Expired Norton stops Internet access

Two machines have been brought into us recently with DNS errors on accessing Internet pages. In both cases these machines had an out of date version of Norton Antivirus / Internet Security installed. In both cases once Norton was removed Internet access was restored.
The problem is that you cannot always uninstall Norton after it has expired. This means that you have to use the Norton Removal Tool (or for the brave you can edit the Windows registry directly) but without Internet access you cannot download the Norton Removal Tool.
You can of course download the NRT to another machine, copy the files onto a memory stick or CD and then copy it to the target machine and run it. Remember to reinstall some AntiVirus software once you have deleted Norton. We recommend Panda Internet Security products.
To occupy the high moral ground I have to say that for a company such as Symantec with a product such as Norton AV to exhibit this behaviour simply because the license has expired is really unacceptable.

Ping error 1231 in Vista

Have you had an error 1231 when using ping on Vista. We had our second case of this on a laptop today.
The laptop was brought in because it could not connect to the internet. We did all the usual things, turning off firewalls, checking connection settings, we changed between dynamic IP address allocation and fixed IP addresses.
On our network we have a mixture of fixed and dynamic addresses all of which work OK. We use our domain server as the first DNS server in the chain. We have done everything right. Yet, no internet connection.
If we used fixed addresses we could see other systems on our network and ping them but not those outside. With dynamic addresses we got the error 1231 if we tried to ping anything including local addresses.
We spent almost 3 hours today searching a number of support fora (even the Microsoft tech help forum) and have put in place a number of suggested changes. One suggested change which we could not put in play was to change the graphics adapter card so we had to keep the Nvidia card that comes with the machine.
None of the suggested changes made any difference. It became obvious from the posts in forum after forum that there is no single way of removing this error and I even doubt if any one has really found a fix for this.
In the end we had to advise our customer that we needed to do a 'back to factory settings' restore of the machine as the most expedient way to deal with this problem.
My issue is this. Why is it that an organisation such as Microsoft with all the resources it has to offer is unable to come up with a fix for this and get rid of it? Similar problems have existed in every release since Windows 2000 so it has been around for quite a while and should have been fixed by now.
If anyone has this problem Google "ping 1231 vista" and look at any of the sites that are listed.

Microsoft Office alternatives

Many businesses out there in the wider world are committed to using Microsoft Office as the primary office suite software. True Word and Excel are good products. Outlook is popular and Powerpoint almost ubiquitous.
It doesn't have to be. Many users do not like the new ribbon interface on Office 2007. Uptake to Office 2007 has been slow and offers very few advantages over Office 2003. We still have a number of clients on Office XP and Office 2000 and who have no intention of upgrading just for the sake of it.
Add to this the new file formats in Office 2007 and the cost of the new products and you can see why users prefer to stay with what they are used to.
But for the more adventurous there is an alternative. It does most of what Office does. It comes with Word Processor, Spreadsheet, Database, Slide Presenter. Best of all it comes for free.
The product is Open Office. It can be downloaded from http://www.openoffice.org .
See our website open source page for details of this and other open source software.

Email hijack

Hi folks. Someone has hijacked one of our email addresses and may have been sending out unseemly messages using it. We apologise for any inconvenience this may have caused anyone. That email address has now been taken off line so if you receive a message coming from networks@hillierconsultants.com after 11:30am Thursday 2nd October (BST) it has not come from us.

NAS Server shipment (based on FreeNAS)

We have just shipped our first own built NAS server.
For those who are not technical NAS stands for Networked Attached Storage which is simply a way of getting large amounts of dedicated storage space in business network environments.
We have used FreeNAS as the operating system and configured the server with 4 x 1000GB hard disks arranged in two RAID mirrored pairs of disks, with 4GB RAM, Athlon 6000+ processor, shipped in a tower case.
This provides just short of 1700GB on line storage for archiving data in a data rich environment. At just under £800 delivered and installed the price compares favourably to the rack mounted NAS servers that are available and still gives room for future expansion if required.
If you have a file server that is getting clogged up with data then this might be an option for you. Moving data to a dedicated storage server could give your domain server a new lease of life.
Our website gives contact details.

Is this new malware or just a bug!!

I may have identified new malware. I am calling it a thrip but it might just be a bug!!
Things were moving in front of my eyes. Items on my screen were moving around. I had a close look and sure enough this small half cursor sized object was moving around my screen. It looked just like a thrip (also called thunder flies in the UK). I went to brush it away but it just kept on walking.
When I looked closely I saw that this insect was indeed walking around on my screen BETWEEN the layers of the flat panel. We all know how these small insects can find their way behind the glass of pictures but if need be you can unframe your picture of photo, remove the thrips and get on with life.
I know precisely what is going to happen with my pet thrip. It will die and it will do so in the middle of the screen so that every word document I have will have this thrip in the most straegic place. I won't be able to get rid of it. I will not be able to take the layers of my flat panel apart.
It looks like thrippy and I are just going to have to get along for the time being.

Bullguard Internet Security on VIsta

If you are running Windows Vista and have Bullguard AV installed read on.
We have been wrestling for some time with a computer that intermittently runs slowly, but then recovers. This has now been on the bench for 3 days.
Bullguard has integrated anti-spyware so we turned off Windows Defender - it works better however...
We thought we ought to run a virus scan. Ran the Bullguard scan and after 1.5 hours with only 7% complete we cancelled this. We ran Panda Active Scan which identified in about 1 hour 20 minutes that there were 11 infected files, so back to Bullguard and let it run.
After 2 hours still on 7% complete, 800,000 files out of 1400000 files scanned and the number of files to scan increasing faster than those scanned and 23 hours left to run to completion.
We sent an email to Bullguard and got the following response "Because the system is running Windows Vista, please make sure that the following Windows features are currently Disabled: Windows Defender, Windows Firewall, User Account Control. Know that these modules can lead to conflicts with the BullGuard plug-ins and also slowdown of the computer."
This is not good news, but our main gripe is to underestand why Mesh who supplied this machine shipped it with full featured Vista when the AV product is known to have these issues.
Our policy would be to ship an AV product that does not cause these conflicts or turn off those features that cause the conflict.
Of course many people turn off Vista UAC but is that really the right thing to do?

Antivirus 2009

Beware spoof anti virus software "Antivirus2009". We have just has our first case of this infection on a Windows Vista Home Premium machine.
This unwanted program comes in via a trojan, which means it gets round the Vista security controls because you have effectively invited the program in.
There are some published removal methods - simply Google for 'Antivirus2009'. We clicked on the 3rd and 4th links to find effective removal methods. The methods listed are really 'techie' methods and are not for the faint hearted.
However we did remove this program from our machine by installing an up to date version of Panda Anti Virus Software.
If you need more help you can always contact us via our main website http://www.hillierconsultants.com.

Basildon Business Awards Winners

Hillier Consultants are very pleased to number suppliers and clients among the winners at the Basildon Business Awards on 11th July 2008.

Congratulations to Geoff Morris and his team at Uniscan for being a winner in the Manufacturing Category, to Julian Lionel and his team at XPC who won in the Environmental Awareness category.

Another customer of ours was present in support of Janet Hart who won the Business Woman of the Year award.

A full list of winners can be found on http://www.essexbusinessawards.co.uk/basildon_winners.html

Basildon's 16th Awards ceremony was a success overall.

Many thanks to all those who entered the competition and made a contribution to the business opportunities that exist in and around Basildon District.

New web server in action

We have now installed our new webserver back in the UK to replace the 4 year old rented machine which is in the US.
We feel this will give us a greater measure of control over the service we provide to our clients, particularly as the number of clients keeps on increasing.
The new server has been built on an AMD platform running the Fedora 7 operating system. It runs the Plesk control panel software to maintain the web sites themselves.
We had several attempts at loading the software onto a Ubuntu based server but the final result was not robust enough. We finally chose to run with Fedora 7, Plesk does not run on Fedora 8, and Fedora 6 does not automatically support SATA disk drives.
We have now begun the long process of migrating domains across to the new server so if clients experience a slight hiccup in service over the next fews days, please forgive us and call us for support.

Web Development Tools

I don't like to be critical of developers who create programs which they then distribute at no cost but...
In making changes to our website I have been using a number of programs to help me. I have also at the same time been trying to make the website W3C compliant as well as improving our SEO rating.
One program I have been using suddenly without prompting started putting in a whole lot extra tags to do with base_target _top in all the 'td' tags, it has littered the code with empty 'span' '/span' and 'small' '/small' tags whereas other editors use 'strong' tags.
One issue that related to leaving untidy code around is that file sizes increase unnecessarily which impacts directly on download speeds.
Another program I have been using has a good tool to validate the code in the file. It advises about closing tags such as using in preference to and applies this to 'img', 'hr' and 'meta' tags. However it's own HTML editor strips these trailing \> closing references out of the code.
Come on guys - good programs but please test that there is consistency when you have finished.

New malware threat hits unprotected computers

Today we have had two incidents of a pernicious malware infection which is identified by the desktop background being altered to a red image with a 'Privacy protection threat' warning. It is accompanied by a number of popups trying to get you to obtain malware removal programs. These popups appear at regular intervals even in idle mode. Both machines also had the Windows Task Manager disabled although regedit and msconfig were available for use.
These two incidents are on unrelated equipment. One machine had a copy of McAfee installed but we cannot vouch for the state of the updates licence. The other machine had lost it's antivirus and was thus totally unprotected. We believe the infection has been brought in by a trojan horse but our invesigations have not identified the causal agent.
The totally unprotected machine allowed us to install and run Panda AntiVirus, which removed some threats but did not entirely clean the machine. We did a system restore to a week ago and then reinstalled Panda. Other machines on this network which were protected seem to be unaffected.
The other machine gave us grief. We could not get Panda installed initially because we could not remove McAfee. We disabled startup options in msconfig and trawled through registry to remove relevant McAfee keys. We have loaded Panda and done a system scan but we are not sure how complete the clean up has been. We may have to use system restore on this one as well.
This malware seems to strike fast. Dont let it cripple your system. keep your anti virus up to date.
Both systems running WIndows XP. One using XP Home, one XP Professional. Both SP2.

Website upgrade

A considerable amount of time has been spent recently trying to improve the layout and accessibility of our website.
We have done a check on our site to obtain the Google PR number which we felt was lower than we wanted.
We have made significant changes to improve readability, we have added many more images, we have added more links.
The transition is by no means complete and we have yet to nudge our PR reference to the level we would like.
On the other side we have also taken time to look at other URLs reference numbers. A number of those we would expect to be in the region of the top quartile are achieving a score of 7 out of 10. Many more, and these include sites which are aesthetically pleasing, seem to languish in the lower quartile: 1s, 2s and 3s.
We were very cheeky and did the same test on the Google site itself. Now get this. Google.co.uk only scores 8 out of 10 but surprise, surprise google.com achieves the magic 10 out of 10.
One thing we have learnt is that home pages with Adobe Flash or a single large graphic and a link through do not score very well at all. Our home page which has a high proportion of words and links to other sites seems to score better.
If you want to make use of our experience and serivces to help you with your site then please use our site to make contact.
There is more yet to be done so feel free to comment if you have constructive ideas we can put in place.