Live Video for Horse Auction

The Louisiana Horse Breeders Association chose Bayou to do the live video feed of their auction out at the Ike. The project took off easily and turned out pretty well. I still find it amazing the things we can bring to the web.

Not a good day

A new customer T3 turn up went very wrong yesterday. It did really bad things to our network (not customer fault .. ILEC misconfiguration.) We spent all night and half the morning fixing routes, etc. Lesson: Filter first. Ask questions later.

Denial of Service Attack

4/27/07
Denial of Service Attack
Bayou Internet and Communications was the recipient of a Distributed Denial of Service attack this morning which interrupted most services to our customers for up to 1 hour. This DDOS attack was delivered from thousands of locations making it very difficult to stop. Bayou System Administrators worked with router and I.p. technicians throughout the country to diagnose and resolve. Details and logged information will be turned over to the proper authorities.

Vista Upgrade

I took the plunge to Microsoft Vista this week. I say this week because i spent the better part of 3 days redoing my machine. It was a long task but so far has worked out.

While I really saw no compelling reasons to upgrade from XP to Vista I decided it was time. It's been out for a month now and I might have customers asking me about it.

My machine was starting to run alittle slow. I install and uninstall alot. I wanted to back up to my USB hard drive and then wipe the machine completely.

Stats on my machine .. 3 ghz with hyper threading .. 1 gig of ram and 160 gig hd.. sony dvd burner and dell 19" widescreen monitor.

I ran the vista compatibility program and it said my machine was fine. It said that 1 piece of software, Nero cd / dvd burning software would not work. I guess I can live with that.
Turns out that 1 program I cant live without, Quickbooks 2004, would not work either. I did get QB working. I'll explain later.

On the install of Vista I deleted my main partition then reformated to make sure all data was deleted. Yes I checked my backup first. The install took a while .. about 40 minutes or so but went extreamly well. All devices were recognized properly except for my logitech web cam and one other device. However after install the windows update runs. The drivers were downloaded automatically and the 2 remaining devices came up without problems. Yes even my HP 6210 printer came up properly. I was surprised.

With hardware working I went to software. I wanted to upgrade to Microsoft Office 2007. This went without problems. The upgrade made me put in my Office 2003 CD to verify then asked for the 2007 DVD .. No problems at all. Outlook connected back to my Exchange 2003 server without problems.

I use Instant Messaging alot. I mean alot. My favorite program is Gaim. I can load my corporate Jabber account (all employees here must be logged on to their corporate Jabber account when here. Our corporate Jabber server is hosted here and is easy to pop single line questions and see who is at their desk and working ) As for the other IM services I use .. yahoo, AIM, ICQ, MSN .. there are customers on different ones, consultants and Marketing company on others, so Gaim happily runs all 5 different accounts with just 1 common interface. And it's open source .. so it is Free. And yes Gaim version 2.0.06 has vista compatibility. Worked like a charm.

I noticed that my machine is writing to the hard drive quite alot. In checking the memory stats I saw that there were alot of Hard Write Failures. Hard Write Failures mean that memory was exhausted so it was using hard drive space (swap space.) Basically Vista uses more memory than XP.  A quick trip to Office Depot fixed that. Now I have 2 gig of memory (the extra gig cost $176.)

Now that the core of the machine is up and working properly and core programs are installed and working it's time to restore data. I went to Vistas backup and restore and said let's restore. Vista replied back saying that i had to first back up. Not good. Vista does not natively recognize XP's backup. A quick search revealed that there is a download for the old backup program that can be installed. The 3 step instructions worked. I did have a permissions problem that i had to correct before i could move the restored files to where i wanted them.

Documents and spreadsheets, databases, etc all work fine.

Quickbooks 2004 did not. Would not install. In checking with the Intuit support website Vista is not compatible with Quickbooks 2004. Their suggestion was to upgrade to Quickbooks 2007. They is a unsuggested workaround that can be tried. It worked. Running QB in XP compatibility mode and as Administrator did the trick.

Ok so let's review. I have vista up on the machine and my core pieces of software working. I restored my data and am back up to speed with a almost $200 memory upgrade.

There it is. Worth It? Since I am a consultant I have to dive off into the bleeding edge sometimes alittle sooner than most. But eventually it would have been forced. It's working out for me.

Offsite Backup

I added a new feature rescently to Bayou's line up. It allows customers to back up their data safely and securely to one of Bayou's large servers. We provide easy to use backup software. The difference is that in stead of creating the encrypted files on the customer machine it transfers it through the Internet to Bayou where it is stored. Need a file? Just drag and drop.

It's also one more level of safety for disaster recovery.

Fiber Capacity Added

Bayou will be adding fiber capacity this weekend. You may see short time periods of service interruptions as we turn up on the new services. We promise to keep it as short as possible.

Added Spam Filtering

Customers may have noticed an increase in the amount of spam or slower than normal email delivery the past 2 days. In efforts to better handle denial of service attacks and the shere volume of spam Bayou has added more spam filtering servers. They went online at lunch today. It will take a bit of time for all records to update but you should begin to see the results soon. Bayou processes over 2 million email messages a day.

Sparks and Fire

A truck across the street from our building grabbed ahold of some overhead lines. Sparks and grass fire but nothing serious. The power bump put us in backup generator mode. No down time.