Blog

Hello there happy readers and welcome to the current goings on at ComTech. There have been quite a few things going on since the last blog. The most important is the search for new staff members to join our team. Our Foundation Apprentice Alexander starts today and will be joining us for two afternoons per week whilst still studying at Falkirk College. Hopefully we can add to his existing knowledge (even moved the office around to fit him in!!) and even treat him to some of the legendary lunch meetings we have at ComTech Along with Alexander we are still searching for a modern apprentice to join us full time which would significantly enhance our support capacity going forward. If you can think of anyone who might like to work with us please share. Along with new staff we have been takin...

So what have we been upto then? Loads!! In the last couple of weeks we have been helping a client in Callandar with hosted desktop issues, along with sorting out a broadband migration to BT. This has been a good learning experience for us with respect to the LAN-to-LAN VPN, which is required to get their printers working within the hosted desktop environment. Our Linux network address space issue has mostly been sorted with just a couple of things to mop up. Again, this has been a valuable learning experience for the entire team and credit to everyone for pulling together when things threatened to go pear-shaped. We have also got a couple of clients set up on Office365 for their emails over the last couple of weeks. Their contacts, calendars and emails are now fully synced across all th...

It has been pretty hectic over the last couple of weeks here at ComTech HQ. From Cyber Essentials audits to server installs to network redesigns, we have been kept very busy and at times been run ragged but the team has pulled together and we have got through. So, what exactly have we been up to then? ...

Chris has been back on the networking scene after a forced break due to the sheer volume of work we had on.  Boy was he happy to get his hot chocolate fix!  He attended the second session of the Business Academy with The Tannahill Partnership, learning about new approaches to taking the company forward.  If that wasn’t enough, he has also been delving into the world of Office365 sorting out issues for clients. Kenneth, our worthy apprentice, has been running around visiting clients installing new PCs, resetting existing ones, sorting out a couple of Linux issues and everything in between. To top it off, he is also getting ready to start the next chapter of his formal training, which should see him earning his SQCF level 8 in IT.  He has also been getting his hands dirt...

The numbers are in and we did 105 support tickets last month - almost a record: second only to January when it was 116! With Kenneth sunning himself somewhere in Europe for 3 weeks it was down to John, myself and the bears to hold the fort and glad to say we muddled through. Chris and the bears had a lovely visit to Inverness with Herbie a couple of weeks back and decided to take the mountain bike up the Drummochter Hills on the way home. Answering calls from clients when carrying a 14kg bike up the mountains is definitely "interesting”. John also had his own adventure when he headed up dirt tracks to a client's north of Aberfeldy earlier this week to install a couple of new PC`s. He might even have to wash his car!! We are also moving office on the 1st July too. The current office is g...

So what have we been upto in the last couple of weeks? As it turns out quite a bit!!! Our new apprentice Kenneth is currently sunning himself for 3 weeks on holidays but before he left he managed to finish his SQA level 6 in half the time expected. This is quite an achievement and shows his dedication. For the record when you have been working as a team of 3 and then go down to 2 it does come as quite a shock to the system!! We have also had 2 server fails which resulted in new hard drives and restoring from backups (we love backups!!). Never had any servers fail in 9 years and then two go down in 6 days. On the same day as the second server failing we also had a Linux network go down which turned out to be from a lack of ip addresses on the network. We are looking to completely redesi...

I was having a meeting with someone (lets call him Jeff) over coffee last week when the topic got onto where we actually do our work. Jeff is your typical office worker who has an office with 2 PCs, 2 printers and is in the office at 9am on the dot and does not leave until 6pm at the earliest. For 90% of his time he is bound to his desk as he thinks he is more productive that way. If that works for him I am not going to knock it but then we got talking about me. My style of working is completely different to Jeff’s. I have set up ComTech to be a mobile business (just look at the top picture), which means I am not tied to a desk all day unless I choose to be. I have an office setup with my lovely iMac and multiple monitors but I also have a mobile setup which allows me to work from anywher...

Should broadband now be classed as a right? This is something I have been asked by quite a few people recently and to be honest I am still undecided. You see the problem is when I think of rights I think of shelter, food, water and that kind of stuff. People wanting to access their Facebook page and access to the internet in general doesn’t come in to it. There is a problem here though, and it is a BIG problem, everything these days revolves around the internet in some shape or form. Everything that effects our daily life – food, money, transport etc is affected by the internet in some way so even if you aren’t online yourself you can guarantee that the things you use will have been influenced by it. Perhaps I am being narrow minded thinking people only want to use the internet for social...

I used to work for an IT department at a well-known UK-based global insurance company. One of the most important pieces of software was our network management system or NMS. This system monitored the network and alerted us when something went wrong. But because the network was designed to be fault tolerant, the users (usually!) did not notice when part of the system failed. So, the senior managers at the company were always bemoaning the cost of the network management system and any time we wanted to implement improvements the reaction was “but nothing ever goes wrong so why are we paying all this money for software that draws pretty graphs but adds nothing to the bottom line?” You can see where this is going can’t you? Our network had at least two separate connections into each major br...

Fake news is highly topical just now, least of all due to President Trump’s infamous speeches and prolific tweets. It is easy to think that he is talking mince but maybe, once in a while, he is not wrong – who knows? I was at a networking meeting last week when I was reminded by one of the attendees of the story of the guy who successfully sued the manufacturers of his motorhome because he crashed when, having set the cruise control to 70mph, he left the driving seat to make a cup of coffee. The motorhome, of course, according to the story, went off the road and overturned. He was subsequently awarded a humungus amount of cash by the court. Despite the very low probability that he would have survived a crash at that speed, just how likely is that someone could be so stupid? Or that the c...