bruceb news

Microsoft has a special price of $99 for an upgrade to Vista Ultimate on PCs purchased from Best Buy, Staples, Circuit City, and Amazon through June, according to Paul Thurrott, normally a well-informed source. (I can’t find any reference to it on the Microsoft web site. Maybe there’s a coupon in the box or something.)

That seemed like a bit of a yawn until an extra piece fell into place, courtesy of Susan Bradley. PCs purchased from one of those stores will undoubtedly have Vista Home Premium installed – and Vista Home Premium cannot be used effectively in any business run by a server. […] continued

Network Attached Storage devices (“NAS”) are starting to appear regularly at small businesses. An NAS device is a small box with one or more hard drives and a simple operating system that can add huge amounts of storage space on a network just by plugging them in. They’re frequently designed with multiple hard drives that can use RAID drive management to hold data very safely, but without the expense or maintenance required for a Windows-based server.

This article is a useful primer on network attached storage. Every computer user should start to become familiar with this technology!

“As the name indicates, NAS devices connect directly to a computer network, rather than to an individual PC.

[…] continued

There is no end to the games played by bad guys and big companies alike at the expense of consumers and small businesses. You may run into the latest shenanigans if you try to register a domain name. The system is rigged.

“Domain kiting” has been widespread for a couple of years. In what seemed like a good idea at the time, domain registrars are required to have a grace period of five days after a new name is registered; no payment for the name is ever made if the name is “returned” during the grace period. Shell corporations have been set up to register names by the millions, stick them onto a server with some ads, and see if they draw any traffic. […] continued

Yet another tale of woe.

1and1.com is one of the largest web hosting companies in the world. They established themselves in Europe before making a big splashy entrance in the US a couple of years ago, with huge advertising sections on thick glossy paper in dozens of magazines. They offer rock bottom prices, a wide range of services, and well-designed online control panels.

I started using them and recommending them for domain name registration ($5.99/year), web hosting, and hosted Exchange mailboxes. A year ago I had a couple of reasonably good experiences with customer support.

A client called up a few months ago and complained that he had a terrible experience with an aggressively incompetent tech support person in India. […] continued

Something took down all the web servers at XO Communications at 2pm yesterday. That’s why you couldn’t bring up the bruceb.com favorites page until about 9pm last night. The outage apparently affected all the web sites hosted by XO and took down my mail along with the web site. During that time the phones at XO would immediately disconnect calls to tech support – presumably they were overloaded.

The disturbing thing is that there’s no information from XO this morning about what happened. XO has a long history – it started life as Concentric Networks, went through acquisitions and bankruptcy, and still offers very appealing onscreen tools for domain hosting. […] continued