The Lucid View

Been getting lots of spam emails with funny looking characters in it? Do a little digging and you might there from Russia with love…..

If your suffering from an abundance of spam emails, why not have a look at exactly where there coming from? Recently we had a vast quantity of spam emails coming through to a particular generic email address. We suffered with it at first, moved on to using a desktop anti spam product which did filter them straight into the Junk email folder, but there was still a stupid amount of spam emails sat there.

So when I had a few minutes to think about this conundrum, there had to be a way of blocking these emails completely.

Having inspected these emails I found that they were all coming from Russian domains in one form or another.

How to ban a top level domain in Microsoft Exchange………

To block the Russian emails I used Microsoft Exchange to reject anything involving .ru

1. Head into the Exchange System Manger

2. Locate your Global Settings

3. Right click on Message Delivery and click on Properties

4. Select Filtering on the tabs that appear

5. Click on Add

6. Add *@*.ru

7. Make sure you have filtering turn on, on your SMTP connector to apply this!

You will then be living in a spam free world!!!

Gavin Moorhouse runs Lucid Computer Solutions Ltd, a West Midlands based IT Support and Computer Solutions business.

With many businesses now looking to their first server, what are the benefits of Microsoft’s Small Business Server?

I know, this should have been discussed a while back. However it’s dawned upon me that we’re doing more and more installations for businesses acquiring their first server or businesses looking to take control of their IT by having their own File Sharing Server, Email Server and the ability to access IT resources remotely. The customers looking for a Small Business Server range from businesses with a couple of employees to fifteen or so.

The benefits of Small Business Server 2008……..

So we’ll keep this brief and simply summarise the key benefits:

Value For Money | File Server, Email Server and Remote Access all in one box

File and Printer Sharing | Share your company documents, share printers and restrict access to certain files

Email Server | Take control of your email, creating your own email addresses and email groups

Company Web | Host an Intranet to share your announcements and document templates

Remote Access | Remotely Access your work computer, your work email and company website

Backup | Backup your company data with ease, enabling you to have an off site backup

Gavin Moorhouse runs Lucid Computer Solutions Ltd, a Worcestershire based IT Support and Computer Maintenance business.

So you have a backup, that’s a great start, but how secure is that backup?

We like simple solutions. We like backup solutions. We therefore like simple backup solutions, such as having all of your company data, databases and email automatically backed up at a given time of day. A nice touch would be to have an email afterwards telling you that the backup worked or failed so you can take appropriate action.

However backups solutions are the point of this blog posting……….

The point of this blog posting is to simply raise the question – how secure is your backup?

You have all of your confidential company data backed up and the backup drive is in your car. Your car is stolen and Mr.Thief plugs in the backup drive to his stolen laptop and can instantly access all of your data. This would be bad for any business, but even worse if you store personal details which are confidential.

You can be exposing your customers to identity theft or risk your own trade secrets……..

Thankfully there is a simple solution to save your bacon……

You can encrypt your backup drive so that you can only access the drive after you have entered a secure password.

If you don’t enter the password, you can’t view the contents of the drive at all, so Mr.Thief wouldn’t even know the data was there in the first place. This would also give you peace of mind in the event of a drive being stolen or lost.

Gavin Moorhouse doesn’t manage the England football team, but if he did, they would probably be the best in the world! He does however provide IT Support and Computer Maintenance in Worcestershire and the surrounding areas.

Last night saw the 30th Brit Awards, here is what I made of it……….

Lady GaGa, Jay-Z and Cheryl Cole were amongst the performers at last nights Brit Awards. For once I honestly enjoyed the whole show. Peter Kay as presenter was a master stroke, he is a legend and his links to the performers and presenters were brilliant! He should do it every year!

Lady GaGa was her usual bonkers self, which is what I love about her. I would like to have seen her perform Poker Face or Just Dance, but you can’t have it all can you? The king of hip hop Jay-Z was superb with Alicia Keys, if some of the other acts are the in the Championship, they are defiantly top of the Premier League.

Cheryl Cole clearly mimed (badly) but the performance was still superb. After recent newspaper revelations about her husband (not the broken ankle) she looked angry to say the least. I loved the remix of her track with Steve Angello (that’s right, I’m still down with the kids).

Robbie is on my middle ground. I don’t love him or hate him, he is just sat in the middle. I’m not sure about him getting an outstanding contribution to music though, I’m sure Sir Paul McCartney picked it up last year and I think Robbie has a very long way to go to be in the same bracket at the former Beatles legend.

I think my only criticism of the awards would be ‘The Spice Girl Show’ at the beginning. We had Geri and Melanie B collecting an award, then individually presenting an award and then both being interviewed afterwards. I was soon sick of the site of them.

Overall it was probably the best Brits I’ve ever watched as I only paused for one cup of tea, which is normally a good sign!

If your using Kaspersky Internet Security or Kaspersky Anti Virus, this might apply to you…..

As a big Kaspersky fan, it’s not often I see problems with this product. However today I received an error on my laptop (which I have seen before) which made me think it would be worth putting out a quick blog article about the error and how to resolve it.

Database Corrroption / Application Errors

When starting up your computer you may have received a notification in the bottom right of the screen that Kaspersky hasn’t started, that there has been an application error or that the Kaspersky database is corrupt (see screen shot).

This is normally caused by a bad update from Kaspersky, a hard shutdown of your computer or by another program interfering with the Kaspersky program.

Thankfully there is an easy way to resolve this problem. All you need to do is force Kaspersky to do an update and it will automatically resolve your problems. You can force the update of Kaspersky by either right clicking on the Kaspersky icon in the bottom right of the screen and clicking on update or by going into the main program and clicking on the update button.

Once you have clicked on this it will go away, grad the updates and a normal service will be resumed.

The Manchester City v Stoke City game has just kicked off in the FA Cup, my money says City will win this one………..

Is your Internet connection slow or dropping out completely? Have you tried replacing your router?

For a few days at Lucid Towers we had been suffering with drops in Internet connections and a general slowness to our usual speedy connection. Looking after our customers is our first priority so we just grinned and took it as we had to crack on with the job in hand. However after the connection appeared to grind to a complete stand still, enough was enough.

Time to try something different

I could have phoned my ISP or the line provider and more than likely would have had the run around. Perhaps I would have been told to reinstall Windows (yes I was told this once by a call centre) so I thought I’d just check out things myself.

Having swapped over the ADSL Filter and Lead there was no difference, the same result was also apparent after disconnecting everything for a while.

It was time to bite the bullet and try a different router. Having connected up the new router, the connection speed was some five times quicker on average compared to previous test results. I tested the speed over a period of a couple of hours and the same consistent speed was still there, which was great news.

Having left the replacement router in for a few days, all is well and we’re once again firing on all cylinders! Result!!!

Following on from the previous posting on Anti Virus Live, we have another similar nasty…….

Internet Security is it’s name, and pain is it’s game!! This hoax program is similar to the Anti Virus Live program I previously blogged about. Internet Security is another scareware product which will tell you have a number of virus problems and the only way to resolve them is to purchase the full product. This is the last thing you should do, at the least it will cost you money, worst case scenario, your card details are ripped off.

System Restore won’t resolve this one……….

A handy tool which is part of Windows XP, Vista and Windows 7 is the System Restore feature. Unfortunately this nasty little program will hide itself in the System Restore area, so even if you roll back to before your problems, it will appear again and again.

The best option for removal is to scan your hard drive using another computer with up-to-date Anti Virus software installed, removing all the infected files and then to clean up the registry to ensure it doesn’t come back.

In the future you should such as a real Internet Security suite such as Kaspersky or Avira.

I’ve seen this program getting onto many systems using the AVG Free Edition product, which doesn’t appear to detect and remove this little number.

This year we will no doubt see the release of Google’s Operating System, Chrome, it’s won’t rival Microsoft Windows though……

A while back now I blogged about the Internet daddy, Google, releasing it’s very own Operating System to rival Microsoft Windows. Well I’ve read some further details on the hardware requirements, and based on this, it certainly won’t rival the beast that is Microsoft.

The main reason it won’t rival Microsoft is because it will be entirely cloud based. For those of you that just read that and are thinking “Will it be formed from evaporated water?”, let me briefly enlighten you. A cloud based product or application means it runs over the Internet with nothing being stored on your computer. So for the entire Operating System to be cloud based, means no Internet, no working computer. This means you will use applications such as Google Docs or Office Live, without storing anything on your computer.

Now before you cloud gurus out there jump off your high horse and rant at me for not knowing about products such as Google Gears which allow cloud based applications to work without an Internet connection, please stop there. I know about them, but I’m simply not a fan. There is something I like about being able to touch and hug my data. I’m responsible for it and no one else suits me just fine.

No support for a hard drive……..

If you look at the hardware requirements for the Google Chrome Operating System, you will see that there is no support for a hard drive. You can use a flash drive (one of those USB pen drive thingys) but this is just to store local files to and nothing else.

You also won’t be able to download the Chrome Operating System, so it will only come on preloaded computers.

Now this doesn’t mean one of us geeks will take something call the ‘source code’, work some magic on it and release it as a download, but Google themselves won’t be doing this.

With all this in mind, you definatly won’t find it breaking into the business market. It will be aimed at the Netbook style user market. Interesting times indeed, I’ll keep you posted as and when I have further information.

Scareware is on the increase, here we will discuss one common example of this new breed of annoyances….

So what is scareware?

Scareware is a piece of software which gets onto your computer and claims you have multiple computer virus related problems. This is actually quite amusing because the only virus here is the actual software telling you have a problem. This software is basically there to get you to make a purchase online using your credit card. At the very least you will make a purchase for something you don’t need, in the worst cases, your credit card will be cloned and you will have all sorts of weird and wonderful purchases appearing on your monthly statement.

How does it get onto my computer?

The most common ways are through social media websites or through a pop up on a website. Try to avoid any ‘click here to download’ links and if you receive something through a social media website, ensure you know and trust the person first, before opening the message or download.

What does it looks like?

There is no standard answer here as they all look different and they are always changing, however a common one we have seen over the last few weeks in the Anti Virus live program which is pictured here. This tells the user they have a whole world of problems on their computer and if they don’t remove them now, the world will come to an abrupt end.

What should I do if I get this on computer?

If you get this on your computer, you should shut it down immediately and contact your local computer services provider (isn’t this a shameless plug??) because if you want it properly removed and what to protect yourself from future issues, it’s best done by an expert.

You wouldn’t change the head gasket on your car yourself would you?

Kaspersky is the number one anti virus product of choice for Lucid Computer Solutions, but there appears to be problems…..

If you have dealt with me or my business, you will have no doubt heard me harp on about how good Kaspersky is at protecting your computer from viruses, spyware, scareware and all the other wonderful terms out there for computer nasties.  

Kaspersky’s latest offering is Kaspersky Internet Security 2010 which is their package to protect you using Anti Virus, Anti Spam and Anti Hacker technology, and it’s a really good product. So what are these problems you speak of?

The problem seems to centre around Windows XP computers. It causes a slow down of applications, such as Internet Explorer and seems to work the computer extremely hard. Having played around with the advanced settings (because that’s what I do in my free time, call me a geek) there was still no improvement in the overall performance. 

Support is there to be used, when you need it……

No this isn’t a shameless plug for the IT Support services offered by Lucid Computer Solutions, but an example of how customer support is there to be used when you need it. I contacted Kaspersky UK (and I have to say every time I have contacted them, they have been very good) and asked them about this overall slow down affecting some XP computers. There were completely honest and told me that Kaspersky 2010 was written with Windows 7 in mind and therefore didn’t run as smoothly on older systems as its predecessor.

Their advice was to install Kaspersky Internet Security 2009 on the Windows XP computers. Sure enough, having changed some computers back to this version, a normal service was resumed. I could have spent hours tinkering with 2010 settings, but a quick call to support and I was told what would essentially overcome my problem.

So if your having performance problems with Kaspersky 2010, install 2009 instead and see if it resolves your problem.

Your license key for Kaspersky 2010 will work just fine with 2009.

And whilst we’re talking about Anti Virus solutions….

I’m also trialling ESET on a Small Business Server to see how that fares as a Kaspersky alternative. So far it is refusing to update and it has stopped inbound VPN connections, so sure enough, their support team have been contacted. Watch this space!