The new website for The Wolff Computer Group is now online. I want to use the blog area of this site to talk about interesting projects that we have been doing for our customers. Most of the projects that I am excited about either involve virtualization, wireless installations, or telephony. If you are interested in any other topics, let me know.
Ransomware and Having a Plan
Ransomware is major pain in the ass, but if you have the right plan in place it doesn’t have to be the end of the world, and it doesn’t have to cost a king’s ransom. Step One – Backup, backup, and backup. I would recommend at least 2, if not 3 distinct and separate backups. I like Microsoft backup for any incidental file level recovery you might have to perform. I can recover a single lost file or folder in minutes. If you like an offsite cloud backup, that’s great. But both of these backups have been known to […]
Using a dynamic DNS service to secure remote access
I recently had to come up with an inexpensive and reliable way to secure remote access (RDP in this case) for my clients. We had been using non-standard ports to provide some security, but hackers were now scanning our network for those ports. I had introduced the use of VPN’s to many of my clients, but for the most part they proved to be too cumbersome for my clients to use. Almost every firewall on the market can restricted access by IP address and most firewalls can recognize fully qualified domain names (FQDN). I had my clients subscribe to […]
Replacing Small Business Server with Windows Server Essentials and Exchange server
Since Microsoft announced several years ago that they would be discontinuing Small Business Server we have been trying to wring as much life out of it as we could. Small Business Server was a platform that allowed our customers to manage most of their computing needs on premise. Many customers in the medical and financial sectors are still leery of the “cloud”. Not trusting medical and financial information to a mysterious place for safekeeping. In responding to those need we had to put together a cost effective way to keep most of the services provided by SBS on premise. […]
Designing a cost effective phone system for small businesses
We have been implementing an asterisk phone system for clients with a T1/PRI for quite some time now. Unfortunately, we really couldn’t provide a cost effective solution for small business that had less then 6 incoming lines. The solution has always involved SIP trunking, but it was a technology that until recently was not stable or mature enough to trust with a companies communications needs. Recently SIP trunk providers have started to address the need for concurrent calls over the same SIP connection, DID’s, local phone numbers, and local number portability (moving existing numbers). With that in place it […]
Hospitality Wireless
We recently put access points in a majority of the rooms at the Napili Kai Beach Resort, a 160 room Maui resort. They had originally asked us to handle their guest wireless several years ago and we turned them down because they wanted 24 hour a day monitoring and they wanted us to handle guest problems directly. At that time they hired another company to provide them with the services they needed. The company put in Aruba wireless access points in about a third of the rooms in a couple of the building on the property. The Aruba access […]
High Speed Wireless Bridge
We just finished a project connecting a client to a remote office at the University of Hawaii, Maui Campus. Our client was working in one for the University’s building and needed a secure connection between their offices and the University. The cable company wanted $10,000 to bring a line to the building and $400 a month for a 5MB connection. Hawaiian Telcom could give us a point to point T1 line running at 1.44MB for $800 a month. Neither of these solutions were fast enough to meet our needs. Working with Ubquiti Networking products, we were able to install […]