Small Business Tech

I am just heading to bed on this now Christmas morning. I wanted to take a few minutes to thank you for reading this small effort to educate those part-time, small business IT professionals. Enjoy your Christmas and hopefully everything will still be running when we return tomorrow, or next week, or next month.

Everyone is trying to wrap up their books as we close another year. All of a sudden your Quickbooks company file is unavailable. This is not good.

It seems to be a common problem with Quickbooks in a shared environment. The fix is simple, but not obvious.

1. Log into your server.
2. Open the Quickbooks Server application.
3. Add your Quickbooks data folder to the list.
4. Scan for files.
5. Go back to your workstation to log into your company file.

All right. Back to balancing the books.

Labels: Quickbooks

If you need to kill some time in front of the computer, Wild Earth TV is a great choice. This 24-hour videocast from South Africa shows a small pond that is visited by wildlife. Three times a day they take their camera out for a safari. They have morning and night driving trips everyday. They also go on a walking trek everyday as well.

The downside to watching this site is that you could end up sitting through a whole safari. The hosts interact with the camera and explains what is being shown. The camera operator is good and does a fine job of zooming into wildlife.

Labels: online TV

I am not a huge fan of the New York Times, but I do like their technology columnist - David Pogue. He has a great write-up this week on three devices that convert your cell phone data service to wifi. The advantage of doing this is that you can use multiple computers on a cell phone data plan, and you are able to use wifi devices that cannot accept a wireless card.

Labels: cell phone, wireless

I am impressed with the OpenDNS service, and I use it where ever possible. I have ran into a small problem in using OpenDNS. When using it with heavy traffic applications such as Microsoft Exchange or a Microsoft SQL database you can run into connection issues. It might be intermittent connections or some cases no connection at all.

There is the theory presented on this forum. I have also suspected that the small routers are unable to handle the large amount of DNS requests quickly enough.

There are two ways to correct this problem.

1. Static IP addresses. You can set each computer on the network to a static IP address and static DNS pointing to OpenDNS. This solution works well enough for small networks. The problem can be managing IP addresses on large networks. It is not effective if you have notebook computers that travel off of the network. Be sure to pick IP addresses that will not conflict with the addresses served by your DHCP server. An example would be to start your DHCP server at x.x.x.100, and then place any static addresses below that address.

2. More robust DHCP server. Setup your server to serve DNS and assign IP addresses using DHCP. This will also alleviate the problem as well as give you a more robust and customizable DHCP server.

In a later post we will go into options for setting up a DHCP server.

Labels: DHCP, OpenDNS

As you are shopping for computers either as gifts for family or to burn through the rest of your year-end IT budget you might be running into SplashTop. SplashTop is a trade name for an small, instant-boot operating system that can be found on many notebook and desktop computers. I recently had an opportunity to setup and try out the similar ExpressGate from Asus on a desktop computer. (Note: ExpressGate might actually just be another name for SplashTop)

Labels: Cloud, gOS, laptop, notebook computer, Skype, Wal-Mart