RIM CEOs step down!

Hi folks! So this just in! Jim Balsillie and Mike Lazaridis have stepped down as co-CEO’s of RIM! They have named Thorsten Heins as the new President and CEO. He has also been appointed to the board!

All I can say, is it’s about flipping time! RIM was on a roller coaster ride into oblivion this past year, and they needed a change and fast!

Now with this announcement, hopefully RIM can begin the healing process and concentrate on churning out good products instead!

You can read more here.

-RP

Cool Top Apps for the iPhone

Hi folks! So now I have finally upgraded to iOS 5! I have to say it’s not that bad, especially now that the jailbreak is out for it.

I am running iOS 5 on an iPhone 4, so I don’t have Siri yet. I don’t feel that the iPhone 4S is a big enough upgrade from my iPhone 4, so i’ll be waiting for the iPhone 5 before I make the switch.

So in the meantime, what are the cool apps for the iPhone? Well there are many, but some of them you’ll need to jailbreak for so you can access the Cydia app store.

You can check my list of cool top  apps for the iPhone here.

-RP

QuickBooks 2012 and MSXML 4 Installation Error

Hi folks! It’s been a while since i’ve done a troubleshooting post, so I figured I’d send one your way. This one has to do with QuickBooks 2012.

The problem experienced by users is when they try and install QuickBooks 2012 in Windows 7 and they get the following errors:

• MSI returned 1603: Fatal error during installation
• A network error occured while attempting to read from the file  “path to msxml.msi”

Happy New Year!

Hi folks! Just wanted to wish you all a happy new year! There will be a lot of great things to come in 2012, and I hope to see what new and exciting things might happen in the tablet wars this year.

Also, the continuing saga with RIM is sure to proliferate the news over 2012. Stay tuned, and lets see what the BlackBerry maker can do to survive in the new year!

I wish you all a happy holidays and a happy new year!

-Cheers, RP

Adobe Flash announced for Ice Cream Sandwich

Hi folks! So you may have heard that the Ice Cream sandwich os for Android didn’t have anything announced for Flash as of yet.

However, Adobe has just announced that they will indeed support Flash for the new Ice Cream sandwich operating system. This means they are making good on their promise to do a final release of their product.

As time goes by this will be phased out in favor of HTML5. You can read more here.

-RP

Veeam 6 released!

Hi folks, for those of you that love the virtualization world as much as i do, great news! Veeam 6 has been released!

Veeam is the product that I love to use for backing up virtual machines. There are a lot of products out there that can accomplish this but Veeam has always had some great features to bring to the table. Top amongst them is their UAIR functionality and their ability to recover file level data super-fast!

Veeam 6 has a new architecture and some great new features. If you’re a VMware fan, i highly suggest you check it out!

You can read more about it here.

-RP

Mobile Device Policies

Hi folks! So as I spoke about in my last post, there will be a huge mobile device explosion this Christmas.

I mentioned that IT personnel should get prepared for the coming storm. Where to start? Well first off, you will have to define the risks and benefits to the use of mobile devices in the work place. Then you will have to determine how you can mitigate those risks and take advantage of those benefits.

There are many pieces of technology out there that can help you deal with MDM (mobile device management) in the work place, but my best advice? If you have any say in the matter, see if you can hold off. Wait even just a year and the technology should mature a bit more where we might have a fighting chance at adequately supporting these devices in a corporate environment.

Don’t get me wrong, there are solutions out there now, but they are all in their infancy. If anything one of the best things you can do now is use products such as Citrix and the Citrix Receiver App to keep all your data in the cloud, so nothing actually exists on the actual device. This way you’re using your mobile devices more like a dumb terminal. That way if it’s lost or stolen, no data goes missing.

-RP

Penetration Testing

Hi folks! So often there are questions from fellow IT colleagues, what can they use to help them in testing their networks to make sure they are secure?

After all, you need to know for sure that everything you’ve done to secure your network is actually working. How do you verify this? You perform a penetration test. If you are not well versed in this you can easily hire a consultant to come in and do this for you. However if you don’t have the monetary means to do this, you can use freely available software out on the Internet to test your security.

One of these is BackTrack 5. This is a security Linux distribution that consists of many tools used to test your network. In addition to this, purchase of a promiscuous wireless network adapter is recommended. This will allow you to perform proper wireless penetration testing.

Just remember one thing, do not ever do this on a network that you do not have permission to do this on. Even if it is for a network that you run, please ensure that you have an outage window declared and permission from the proper people who are authorized to give you permission to carry out the penetration test.

If you’ve never done penetration testing before, I encourage you to build a lab network where you can test to your heart’s content without affecting anybody in a production environment.

-RP

QNAP 1279

Hi folks! As you know I am a big fan of the QNAP series of NAS devices for the SMB market. QNAP makes a great product at a great price point.

QNAP has just released a new product at the top of their product line, the 1279 model which allows for a maximum of 12 drives, increasing your maximum capacity using QNAP substantially! Of course with hard drive prices through the roof these days, it might make things temporarily more expensive than usual. The device is also capable of 10GBe connectivity!

However once hard drive prices come back down again, this will make for a great buy. Especially useful for archival/backup storage in your network or even as a SAN for small non-critical VMware environments.

You can read more about the new model here.

-RP

UN Server hacked!

Hi folks, according to recent news the UN has been hacked!

Apparently the hackers compromised a server and pasted email addresses and login credentials to paste bin. This would show how important it is to make sure you encrypt this kind of information so even if there is a breach, then the information is not easily accessible.

The hack isn’t confirmed yet but from initial reports it looks like it could be possibly legitimate.

You can read more here.

-RP