We are interested in becoming agents for online backup systems and invite tenders from suppliers in the UK.
We resell online backup. The requirements are this.
Low cost - starting at around £5 per month for up to 5GB
Multiple hosts - many of our clients have more than one computer and don't want to pay a per computer charge
Logging - We monitor backups on behalf of our clients and need to have full logs of all activity sent to us and our client
Scheduled backups - We need to protect data on a daily basis with full or incremental backups
Synchronisation - We do not need active synchronisation - daily backups suffice
Console - We would like to have console access so that we can replace hosts on behalf of our clients as machines get replaced
Multi platform - We need a system that runs on Windows and *ix based systems
Re-branding - We are not concerned about rebadging and are quite content to use proprietory branding
Suppliers of such systems are invited to contact us by email to stephen@hillierconsultants.com using the subject line "Online backup tender bids".
Wednesday, 26 May 2010
Wednesday, 12 May 2010
McAfee offers appalling service support
Those of you who read these blogs might consider me to be a serial whinger but in my own defence I have to say that these days if I have a raw deal from a large organisation such as McAfee then if I do not make my views known how will anthing change.
I have a client machine come in running Vista. It will not boot. I managed to get a start in safe mode and saw that McAfee was installed.
I called McAfee to ask if what I was seeing was related to their recent debacle with a bug in an upgrade. The person on Tech Support obviously was not listening or failed to understand what I was telling them. The person concerned kept on about McAfee not working but was told on several occasions that it was Windows that was not working. I was advised to uninstall and reinstall McAfee but when I asked how I could re-input the client details I had no assistance.
I was transferred to Customer services who simply got hung up on finding out my email. Despite being told that my email address would have no bearing on the case the operative insisted that that was the only way they could help me. In the end I got fed up and hung up the phone.
I then thought I would raise it as a complaint. I spoke to the switchboard in England and asked how I could make a complaint and got transferred to Customer Services in the States. Back on the merry-go-round again.
How can big organisations operate in this fashion?
How do they ever believe this is a service?
I am trying to support one of their customers so why don't they try to support me?
In the end I give up and say "I will put this blog on our website and hope that anyone reading it will take the hint and never buy another product from this unattractive corporation". Let's hope they have so many claims from this latest fiasco that they are not around for very much longer.
I have a client machine come in running Vista. It will not boot. I managed to get a start in safe mode and saw that McAfee was installed.
I called McAfee to ask if what I was seeing was related to their recent debacle with a bug in an upgrade. The person on Tech Support obviously was not listening or failed to understand what I was telling them. The person concerned kept on about McAfee not working but was told on several occasions that it was Windows that was not working. I was advised to uninstall and reinstall McAfee but when I asked how I could re-input the client details I had no assistance.
I was transferred to Customer services who simply got hung up on finding out my email. Despite being told that my email address would have no bearing on the case the operative insisted that that was the only way they could help me. In the end I got fed up and hung up the phone.
I then thought I would raise it as a complaint. I spoke to the switchboard in England and asked how I could make a complaint and got transferred to Customer Services in the States. Back on the merry-go-round again.
How can big organisations operate in this fashion?
How do they ever believe this is a service?
I am trying to support one of their customers so why don't they try to support me?
In the end I give up and say "I will put this blog on our website and hope that anyone reading it will take the hint and never buy another product from this unattractive corporation". Let's hope they have so many claims from this latest fiasco that they are not around for very much longer.
Tuesday, 27 April 2010
McAfee bug problem April 2010
If you are running McAfee antivirus you may have a problem resulting from a bug in a recent update from McAfee which cripples your XP machine.
We noticed this in a machine that lost all network function, could not copy or paste and had other quirky behaviour.
After scanning it with several antivirus programs we found that the 'svchost' was being deleted. We were able to copy this file onto the relevant folder by putting the disk in another computer.
We could then open the system successfully in safe mode and remove the bad McAfee.
After that we installed a copy of Panda Antivirus which has proved successful for us.
You can find more information by clicking on these two links
http://www.longislandpress.com/2010/04/21/w32wecorl-a-wecorl-a-dcom-server-process-launcher-terminated-what-it-means/
http://vista.blorge.com/2010/04/26/mcafee-to-compensate-home-users-over-xp-update-bug/
If you are having problems with this issue we can help out.
We noticed this in a machine that lost all network function, could not copy or paste and had other quirky behaviour.
After scanning it with several antivirus programs we found that the 'svchost' was being deleted. We were able to copy this file onto the relevant folder by putting the disk in another computer.
We could then open the system successfully in safe mode and remove the bad McAfee.
After that we installed a copy of Panda Antivirus which has proved successful for us.
You can find more information by clicking on these two links
http://www.longislandpress.com/2010/04/21/w32wecorl-a-wecorl-a-dcom-server-process-launcher-terminated-what-it-means/
http://vista.blorge.com/2010/04/26/mcafee-to-compensate-home-users-over-xp-update-bug/
If you are having problems with this issue we can help out.
Tuesday, 13 April 2010
Advice to those tempted to try Office 2010 beta - DON'T
As you would expect it is right that people like ourselves should keep up with what is new and up and coming.
We therefore felt that we should try out the Office 2010 beta products.
First if you are running a 64 bit machine and have 32 bit versions of Office installed you cannot install the Office 2010 64 bit version.
We installed the 32 bit product. We then tried to read out emails.
Our copy of Outlook 2003 would not run because of a corrupted file.
The beta version of Outlook 2010 initially would not allow us to read any of our existing emails.
Eventually we could read the existing emails but we could not send and receive mail - getting a message that this was not implemented.
We googled for this and found a lot in blogs discussing this problem dating back to November 2009 so why is it that Microsoft have not patched this and released it. One site did have a work round - install the beta, uninstall the beta, re-install the beta and then it might work.
Then it wanted something called Outlook Social Connector to enable interconnection between Hotmail, Facebook, Twitter and a whole host of products that I do not use nor want to use.
What I want is a good solid email client program that collects and send my email - I don't need all the rest, and if I ever do want a Facebook client I will find one.
At this point I informed Microsoft through their feedback mechanism exactly what I thought of this product and that it would be removed from my system.
I then ran a system restore to a point further back than the install. Luckily I have been able to get all my historic emails but all my contacts have been obliterated
So if you are thinking you should try the new Office 2010 beta product our advice is simple. DON'T.
I do not feel we can say it any better than that.
It is time for Microsoft to get back to providing good solid products not a load of fancy cradle to grave software that doesn't do what it is meant to do.
We therefore felt that we should try out the Office 2010 beta products.
First if you are running a 64 bit machine and have 32 bit versions of Office installed you cannot install the Office 2010 64 bit version.
We installed the 32 bit product. We then tried to read out emails.
Our copy of Outlook 2003 would not run because of a corrupted file.
The beta version of Outlook 2010 initially would not allow us to read any of our existing emails.
Eventually we could read the existing emails but we could not send and receive mail - getting a message that this was not implemented.
We googled for this and found a lot in blogs discussing this problem dating back to November 2009 so why is it that Microsoft have not patched this and released it. One site did have a work round - install the beta, uninstall the beta, re-install the beta and then it might work.
Then it wanted something called Outlook Social Connector to enable interconnection between Hotmail, Facebook, Twitter and a whole host of products that I do not use nor want to use.
What I want is a good solid email client program that collects and send my email - I don't need all the rest, and if I ever do want a Facebook client I will find one.
At this point I informed Microsoft through their feedback mechanism exactly what I thought of this product and that it would be removed from my system.
I then ran a system restore to a point further back than the install. Luckily I have been able to get all my historic emails but all my contacts have been obliterated
So if you are thinking you should try the new Office 2010 beta product our advice is simple. DON'T.
I do not feel we can say it any better than that.
It is time for Microsoft to get back to providing good solid products not a load of fancy cradle to grave software that doesn't do what it is meant to do.
Friday, 2 April 2010
Creating reports based on user input criteria in OpenOffice BASE
I was searching the Open Office Community forum to solve a problem but did not find a direct answer. However I think I have worked out a method so I thought I would share it.
My development rig is using standard OO DB drivers. My production rig is using MySQL on our domain server to allow shared access.
I am using 3.1.0 on the development rig Windows 7 based. I am hoping my production rig will work from Windows and Linux platforms.
It is only a small database taking over from a spreadsheet which is getting too unwieldy to work.
I have 3 tables:-
Clients: clientno, name, contact, addr1, addr2, postcode
Record types: recordno, typename
Details: recordno, recordid, clientid, username, password, url, extra
Details.clientid = Clients.clientno
Details.recordid = Records types.recordno
I want to be able to generate a report which extracts from the DB all records pertaining to a particular client and allow the user to enter the client name after selecting the report to run. [Ideally I would like to do this selection from a form but I will live with what I have got at the moment]
I have in the past written db programs using basic ISAM files. I have recently been writing web apps using MySQL DBs so I had a good idea of how I wanted my solution to look. I just wasn't getting how to do it in OO and I have never found the patience to work through MS Access.
My solution.
I created a view with all the fields from the Detail record with links to the relevant tables elsewhere and saved this View as 'Details View'.
Next I went to queries and set up a new query. When I got to the Search Conditions I selected View.clientname in the fields box put in " :Enter_Client_Name " in the values box as suggested elsewhere in this forum but without the double quotes [and this point is important].
I then completed the query. When I ran it it gave me an empty list. I went back in to 'edit by SQL' and noted that the SQL had placed my :Enter_Client_Name in single quotes and thus it was not being found. I took off the single quotes [please note the input field turned green at this point]. Running this query allowed me to input the client name successfully.
Then I set up a report using this new query as the basis of the report. Running the report now allows the user to enter the name of a client on which they want to generate a report.
I am not going to say that I may not need refinements on this but I do believe that this gives other newcomers to OO DB a chance to make progress. Given a number of the posts on the forum I feel this is at the base of a lot of the queries.
The original post can be found on the OpenOffice.org Community Forum at this web address http://user.services.openoffice.org/en/forum/
Many thanks to all contributers to that forum.
My development rig is using standard OO DB drivers. My production rig is using MySQL on our domain server to allow shared access.
I am using 3.1.0 on the development rig Windows 7 based. I am hoping my production rig will work from Windows and Linux platforms.
It is only a small database taking over from a spreadsheet which is getting too unwieldy to work.
I have 3 tables:-
Clients: clientno, name, contact, addr1, addr2, postcode
Record types: recordno, typename
Details: recordno, recordid, clientid, username, password, url, extra
Details.clientid = Clients.clientno
Details.recordid = Records types.recordno
I want to be able to generate a report which extracts from the DB all records pertaining to a particular client and allow the user to enter the client name after selecting the report to run. [Ideally I would like to do this selection from a form but I will live with what I have got at the moment]
I have in the past written db programs using basic ISAM files. I have recently been writing web apps using MySQL DBs so I had a good idea of how I wanted my solution to look. I just wasn't getting how to do it in OO and I have never found the patience to work through MS Access.
My solution.
I created a view with all the fields from the Detail record with links to the relevant tables elsewhere and saved this View as 'Details View'.
Next I went to queries and set up a new query. When I got to the Search Conditions I selected View.clientname in the fields box put in " :Enter_Client_Name " in the values box as suggested elsewhere in this forum but without the double quotes [and this point is important].
I then completed the query. When I ran it it gave me an empty list. I went back in to 'edit by SQL' and noted that the SQL had placed my :Enter_Client_Name in single quotes and thus it was not being found. I took off the single quotes [please note the input field turned green at this point]. Running this query allowed me to input the client name successfully.
Then I set up a report using this new query as the basis of the report. Running the report now allows the user to enter the name of a client on which they want to generate a report.
I am not going to say that I may not need refinements on this but I do believe that this gives other newcomers to OO DB a chance to make progress. Given a number of the posts on the forum I feel this is at the base of a lot of the queries.
The original post can be found on the OpenOffice.org Community Forum at this web address http://user.services.openoffice.org/en/forum/
Many thanks to all contributers to that forum.
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