; there is a native one built into GMail, and there is a secondary service brought by a relatively recent Google acquisition, Postini. Postini works best at the domain level, filtering all traffic heading for an organization’s mail server. In this case, it’s pre-filtering it before it gets to GMail. Once there, the email is again scanned by GMail’s internal spam filter. The positive matches are placed in a Spam folder.

Space

Did I mention 25Gb? Holy crap!

Google Search

What about the power of Google search in your inbox? I have several thousand emails in various GMail containers (Inbox, Archive, Spam, Trash). I don’t think I have ever had a search take longer than 5 seconds… no matter what keywords I was using in my search. Certainly orders of magnitude faster than Outlook’s search function.

Archiving

I want to go slow here, because this is the part that took me a while to get accustomed to Google’s take on an email service.

First, when you import your mailbox from another server, as I did, Google strips off the notion of “Folders” in your inbox and instead uses “Labels” to indicate where the email used to live. Google’s import utility assigned some very long labels (the label name was the same as the folder path in Outlook) and it made viewing the message sometimes challenging. However, if you’re looking for something in a specific location, the labels may help with your organization scheme.

Second, the notion of deleting email is all but silly. With so much space available to you, there is no reason to delete an email you may want to refer to again at some point down the road. Rather than deleting, in most cases you should archive.  Archiving gives you the ability to search and find email quickly without having to have it all in your inbox.

Between the labels, the archiving, and the search capabilities there is first of all no need for folders. Just remember a word or two, or even just the originator. The more keywords, the more precise your search will be. You can label it, if you prefer to have items labeled. You can then search for those labels. And if you never delete, only archive, you can have all of your historical email ready to be searched.

Unified Messaging

If your organization is using email, you automatically have GoogleTalk as well. GoogleTalk is not only an instant messaging platform, it also includes voice and video chat. While this may be useful when all of you are in the same location, imagine if parts of your small business are in other locales. Or, like my small business, everybody may be on the road at the same time, yet still need to communicate.

Mobile Device Support

This is so critical for our small business, and may become so for yours as well. We needed a solution that had extremely high availability, even from our clients’ machines. Additionally, we did not want to be locked into a specific vendor’s method of doing mail. Finally, we wanted to be able to synchronize our Mail, Calendar and Contacts between our mobile devices and computers seamlessly.

We found that the Blackberry Storm (then a new platform) was the best bet for this. Truth be known, it has been amazing. It has changed the way that communication is done in our business – there is no more waiting until after lunch to see if the client got back to you. This can be a good or a bad thing – but if you own the business, it’s a good thing.

So what did we get for 50 bucks per user per year?  A world class spam filtering engine, 25gb of space, access from anything with a web browser and near-real time synchronization with cell phones. I call that a bargain.

Stay tuned for tips on how to set this up for your business.

For now, let’s just focus on what we can accomplish with the minimalist’s toolset, starting with email. We will address the other two in future posts.

I don’t know what the next great communication medium is going to be, but it’s going to have to be something amazing to unseat email as the primary business communication tool. Some believe that Google’s Wave promises to do just that. I can’t believe I’m about to say this in 2009… but if you don’t have email… Oh, never mind, you may well never “get” it.

If you’re into crash courses, Howstuffworks.com has a great primer on How Email Works. It’s well beyond the scope of this blog post to go into much detail about how the technologies work – but if you’re the type that likes to dig deeper, resources and links can be found there.

A big part of email’s success in the business market is its simplicity. From the early days of the commercial Internet, application writers have worked very hard to shield the user community from the nuts and bolts under the email hood – basically limiting the user’s input to addressees, subject, data, and attachments. Because of this simplicity, the world’s pointy-haired-bosses were even able to understand email and see it as a valid business tool. Sales reports, logo ideas, building plans, and dirty jokes could now be delivered much faster than they ever were by fax.

At the risk of being obvious – email is not new. The specification that is used for most modern servers was originally ratified in August of 1982, and was a descendent and/or improvement of methods and research going back to the 1960s. Arguably, the best thing that’s happened to email in the last 10 years is its move to mobile devices.

What has this transition done for businesses, especially small ones? Suddenly, you’re not a slave to your computer anymore. You don’t have to get to a wireless hotspot or to the office to plug in – it all goes straight to your mobile device. Potential productivity increases because the lag time between when a message is received and when it can be acted upon is theoretically reduced. Sales reports can be reviewed, logo ideas can be accepted, building plans can be green-lighted (as long as the smaller screen doesn’t cause a problem – and you may need to export them to an image file first), and dirty jokes can be forwarded straight from the mobile device.

Email is still the king of business communication media. If you do not already have your phone in near-real-time-sync with your calendar, contacts and email, you may be at a competitive disadvantage.

The good news is, with today’s modern technology, you’re always reachable. The bad news is, with today’s modern technology, you’re always reachable.

As a sidebar – I’m using the turn “mobile device” instead of “cellular phone” deliberately.

• There are very few mobile devices that do nothing but make phone calls. In fact, many free cell phones have more technological know-how in them than what sent American astronauts to the moon. Can we still call it a phone if it does more than make calls?
• There are roughly two styles of mobile devices -  Phone devices that do data things and data devices that do phone things. The former category is a dying breed, now being replaced by things like the  iPhones, Blackberrys, Androids, etcetera. These fit firmly in the latter category – being computers that handle voice communications as well.

If you’re not sure how to set all of this up, a competent business computer or network consultant should be able to handle most of what you need.

That in mind, future blog posts will be short… targeted. Maybe a para or two, but with the option to grow that should the topic warrant.

The average computer comes with average wires – They are either too short or too long for your requirements. Fortunately, you can purchase custom cables from companies like cablestogo.com.

This is especially useful in business rack mounted systems. Racks are optimized to get the highest number of computers and equipment in the smallest possible physical area. In a standard full height rack, you can get up to 42 servers. That’s a lot of processing power!

With all that processing power is a downside – you have to get cables to the equipment. In the case of HP servers, each server gets two power cords, a KVM (Keyboard, Video, Mouse) cable, three network cables, and whatever other peripheral needs it might have.

So how do you lighten the cable load?

Installing Power Distribution Units in your rack is a start. These are either vertically or horizontally mounted, and they act similar to the power strip you probably have some of your home equipment plugged into. The only difference is that these are meant to be installed in a rack, and have mounting equipment to accomplish this.

Once you have your PDUs in place, it’s time to shorten the power cables. Cablestogo.com has a great selection of shorter cables – 18″ or 24″ power cables. Just enough to get from the server to the PDU. With the average server cable being around 10′ long, you are already pulling out 8-8.5 feet of useless cable!

KVM cables are almost always much longer than they need to be. Like power cables, this is most often remedied by bundling them together or creating cable loops. Messy! These cables can be purchased in 3′ lengths, stepping up in increments to dozens of feet long. Getting the proper length KVM cable (and no longer!) will pull out a lot of the clutter.

Finally, the network cables. What to do with all of the extra wire inside the rack? Fortunately, there’s a solution (are you surprised?). A terrific product called NeatPatch will tuck those extra inches of cable away neatly out of sight.

I’ve seen some fantastic results from these products… Have a look and see if you can improve your wiring closet or server rack!

As we go forward, I would like to feature some of the tools we use here, a bit about what they’re used for and how to use them. The purpose is to put tools in the hands of our readers (and clients!) that may be helpful as they’re trying to track down information about their network. Or maybe just to impress their friends.

This week, I want to feature Network-Tools.com. This has truly become one of the must-have tools in our consultancy. There is a wealth of information that can be gleaned here – far too much for a single blog post, so I’ll take the one that we use most commonly.

Of the many useful tools here, the one we use most is the DNS tools. Often we are called on to gather details about a domain so we can make DNS changes or to find out the IP Address of a specific server (web, email, or other).

Once on the site, we will use the Advanced NSLookup DNS tool link. This is essentially a web-based NSLOOKUP utility. It is used to determine the relationship between a hostname that makes sense to humans (such as www.google.com) with the IP address that makes sense to the human’s web browser, email client, or other “network aware” utility.

In the Advanced NSLookup DNS tool, we will enter the domain we are researching. If we were researching Google, for instance, we would enter “google.com” in the domain field. We will leave the rest of the fields alone for now – we’ll come back to them in a moment. Click the “go” button to get your results.

This will produce some very useful information. First, we know that google.com exists (assuming you haven’t been living under a rock for over a decade). Additionally, we see that we received a “non-authoritative” response. This means that Network Tools is not where Google’s records are kept. This tells us that we have a bit more work to do before we can see the detailed information that we’re looking for. The last bit of useful information that this search has provided is pointers to the authoritative servers. In other words, Network Tools is telling us “I’m not authoritative here, but I have the information on the servers that are, and here they are.” We are going to use one of those authoritative servers, and feed them back into the NSLookup tool in the “server” field. Again, we will click on the “go” button.

We are now presented with a wealth of information on the Google domain. First, note that this is now an authoritative response. In this case, we can now see information about their web servers and email servers, their IP addresses, and the order in which Google would like to have their email servers addressed in the event one of them is down.

In actuality, each of the IP addresses for Google points to a load balancer – which distributes the crippling load that Google deals with daily among several thousand computers. This is how they are able to deal with a volume of traffic that would crush most other sites. Still, the principles that apply for Google also apply for much smaller businesses. In each case, the domain information has to be on a DNS server somewhere, and it needs to outline the relationship between the services a domain provides – such as a website and an email server, the hostnames that provide the services, and the IP addresses of the hostnames.

Network-Tools.com is a very simple, easy to use tool. Some of the beauty of it, like Google itself, is the simplicity of the website design. It’s not flashy, it’s utilitarian. When you are tasked with finding out information on a large number of domains, the flashier sites end up getting in the way. Give it a try! See what kind of information you can gain on your own domain.