Jesus loves geeks
…because someone needs to.
Web Filtering – Look for this
Apr 12th
So over the past few months I have been shopping for a good Internet filtering solution.
My few requirements:
- Must integrate with AD (mainly so I don’t have to recreate every user)
- Must be an appliance, there were a lot of good software solutions or creating our own proxy kind of things but I don’t have time for that since we only have 2 techs for 200+ users in a medical facility.
- Needs to work well with Citrix & Terminal Services
- Good reporting
- Price (this according to our bosses, all 27 doctors, is the most important)
There are actually a few decent options out there but after 3 months of comparing, researching, webinars, live demos, and talks with sales people (who will tell you the appliance cooks your meals & gets you dates, if it will get you to buy) & techs, I narrowed the field to 3.
St. Bernard iPrism, Barracuda Networks Web Filter and the Cymphonix Network Composer.
All three had most of the features I wanted. I was familiar with the iPrism from a previous job, and really liked it best at first but of the 3 it was the most expensive in the long run. I know the expression that “you get what you pay for” but then again sometime you pay more for a reputation and name than a solid product. The price for the yearly updates were more than double than the price updates AND instant replacement of the Barracuda.
When I first started looking the Cuda had virtually no reporting and AD integration was iffy… but I already have a Barracuda Spam Filter on our network…
(sorry, side note here: the Barracuda Spam Filter is a very cool and helpful gadget. I have never found one that blocks 100% of Spam and anyone who says theirs does is a flat out LIAR…however this one gets so close it is scary)
…and being familiar with the interface was a plus. The more detailed reporting and much better AD integration were promised and by the time I was ready to buy, had came up to the standards I wanted.
The Cymphonix was, honestly, the most interesting and comprehensive option of the three. It honestly did too much. The reporting was very detailed and it had some very cool network traffic analysis features. The catch with the Cymphonix was the way it worked with Terminal Services and Citrix I was going to get charged virtually doubled the per seat cost. Simply put, this means that for my 200 concurrent users I would need 400 “seats” (licenses). Then again the sales guy I talked too read off a script pretty much, which is the most annoying thing to someone who actually knows about technology… So, yes, I went with the Barracuda. I will be installing it next week so I’ll post more on this later. Feel free to ask any questions about my decision and I’ll try to reply here. Cheers!
Taxes
Apr 11th
As Dave Barry Once said:
“We’ll try to cooperate fully with the IRS, because, as citizens, we feel a strong patriotic duty not to go to jail.”
You gotta love Dave. Enjoy tax time! Check out Dave’s blog as well: Dave Barrys blog
being productive…and a blog review.
Apr 11th
Being a very unproductive person at times…mainly because I enjoy procrastination so much. However, I have noticed that this is cutting into being, well, productive. So I set out on a search Google search for some personal productivity tips and immediately found why I can (sadly) never be productive. 
Then, I happened to find Productivity501. Productivity501 is run by Mark Shead and is dedicated (and does by the way) to giving you tips and tricks to help increase your personal productivity. After reading only a few articles, I got hooked and even added his feed to my Google homepage.
The first article that caught my attention was obviously the iPod Contest for reviewing the site..yea, I’m a sucker for the chance at a free iPod…either way there are some really great tips here. Some articles hit really close to home ( Internet–Friend or Foe for Productivity? and The Habit of Lateness). Even though it hurt my feeling to see that someone had been watching my habits, Mark had some very solid advice on breaking my “issues.”
I also found an article called Effective Web Browsing that had some very simple but effective advice on making the most of your browsing time, something I do very poorly. For example I do love bookmarking sites (since I use multiple computers) and a tabbed browser (Firefox) is a must, but a simple thing like a time limit?
“Set a time limit for browsing. By giving yourself a resonable time limit, you’ll keep yourself focused on things that are really important to you instead of following every random tangent hyperlink.”
Simple, common sense advice, but yet very effective.
Some other articles worth your time (be productive!):
Top 5 Time Savers
Top 5 Time Wasters
The Most of Your Minute (lots of these, great quick tips)
As far as the site goes here are some PROs & CONs:
PROS
- clean and simple site layout.
- Found in Google, Yahoo & MSN search engines (I searched for “personal productivity.”)
- great advice; simple, effective and easy to apply tips.
- The iPod give away is a great idea for boosting visitors & getting linked from other sites.
- RSS feed and the simplicity of adding to Google homepage(a big plus for me anyways.)
- add were there (Google) but done tastefully and not too overbearing.
CONS (not that I have any room to brag being a new blogger and all)
- even though I found the site on some major search engines it was normally on the 4th page of results for terms I would highly associate with the site. (I originally found Productivity501 using Google Blog Search.
- graphics included with the posts are kind of dull ( overall the advice makes it worth it though.)
- clicking the “read more” link to read the entire blog is kind of annoying for someone trying to save time but I suppose it also lets you browse more articles on the main page to see if they are applicable.
- even though I love and use Google you might want to add more RSS feed options that are easily available at the top of the page.
It will be definitely be interesting to see how the give away works for his stats. For both of you reading my blog take the time to check out Productivity501 and enter the contest. I would only ask a to share the iPod for a day a week if you win.
Cheers.
Adding a new hard drive…
Apr 10th
Often people will ask me what are some things I can do to upgrade my computer or improve performance on my pc? Well there are some simple software things you can do but I’ll not waste your time with that. This time, lets start by looking at your hardware. RAM is usually the best place to start especially if you have less than 256 MB. A new hard drive is another great improvement. Let me recommend this one:
Actually I carry a few of these in stock so if your interested just shoot me an email.
“beep”ing Terminal Service!
Mar 1st
Silly issue… actually. It won’t be a problem that keeps you from working, though if your not used to hearing it it might drive you mad! After our recent upgrade to Windows 2003 (for Terminal Services) and Citrix Presentation Server 4, users kept complaining about a “beep” that would happen all the time. For example, if you were going to close a Microsoft Word document without saving it you would hear a “beep” sound when the message box pops up.
It’s a fairly easy fix and you can deploy it a number of ways. Modify the following key on the Terminal Services server using regedit:
[HKEY_CURRENT_USER\Control Panel\Sound]
“Beep”=”no”
“ExtendSounds”=”no”
Now since this is a registry setting for the current user you will have to have it applied to all users who use this system. Now I did this by making a simple reg file and referencing it in a bat file that I put in the “All Users\Start Menu\Programs\Startup.” Users will have to log on & off …then back on… to notice the change but still…no beeping.
Also to make this effective for new users either just keep the bat file there forever or change the same keys in this location:
[HKEY_USERS\.DEFAULT\Control Panel\Sound]
Hope this helps someone.
Firefox 2…showing closed tabs
Feb 20th
One reason I enjoy using Opera at times, is because it if I close it with 5 tabs open and then open it back up then all five will open back up again. The fact that I couldn’t get Firefox to do this was most always a bother. Well it seems now with Firefox 2 you can.
Go to Tools >Options and in the “Startup” area select the drop down box beside “When Firefox starts” and select “Show my windows and tabs from last time.”
I noticed that when Firefox closed unexpectedly it prompts you about whether you want to reopen the start page or all the tabs you had open. A little searching revealed this. By the way…nothing against Opera, I still enjoy using it at time…but overall I prefer Firefox.
Enjoy
Misys, Citrix 4 and Windows 2003…the saga continues.
Feb 16th
please note… any use of sarcasm in this blog are completely intentional. Thank You
Well more today from our Support help at Misys Client Care. They called…actually they have only been calling back after our systems have been down for an hour or more. Either way, they called back to say…well let me try adding a regedit then and then reboot all your servers…joy.
Anyways…to hopefully save someone else the trouble here is what happened:
Users were complaining about one of two things. The first symptom I saw was annoying but kind of simple to notice. We use a published application and when users tried to connect using the published application it would seem to “hang” and never complete the connection or error out. Actually, it just sat there and looked like this:
The second issue, which actually became the more prevalent problem looked like this:
The message said simply: “Cannot connect to the Citrix MetaFrame server. Unable to contact the MetaFrame server browser. There may be network problems, or you may need to configure or correct the server address in the Server Location field.”
Let me cover a few basic things… This has happened several times since our migration to Windows 2003 and Citrix Presentation Server 4, this was a come and go sort of problem that did not seem to affect every user, I can verify that there are no network problems, and most importantly users can connect directly to single servers in the farm (however we have very few people set up to connect directly this way).
Since users could connect directly to servers and not through the published application the Citrix Knowledge base articles I found didn’t seem to help much. So we went to the Microsoft Knowledge base to so some searching and stumbled on this article: http://support.microsoft.com/kb/312362/EN-US/
At first glance it seemed strange but so far this registry edit has worked. It seems that the paged pool memory was getting depleted when the server was under heavy load. No we did not have the same errors in our log files, but the symptoms seemed like it could describe what what happening. Either way, I’m pretty confident in our solution and will keep track of related issues and report here to confirm this was in fact the solution.
Hope this helps.
Citrix Makes You Cry and Other Hazards of Misys
Feb 15th
Today was absolutely horrible. For those of you who don’t know there are 2 techs where I work. Myself and a lady who has been there for about 13,000 years or so… I might be exaggerating, but not by much… Let me back up.
I work at a medical practice in Tennessee, I have been here for about 7 months and before that I worked for TDOT and took care of the technical aspects of the ITS center in Nashville…..either way…. so now I work in the Medical/Technical field. We currently use a company called Misys for our practice management software (appointments, billing, medical records, etc..) and for the past few weeks we have been going through some upgrades. You see, we had been running an Citrix Presentation Server XP on a Windows 2000 server farm. The Citrix\W2K server farm interfaces with an AIX (UNIX) system that stores our medical database. The Misys upgrades have consisted of adding 1 server to the farm, taking the rest up to Windows 2003, upgrading Citrix to Presentation Server 4, upgrading the AIX server and adding a new server to help handle the load between the server farm and the AIX.
I tell you this to say that their support that we pay an ungodly amount for, is about worthless. I mean seriously, what has happened to customer service? We have been plagued with issues since the upgrade began. Now the good news for me is that I get plenty of technical fixes to blog about, which I plan to.
The bad news is that it is a huge pain in the ass to myself and the users I have to support. I mean my job is to make technology helpful to my doctors/nurses/users but when some of the support is done by other, well what else can you do but ask (more like beg & plead) for help? It’s honestly enough to make you hide under your desk and cry…lol.
The big issue today dealt with Citrix. It seems that users could not login using our Published Application within Citrix. One of about 3 different login errors since the upgrade to 2003 & the new Presentation server. The eventual solution after about 4 hours? Reboot your servers.
“All of them?” I ask
“Yep”
“During the middle of a work day?” I say
“Yep”
“You realize I still have people working on the systems, right?” (now I’m more frustrated)
“Yep, you should actually be rebooting all servers in your farm every night”
“Every night?…And this is better than what we had how?”
…and I’m not going to go on because what he said was nonsense. My futile salute for the day definitely goes to Misys Health Care… If anyone out there is considering them…shop a little longer. Don’t get me wrong, I thought they were great till this upgrade. Oh well, what they screw up will hopefully make me stronger.
Next blog I’ll try to be a little more technical… I’m just frustrated with BAD customer service & support.
Cheers,
aaron
