What’s common sense when it comes to minimising the risk of employees spreading critical information to rivalling companies? As of today, it’s clear that not even the US government and military can be sure that their data stays safely within their doors. Thereby I understand that my question probably instead should be written as “What is common sense to make it harder for employees to spread business critical information?” If anyone would want to spread [...]

My company is working with another company and as part of the contract they are requesting a copy of my company’s written IT Security Policy. I don’t have a written IT security policy, and I’m not exactly sure what I want to give to them. We’re a Microsoft shop. We have update schedules, limited accesses accounts to manage servers, firewalls, ssl certificates and we run the Microsoft Baseline Security Analyzer from time to time. We [...]

My company is working with another company and as part of the contract they are requesting a copy of my company’s written IT Security Policy. I don’t have a written IT security policy, and I’m not exactly sure what I want to give to them. We’re a Microsoft shop. We have update schedules, limited accesses accounts to manage servers, firewalls, ssl certificates and we run the Microsoft Baseline Security Analyzer from time to time. We [...]

I am wondering how all you great admins out there rate your success. I am thinking not only in a personal sense but also how you rate your employees and/or department. How do you build a business case for additional staff, ROI, new equipment, and justify your yearly expenses? For example do you, and how do you track: Trouble ticket solve rates Project Success Factors Project Success Rate Customer Service Score (how much do your [...]

The original contents of this file have been replaced with this message because of its characteristics. File name: ‘Body of Message’ Virus name: ‘Exceeded Internet Timeout’ I keep receiving this message on All mail, both internal and externally received email. I’m not sure what is causing this, any pointers? I’m running MS Small Businss Server 2008, with their Exchange Forefront mail scanner at the moment. Thanks! This (confusing) message is Forefront’s way of saying that [...]

As a system administrator, are there things that may not be obvious that should not be done ethically or legally even when instructed to do it? I am more interested in legally, what sort of actions could seriously damage your future carrier or get you in trouble with the law. For example, is it ever not okay to delete certain types of files even when the Boss requests it? In particular, I am wondering about [...]

Is it possible with the correct licensing and in a business enviroment to install MS office on a server which the the clients on the business’s network can access? You will need one license of Microsoft Word for each desktop device that will access it and use it from the Terminal Server. So you can’t get just one license and share it via Terminal Services. While that’s technically possible, it’s legally a violation of the [...]

We have very quickly out-grown our Small Business Server 2008 current hardware and have decided to purchase a complete new server. What is the best and easiest way to move the server to new hardware? It is one complete box, we do not have any SAN’s or any complicated setup. We do have a couple of SQL databases running on the server and we also use Exchange. I’m sure there must be some easy way [...]

BlueHost does not allow domain-redirection, such as “http://eg.com” to “http://www.eg.com”, at the cost of domain-registration but with the cost of hosting and the cost of the penultimate. I don’t know whether this is a scam or a catch but it evidently drives customers to pay the expensive hosting besides the initially cheap-looking “registration”. It is totally stupid if you are hosting your site with your own servers as you would then have two hosting available. [...]

I’ve just read an old RFP and one of the questions was along the lines of “List the top 3 KPIs of DNS management”. As a web developer, I have a working knowledge of DNS but no idea what would be considered a KPI of managing a collection of domain names. Off the top of my head, and in no particular order: At the management level: reliability of renewals process (don’t allow your customers’ domains [...]