Accent IT&T Blog

Accent Business Technology Canberra Office

2011-05-24T10:32:00.005+10:00

Accent Business Technology has recently opened a new office in Canberra. This will enable us to provide improved service to our customers in the ACT and surrounding areas. By making ourselves more accessible to our Canberra customers, we are able to expand our reach and provide these organisations with a wider choice of vendors when seeking phone systems and other business communication solutions.

Through our 22 years in the communications industry, Accent Business Technology has become the company of choice for over 3,000 organisations in Sydney, Wollongong and the NSW South Coast. This is because our long standing partnerships with key industry vendors allow us to deliver cost effective solutions that deliver results for our clients. Our industry experience and ongoing training and certifications allow us to provide cost effective, proactive customer service.

We can provide business expertise to a host of Small to Medium Enterprises as well as Government Departments. Some of the products we sell and support are:

Approved telephone systems from Telstra, Cisco, NEC, Mitel and Aastra
Enterprise and SMB Business Products
Contact Centre – small to hosted to complex multi sites
Unified messaging/unified communications including presence
Enterprise fax solutions
Microsoft LYNC
CCTV and security access
Online ticketing system
Nursecall
Video conferencing (Tandberg, Webex and Lifesize)
Natural Language Speech Recognition (NLSR) to customer applications including intelligent IVR
Hosting
Hosted solutions
TPAC /MTA – Mobile tracking analysis of company assets to include mandown, OH&S reporting
SMS/MMS messaging marketing campaign tools
Design of hosted applications
PA systems
24x7 help desk IT managed services
Facilities management – desktop and communications
Complex cabling

From the desk of our I.T. Services Manager

2011-04-06T12:11:00.000+10:00

Yesterday, our helpdesk received an urgent request from a desperate client who had suffered a critical server outage sometime over the weekend. Now while we have sat down on many occasions with the local manager of this international client to share our vision on proactive managed services, they still prefer a break/fix type of arrangement. Hey that’s OK, not something we do a lot of these days but I have always held out hope they would see the light.

So after a quick call by one of our technicians we realised it required us onsite to resolve. This leaves the client without critical services and the employees twiddling their thumbs - at least until we get there. 2 hours later our technician arrives onsite to discover 2 SCSI drives out of an array of redundant disks dead, and no way to recover but from backup. More downtime.

Luckily we have a pretty good DR system in place for this customer, and came prepared with some alternate drives. The sad part of the story is this could have all been avoided with proactive systems management in place.

Our proactive managed services would have alerted us weeks ago that a single drive was going to or had failed in that server, which is designed to cope with one drive failure. We would have sourced and replaced that defective drive inside 24 hours with no downtime to the client or their employees. When the second drive failed, the same process would have occurred – no downtime. This is a far better outcome than the reality they are facing now which is a day’s worth of lost productivity (were still recovering from backup as I type) and a rather large bill for something that was completely avoidable.

I have a feeling the next time I sit down with this client to talk about fixed fee proactive managed services, the outcome will be different.

Jason Childs

I.T. Services Director

Warning: Why your Internet might fail on May 5

2010-05-03T14:05:00.001+10:00

Network operators urged to check routers, firewalls.
Network managers are being urged to run a series of checks on their routers and firewalls to ensure their users will still be able to connect to internet sites in the wake of a major change to the internet's domain name system next week.

On May 5, the world's top domain authorities (led by ICANN, the US Government and Verisign) will complete the first phase of the roll-out of DNSSEC (Domain Name System Security Extensions) across the 13 root servers that direct user requests to the relevant websites on the internet.

The DNSSEC upgrade adds a digital signature to the response from every DNS (Domain Name Server) request to give an internet user an extra level of assurance that the domain name is translated to the correct Internet location (such as a website, or email destination).

DNSSEC was developed in an attempt to thwart 'man in the middle' attacks, in which hackers intercept a request and respond with a message that fools the user system into going to a false location.

But the new protocol - much welcomed by the industry - could have an unfortunate side effect for unprepared network managers, according to Bruce Tonkin, chief strategy officer at Melbourne IT and a board director at ICANN.

A response to a standard DNS request tends to be in a single packet (UDP protocol) and tends to fall below 512 bytes in size.

In some older networking equipment, any larger request than this would be blocked by pre-configured factory settings, under the assumption that larger packets (and several of them) represent an anomaly of some kind.

As of May 5 at 17:00 UTC (which is actually pre-dawn on Thursday 6th on the East Coast of Australia), all DNSSEC signature-laden messages sent back to a user's DNS resolver will be four times the size - up to 2 KB. And should packets of that size be rejected, the message would likely be sent in multiple packets via the TCP protocol.

(These signatures will be dummies at first to test the system, as of July 1, they will be the real deal.)

Tonkin fears that while DNSSEC has been on the agenda for some time, many IT and network managers have yet to test their older routers and firewalls to ensure they can handle the larger DNS responses.

"The bigger answer coming back from the DNS request might get blocked by some internet devices in the Corporate network," he said.

DNSSEC is in fact already rolled out across most of the world's 13 root server clusters, in an effort that began in December 2009.

But to date, Tonkin explained, it would only have resulted in a slight lag in the loading of a web page for those with outdated network equipment.

The beauty of DNS is that should a request made to one root server not receive a response, the DNS resolver on a user's machine simply makes the same request along the line of the 13 root servers until it gets a satisfactory response.

But on May 5, once all 13 root server clusters are live with the DNSSEC signatures, responses from all 13 root servers won't make it back inside the corporate LAN on some older systems.

Tonkin expects that the larger Internet Service Providers will have addressed the issue, so most home internet users will be unaffected.

"I'm not entirely sure all ISPs will be prepared, but I imagine the major ones are," he said. "ISPs tend to do DNS translation for you. But it is likely to have a big impact in the corporate environment, where you might run your own DNS server and infrastructure."

In that sense Tonkin doesn't expect a "Y2K meltdown" of the internet May 5.

But he predicts a number of organisations will start experiencing internet access issues, and a number of network administrators will be left scratching their heads as to why.

To complicate the scenario further, network administrators and helpdesks "may not know what has gone wrong," he said.

The problem may take several days to surface and be inconsistent from one user's PC to the next. A user at one machine that hasn't switched on his PC for two or three days will have no access to the internet. A user that left his machine on the night before will have some pages - and responses from DNS servers - cached on their machine, and will still have connectivity.

"It is usually much easier to address a problem when everything isn't working!" Tonkin said.

Tonkin recommended network managers run a series of simple online tests to ensure their network can handle the larger DNS responses:

http://www.crn.com.au/News/173412,warning-why-your-internet-might-fail-on-may-5.aspx

Zeacommunity Conference on the 18 - 20 of May

2010-04-23T15:43:00.002+10:00

Hi,

I invite you to join us at our Zeacommunity Conference on the 18 - 20 of May to learn from the best – your peers in the industry, our international speakers, our sponsors and the Zeacom team.

This conference is all about getting the bigger picture with your Zeacom solution, so you can do more at less cost. I’m looking forward to catching up with you at Zeacommunity!

Thanks, Miles

http://www.zeacom.com/zeacommunity/

+61 (3) 8616 8555

You can register @ http://surveys.questionpro.com/akira/TakeSurvey?id=1669475

Telstra Business & Telstra Enterprise & Government Accreditation

2010-04-20T08:22:00.004+10:00

Accent Business Technology, has successfully completed our accreditation for the Telstra Business also Telstra Enterprise and Government.

We are again fully accredited Total Solution Partner, covering Mobiles, Complex Data, Fixed Lines and Telephone Systems.

Contact our office to speak to one of our accredited specialist now.1300 ACC ENT

Telephone Systems Installation Save up to $1000 on Standard Installation on a 36, 48 & 60 month eligible call plan!

2010-03-11T08:15:00.005+11:00

Accent Business Technology togeather with Telstra offer (Standard installation offer) available to Telstra Business customers and Tier 3 Tesltra Enterprise & Government Customers

Offer Period, 1st March 2010 – 31st May 2010, call us now on 1300 222 368 for full T & C's

Why you need professional WIFi

2010-02-26T15:35:00.002+11:00

Here is a simple video to explain why you need to your business grade WIFi Hadrware. See me for more information on this product

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YnTD5La4FGg

Telstra launches world's first HSPA+ Dual Carrier network

2010-02-26T12:28:00.001+11:00

This week Telstra announced it had completed the upgrade of its Next G HSPA+ network with Dual Carrier technology - delivering the world's first 42Mbps HSPA Dual Carrier network!

Telstra CEO David Thodey said the completion of the HSPA+ Dual Carrier upgrade will mean a better customer experience in areas of high demand - making the Telstra Next G network better placed to deal with the capacity demands that are causing headaches for other carriers around the world.

HSPA+ Dual Carrier technology allows Telstra to send and receive wireless data using two channels simultaneously providing peak network downlink speeds of 42Mbps!

David said. “Put simply HSPA+ Dual Carrier will give Australians the bandwidth to operate their wireless devices at consistently high speeds.”

The Sierra Wireless device will go on sale in Australia later this year and Telstra expects customers will experience typical speeds in selected locations around double those seen with the fastest 3G devices available in Australia today.

The CEO also confirmed plans to continue to expand the Telstra Next G mobile network, doubling our peak network speeds to 84Mbps through the implementation of HSPA+ Dual Carrier plus MIMO technology in 2011.

Great News for iPhone Users!

2010-02-26T09:26:00.027+11:00

Great news for Telstra Next G™ iPhone customers! From Saturday 13th of February Mobile FOXTEL can be downloaded from the Apple Apps store.

The Mobile FOXTEL App will be free to download from the i-store although once installed on the customers iPhone the customer will need to sign up to either a Day Pass, Two Pack Combo or Ultimate Combo to access Mobile FOXTEL content.

The app is exclusive to Telstra Next G™ iPhone customers. The app won't work for other carrier iPhone customers or work over WLAN connection.

Until 1 March 2010 all Telstra Next G™ customers who subscribe to the Ultimate Combo or 2 pack Combo will also have access to FOXTEL’s coverage of the Vancouver 2010 Olympic Games action streamed live 24/7 to your Next G™ mobile.

Post-paid iPhone customers will be billed on their post-paid bill for their Mobile FOXTEL subscriptions. Pre-paid customers will have the value of the Mobile FOXTEL subscription deducted from their pre-paid mobile account balance. The charge for the subscription will not go via the Apple Apps store.

To unsubscribe from Mobile FOXTEL on the iPhone customers will need to access "My Subscription" link at the bottom of the Mobile FOXTEL from Telstra main page. This link then provides a facility where customers can select their current subscription, and then choose from a list of options, including a request to "Cancel" their current subscription; or calling Me on 0419 423222