We are a Surrey based technical services and web development company with a diverse range of clients. We require an enthusiastic IT support engineer to join our team. We provide a full range of IT services to our clients as well as providing hosting facilities in-house. You would be required to administer our internal systems as well as provide support to an external client base. This is an excellent opportunity to gain experience in a wide range of IT disciplines and work within an experienced and dedicated team of professionals.

The applicant will work within a small team but must be able to work independently to meet client deadlines.

Required Skills:

• The ability to troubleshoot and resolve hardware and software issues remotely.
• Solid networking experience, Knowledge of TCP/IP, DNS etc
• Proficient with Windows desktop operating systems and common applications programs such as Microsoft Office, Internet Explorer etc.
• Good hardware troubleshooting skills.
• Excellent communication skills.

Desirable Skills:

• Commercial experience providing 1^st line technical support.
• Knowledge of Windows Server operating systems – Server 2016 or 2012.
• IT Qualification (e.g. – Degree, A-Level, BTEC, MCP, CompTIA).
• Customer service experience.

 Duties:

• Administration of Windows Server 2012 and 2008, both internally and for client organisations.
• Management of all internal backup systems.
•  Microsoft Office365 administration.
• Server and workstation build and configuration.
• Network design, configuration, and installation.
• Firewall administration and VPN setup.
• Amazon Web Services Configuration and Administration.
• Administration of corporate antivirus/security solutions.
• Domain Registration/Renewal and DNS management.
• Deployment and management of in-house applications and software.

Suitable candidates are asked to send their CV and a covering letter to:

The IT Manager
Surrey Business IT
Dixcart House
Addlestone Road
Bourne Business Park
Addlestone
Surrey
KT15 2LE

surrey1117@itinsurrey.co.uk

The following script allows simple notifications from SNS topics to be pushed to your smartphone via Pushover.

Usage

1. Download Pushover app and sign-up.
2. Create an application on Pushover and copy the API key
3. Insert your new API key and your user key in the script.
4. Copy script to any PHP enabled webserver.
5. In your SNS topic, add a new subscription.
1. "Protocol" will be HTTP or HTTPS depending on your server setup
2. "Endpoint" is the full path to the script. You can optionally add "u" parameter to send to non-default user or group; e.g. http://example.com/sns/push.php?u=1234567980
6. Subscription will be automatically confirmed and available to push right away.

When Pingdom interviewed us about the Desktop Notifier, we mentioned that our office has a screen up showing our check statuses at a glance, today one part of that system has been pushed to our Github account.

This first part is a simple PHP site that gives an overview of all checks, highlighting their status in an attention grabbing way.

Installation just requires copying to your webserver and mofication of includes/settings.inc.php with your pingdom username and password.  Once started you can elect to hide paused or up checks using the buttons at the bottom.

View Pingdom Notifier Screen on Github

To solve this problem in our case, it seemed obvious to upload these logs to a cloud based storage and then delete them from the local machine when done.  There didn't seem to be a simple solution out there to manage this, so we decided to create our own simple application that will fulfill this task.

Install

Download the zip file and extract to a folder on the server somewhere, then follow the usage guide below.

Usage

Run the file S3Archive.exe once, this will create a default config file and exit. Modify the xml file to include one folder element for each path you wish to send to S3.

Fields/Attributes

• includeOpen - Will also upload open files, defaults to false as webservers usually have an open file handle on the current log.
• deleteOnUpload - Deletes file after it has been uploaded, there is currently no verification so use with caution.
• recursive - Process all subdirectories or just the current.
• path - The local path to the directory to scan.
• bucket - The S3 bucket to store in. Must already be created, currently this is not created for you.
• basePath - a prepended path to the S3 key for the file to allow you to use a single bucket for multiple sources.
• pattern - File search pattern to use across all included directories

Usage in the cloud

For servers that are running full-time this can be set to run on a schedule based on the volume of traffic you receive and how frequently you want to access the collected logs.  If you are using scaling environments, bake the application into your AMIs and schedule to run on shutdown as well as on a timed basis.  That way all logs are captured even in rapidly changing environments.

Open Source

As with many of our other projects, the code is open source and we welcome suggestions, additions and bug fixes.

In the interview we discuss the existing Desktop Notifier for Pingdom, which is available for free and the code is open source, and we also discuss some of the other internal projects we have created to use with their service, which will be made available on our GitHub account as soon as they have been tidied up.

The full interview is available on the Pingdom blog.

Install

Clicking the above will install the application and all dependencies as well as create a shortcut on your desktop. On first run it will ask you for your Pingdom username and password, enter these and press save for the application to dissapear to the tray. The app is set to check for updates daily at the moment, as time goes on this will be adjusted to less frequently. Windows treats each ClickOnce update as a new program, so if you have allowed the app to stay visible in the tray at all times, you will need to do this after each update.

Features & Future

Currently this mimics the features of the original notifier, however it is open source and there are already some feature ideas in the issue tracker. We would welcome contributors to improve the features as well as the general coding, we will also be looking to make improvements as time allows.

Displays a bubble and changes icon colour if there is a down:

Combines multiple downs into a single bubble:

Right-click menu and double-click launches Pingdom panel:

Nice soothing green ball when everything is OK:

Also tested for internet connectivity loss (icon turns grey) and resuming from standby on a laptop. We do have very limited ability to test here, but it is working on all our workstations and our laptops, please report any bugs/crashes in the issue tracker as well as ideas for new features.

Preparation

apt-get autoremove

apt-get install debian-archive-keyring -y

wget https://ftp-master.debian.org/keys/archive-key-6.0.asc && apt-key add archive-key-6.0.asc

# LSB style init header:
#
### BEGIN INIT INFO
# Provides: Nova-Agent
# Required-Start: $remote_fs $syslog
# Required-Stop: $remote_fs $syslog
# Default-Start: 2 3 4 5
# Default-Stop: 0 1 6
# Short-Description: Start nova-agent at boot time
# Description: nova-agent is a guest agent for OpenStack nova.
### END INIT INFO

deb http://ftp.uk.debian.org/debian/ squeeze main
deb-src http://ftp.uk.debian.org/debian/ squeeze main

deb http://security.debian.org/ squeeze/updates main
deb-src http://security.debian.org/ squeeze/updates main

# squeeze-updates, previously known as 'volatile'deb
http://ftp.uk.debian.org/debian/ squeeze-updates main
deb-src http://ftp.uk.debian.org/debian/ squeeze-updates main

Run the distribution upgrade

apt-get update
apt-get autoremove
apt-get install apt dpkg
apt-get install locales

apt-get dist-upgrade

apt-get install mysql-server-5.1

All done

Seems like a great idea, no?

The Regulations do not distinguish between cookies used for analytical activities and those used for other purposes. We do not consider analytical cookies fall within the ‘strictly necessary’ exception criteria. This means in theory websites need to tell people about analytical cookies and gain their consent.

Although the Information Commissioner cannot completely exclude the possibility of formal action in any area, it is highly unlikely that priority for any formal action would be given to focusing on uses of cookies where there is a low level of intrusiveness and risk of harm to individuals.

The effect of complying

Or is it?

Provided clear information is given about their activities we are highly unlikely to prioritise first party cookies used only for analytical purposes in any consideration of regulatory action.

How we can help

What uses data?

The easiest way to sum this up is "anything that a normal mobile phone doesn't do", so everything except phone calls and text messages.  This does, of course, include checking for your e-mails, which is something that still needs to be done when roaming but it needs to be managed to avoid large bills.  Users of both the iPhone and PDAs have a number of applications installed out of the box that will check the internet from time to time without warning, so even if you haven't added to your phone, you need to be aware of these programs.

Easy option

Android

Fully disabling roaming data

Disabling Sync and Background Data

http://www.google.co.uk/#hl=en&output=search&sclient=psy-ab&q=dixcart+technical+solutions

Within that information is the term you searched for, so the site you click on knows what you searched for and if you then purchase something or register, it knows that particular keyword is effective.  Additionally any site can then customise their content to show you what you were looking for or related items.  If the site knows you were looking for "bronze widgets" but you clicked on the home page in search, it could suggest the product page for "bronze widgets" to you, or highlight your search terms in an article.

 

Impact

Whilst Google is not the only search provider, it is clearly the largest and most important, so every change that they make affects websites immensely.  Keyword data is the backbone of search engine optimisation (SEO) and allows user experience designers to aid their visitors in getting to relevant information faster.

 

It also fuels Google's own AdWords business, the very thing that made them the massive company they are today.  Using keyword data, website owners can analyse in detail how their AdWord campaigns are performing and optimise them, feeding more money back into Google.  Removing this ability will make the job of any SEO or AdWord professional that much harder and result in less income for Google.  NOTE: It seems Google passes this information if a user clicks an ad, but not a natural listing, meaning you can no longer see where you perform badly and then purchase ads, you have to purchase them first and then hope you were not listed highly for that term.  Additionally you will not be able to review if you are performing very well in the natural listings for a search term and therefore decide that you do not need the ads, which will probably mean more money for Google over all.

 

Even those not running AdWords campaigns use keyword data to optimise the content on their site and see what their visitors want when they come to the site, allowing them to grow their business by responding directly to what visitors want to see, even when those visitors do not interact with the site, more than simply looking at it.  At the top of this article is an example of what website owners are already seeing in Google's own analytics package, and if you use Piwik, you'll see something like this as well as search engine visitors appearing as "Direct Entry":

 

Search Engine Land summed up the response when Google first made the move on their US search - recation was entirely negative.  Google's initial response was that it would be likely to only affect 10% of visitors, but the recent move to use SSL search by default in more countries will increase this number substantially, and as you can see from our example at the top of the page, it is a lot more than 10% already. SEL also have a great piece on how Google are not doing this just for privacy reasons, if this were the case they would not send referrer data to their paying customers.

What to do?