Blog (13)
Why I use an answering service instead of voice mail.
Written by Howard Cunningham|
Hi I have been asked mulitple times why a techie like myself still uses an answering service and a pager. In the early days as I built my business, I used a voice mail system that would page my pager when there was a call. This system worked well for many years. What I finally realized was that if someone was in the office answering the telephones that potential clients would call. If no one was in the office and the calls went to voice mail, there were very few potential clients calling. I finally realized that potential clients, in general, were not leaving messages on the voice mail. Think about it, if you call a new business that you have never done business with and you get voice mail, do you leave a message? In most cases, the answer is no, you do not leave a message. The reason that we don’t leave is message on the voice mail is that we have all learned that if we leave a message, the call is almost never returned. If the call is returned at all, it is usually days later. So if you won’t leave a message on a voice mail system, what makes you think that potential clients will leave messages on your voice mail system? Still don’t believe me? If you have caller id, check the caller ID numbers against your voice mail and you will be surprised. I changed to an answering service and now potential clients are calling when no one is in the office. There is an additional advantage to using an answering service and that is that the answering service has the ability to not only take a message, but they can call a designated cell phone if there is an emergency. This solves the problem of tracking who has the tech’s cell phone number or who is on call for after hours emergencies. To make life easy for clients that want to contact us, we only give out one telephone number (703-359-9211). That number is answered by the office, if someone is in the office, or by a live body at the answering service 24 hours 7 days a week. If the call is an emergency, then the answering service will call the designated on-call tech with the call. Clients don’t have to keep track of day/night hours or cell phone numbers or who the on-call tech is. Howard Cunningham |
Why connecting computers to IP phones is a bad idea
Written by Howard CunninghamWith the move to IP phones one of the major issues that arises is that the analog telephone cable is not usable with the IP phones. IP phones need the same cable as do computers. In order to lower the costs of installing IP phones, IP phones have the ability to share the computer connection at each desk with the computer. This is done by connecting the computer to the IP phone; the IP phone then connects to the data jack on the wall. In the computer room, the IP telephone system connects to the same network switches as is used by the computer network. This solution works great in that it saves the cost of installing additional computer grade cables in the office.
The down side is that while all of the computers that have been shipped for the past several years have the ability to communicate at gigabit network speeds; the IP phones are limited to 100 megabits per second. This means that your computer network is running at 10 per cent of its capacity.
What is even worse is the offices that were wired with mulitple computer grade data connections at each desk and the IP phones and computers are sharing a single connection! In those offices, the computers could be running at gigabit speeds and the phones could be completely isloated from the computers.
During a network evaluation for a new client, we discovered that the client had mulitple data connections at each desk and PoE, power over ethernet, network switches. With a PoE switch, the power for the IP phone is provides over the data wiring which means that there is no need for the wall wart power supply to be installed at each desk. What the phone guys had done was to connect the computers to the IP phones (not using the existing unused data connection. They had also not used the PoE network switches that they had sold the client.
hc
Windows XP wont boot with NTLDR is missing error
Written by Howard CunninghamIf something happens to the Windows XP startup, one may get the following error message:
NTLDR is Missing
Press any key to restart
The best resource that I have found to resolve is error is the following link:
http://www.computerhope.com/issues/ch000465.htm
Potential Client with really bad support from one of the Geeks….
Written by Howard CunninghamI received a call from a potential client a while back. It seems that their remote site was down and they were looking for someone to solve the problem. The configuration was a Novell NetWare 3.2 server, Windows NT 4.0 Workstations in the local office and 4 thin clients running across and ISDN connection from the remote office. The 4 thin clients were connecting to a Microsoft Windows NT 4 Terminal Server.
The problem was that the Terminal Server would not boot. Turns out that the equipment was installed in 2001 and the client has no software media. The cliens says that they never received any diskettes or cdroms when the system was installed. I beleive them as all of the software had been out of production for several years when their system was installed.
Remember this was 2001 and the current Microsoft products were Windows 2000 Workstation and Windows 2000 Terminal Server. Widnows NT4 had been discontinued in 1999. As for NetWare 3.2, the current version of NetWare in 2001 was NetWare 5.X. NetWare 3.2 had been dropped in the late 1990s.
The other interesting things that I found were that the battery backup had the “replace battery” light turned on and the Novell server only had a single non-redundant disk drive installed. (Oh and the client had a computer that was a year old running Windows 98 and McAfee Anti-Virus v 4.0.2 with virus definitions that were dated Nov 20, 1998).
Since we dont have a copy of the Widnows NT 4 Terminal Server software, we will be proposing a Windows 2003 Terminal Server (with media!) to solve the immediate problem. The long term solution will be to migrate the client from NetWare 3.2 to a supported Microsoft based solution with redundant disk drives and a working battery backup; current anti-virus and daily backups.
I will also propose that the ISDN WAN connection be replaced with an Internet based site-to-site VPN. The VPN would be many times faster and cost the client signficantly less than they are paying for the 64 kb/s ISDN connection that they are currently using.
