Giving something backHowever, sometimes we want to go that little bit further. So over the last few years we have been giving both our time and donating equipment to a wonderful local primary school called EJPS.
As well as supporting all the school's computers, we have also donated a 12 station ICT suite, pictured below. This comprises 12 workstations, a server and various peripherals.
The school is due to start work on a new £5million state-of-the-art building. But until then the suite is located in one of the old buildings on their site. That doesn't stop the staff and pupils making full use of the facility.
It is great when we pop in and see our donations and hard work being used and enjoyed.
Jason Ozin is a well-known IT professional, technical architect and joint owner of Technica Solutions - www.technicasolutions.co.uk. Jason consults leading UK and international enterprises on real world technical and IT issues. Jason specialises in business infrastructure and IT security matters.
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As we roll out more and more virtualized environments, including our own (all of the in-house servers at Technica are virtual machines running on Microsoft Hyper-V), we come across tweaks that make an engineer's job easier.
We started to virtualize some of the servers in one of our hosting centres and found that BlueOnyx, a CentOS Linux hosting platform that we use for hosting some clients' sites, gained hours per day, due to the way that the guest OS responds to the virtualized clock.
The official Microsoft solution is to add
clock=pitto the kernel lines in the grub start-up file called menu.lst
As you might have guessed, this made no difference at all to the time drift.
We found eventually that the proper solution is as follows:
Add to the end of each kernel line in /boot/grub/menu.lst
(remember to including the kernel line you will find in the comments at the top, so that new kernels inherit the argument)
this string:
processor.max_cstate=1 clock=pmtmr divider=10You may also want to update the Linux OS's clock with a trusted time source weekly.
We do this by editing root's crontab:
crontab -e (allows you to edit crontab in vi)
# update clock every Sun at 13:00
0 13 * * 0 /usr/sbin/ntpdate -s -b -u pool.ntp.org
# sync hardware clock 5 mins later
5 13 * * 0 /sbin/hwclock –-systohc
We hope this little snippet from our in-house knowledge-base helps a few of you who find yourself stuck in the same position.
If you have need for Virtualization consultancy or advice, please feel free to get in touch.
Jason Ozin is a well-known IT professional, technical architect and joint owner of Technica Solutions - www.technicasolutions.co.uk. Jason consults leading UK and international enterprises on real world technical and IT issues. Jason specialises in business infrastructure and IT security matters.
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It was interesting to see Apple clean up again in a Consumer Reports magazine study into after-sales service. As happened last year, Apple’s overall ranking for problem solving, phone waits, phone staff and online support put the company head and shoulders above their nearest rival – 32 percentage points clear on desktops and 26 percentage points up on laptops.
Apple scores clean sweep in manufacturers after-sales surveyThose firmly ensconced in the PC camp deride Apple for the limited choice available when specifying and configuring a Mac, but it is exactly those restrictions that make it possible for Apple’s support team to offer such accurate and effective after-sales support. It's pretty tough to find a poor processor or GPU these days and we're close to 4GB RAM being a standard offering; sacrificing variety on hardware for quality support makes plenty of sense to me.
At Technica we’ve been aware for quite some time that providing a number of standardised core solutions, covering not just desktops and laptops but servers and infrastructure too, help us to offer our clients exactly the levels of service they need and now expect. From the support engineers’ viewpoint, fewer variables, along with confidence in proactive maintenance, undoubtedly lead to greater familiarity and security that queries can be dealt with efficiently and with extremely high client satisfaction.
David Izen: Partner, systems, quality, procedures, ER-6n, MP33, 1dIII, philadelphia cream cheese, beardies, 1990C4Cab, rhythm-free zone, ribena
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Everyone who knows me knows how super fit I am and how well suited my body shape is to climbing down, through and back out of the Grand Canyon, over four days with nights under canvas and days navigating steep inclines. No showers or proper toilets and I've been told that my Blackberry won't work....
You can read more about it here and hopefully be persuaded to sponsor me.
Jason Ozin is a well-known IT professional, technical architect and joint owner of Technica Solutions - www.technicasolutions.co.uk. Jason consults leading UK and international enterprises on real world technical and IT issues. Jason specialises in business infrastructure and IT security matters. Jason does not specialise in doing exercise!
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Good morning,
Welcome!Today Technica would like to welcome VAT Advice Line as our newest client.
VAT Advice Line Limited provides independent, quality VAT consultancy advice to small, medium and large businesses both in the UK and abroad.
Craig Fisher is a partner in Technica Solutions - www.technicasolutions.co.uk and is highly regarded as a sales expert. He is regularly asked to speak at many events on the subject of generating new business.
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This is an email we received from one of our clients after a support call...
Magic,
You guys are like wizards in normal clothing.
Cheers.
Mark
Craig Fisher is a partner in Technica Solutions - www.technicasolutions.co.uk and is highly regarded as a sales expert. He is regularly asked to speak at many events on the subject of generating new business.
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I am delighted to announce that Technica Solutions have moved in to our new 3500 square foot offices in Borehamwood.
Please feel free to pop by and see our new home.
T 020 8236 9160
F 020 8236 9161
Skype technicasolutions
E info@technicasolutions.co.uk
4 Hamilton Business Park
Stirling Way
Borehamwood
WD6 2FR
Craig Fisher is a partner in Technica Solutions - www.technicasolutions.co.uk and is highly regarded as a sales expert. He is regularly asked to speak at many events on the subject of generating new business.
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Just a quick entry to welcome our newest clients to the Technica family. They are:
Europe Economics
Aid to the Church in need
Kitchen Ergonomics
The Cookie Club
Craig Fisher is a partner in Technica Solutions - www.technicasolutions.co.uk and is highly regarded as a sales expert. He is regularly asked to speak at many events on the subject of generating new business.
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Just a quick entry to welcome our newest clients to the Technica family. They are:
Tax Accountants (Herts) Ltd
Tea and Cake PR Limited
Mount Vernon Dental Specialists
Craig Fisher is a partner in Technica Solutions - www.technicasolutions.co.uk and is highly regarded as a sales expert. He is regularly asked to speak at many events on the subject of generating new business.
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We are pleased to report that we have moved our servers out of Global Switch in London Docklands and in to a state-of-the-art new facility in Hemel Hempstead.
We also continue to host servers in data centres in Telford, Manchester and Cambridge so that we can benefit from geographical and data redundancy.
Docklands was proving to be very difficult to arrange access and, like most of London was seriously short of Power. We also had concerns about the older cooling systems in Docklands as well as the risk of flooding.
With the move to Hemel we have no shortage of power and wonderfully easy and yet secure access, 24 hours a day 365 days per week. We also have the ability to expand easily. This means that we can continue to offer remote server hosting facilities to clients, but now lead time to implementation can be as short as six hours if needed.
Our Rack:
Our Initial Servers:
Jason Ozin is a well-known IT professional, technical architect and joint owner of Technica Solutions - www.technicasolutions.co.uk. Jason consults leading UK and international enterprises on real world technical and IT issues. Jason specialises in business infrastructure and IT security matters.
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