Posted on in IT Management
Strategic planning is a subset of the strategic management process. Strategic management is a four-phase process. These phases are situation analysis, strategy formulation, strategy implementation, and strategy evaluation. The process is cyclical, and once the evaluation phase is complete, it is time to reanalyze the situation. Strategic planning specifically relates …
Posted on in IT Management
Short-term planning is any planning whose horizon is within the next two years. Planning within this category is tactical or operational in nature. It is focused on responding to the immediate needs of the organization long-term, strategic planning. Common tasks that fall within this category include project management, budgets, and …
Posted on in Information Systems
The Rural Utilities Service (RUS) and National Telecommunications and Information Administration (NTIA) have officially posted a BIP / BTOP Application Mapping Tool. You may remember that this information was available for a short time before being pulled off the RUS website. One of the intentions of this tool is to provide …
Posted on in Information Systems
Company X has decided to implement a new security plan. This plan includes changes to the information systems architecture and will impact the day-to-day work activities of many employees. Additionally, many operational procedures will be changed to reflect a more defensive security stance. It is not uncommon for organizations undergoing …
Posted on in Information Systems
Organizations use contingency planning to ensure the quickest return of information services in the event of a service disruption. A service disruption can be any event that affects the continuity of information services and may range from a human orchestrated denial of service attack to a major earthquake. From a …
Posted on in Networking
Although routers and switches are often located near each other in a network environment, the two devices offer very different functionality. Routers are network devices that send data packets to distinct network segments. A router examines incoming packets and makes routing decisions based on the destination address in the packet …
Posted on in System Administration
You stopped Agent Manager on your Lotus Domino 6.5 server when you meant to tell
it to restart? I've done that. If you don't know how to start it up again, finding
that information can be pretty frustrating. Not to mention potentially embarrassing.
To get the Agent Manager running …
Posted on in Information Systems
Even a network maintained by the most diligent security professionals will occasionally suffer from a security breakdown. A security breakdown is an incident that results in the opportunity for an information system to be compromised. The breakdown does not have to result in an actual compromise; the opportunity for compromise …
Posted on in Information Systems
Although it is no longer working at the time of this writing, the Rural Utilities Service (RUS) had made a searchable database of applicant project proposals for the Broadband Initiatives Program (BIP) and the Broadband Technology Opportunities Program (BTOP) available on the USDA site. Unlike the database that is currently …
Posted on in System Administration
SSH should feel boring. You type ssh hostname, the server asks for whatever
authentication it needs, and you get a shell. When it pauses for 30, 60, or 120
seconds before anything useful happens, the delay is usually not random. It is
almost always name resolution, address-family selection, routing, or …
Posted on in System Administration
One of the more underrated tools included with Microsoft Windows Server is Network Monitor. Network Monitor is a packet capture tool that allows network administrators to gain insight into what network traffic is being sent and received by the server. This data can be useful in diagnosing various network problems …
Posted on in uncategorized
Slaptijack was offline for 2.5 hours today when the data center with our server in it experienced a power outage. Apparently, the roof started leaking during a heavy rain storm and water dropped directly on a panel controlling the UPS. This caused the UPS to shutdown, and it took …
Posted on in Networking
In the 1970s, Bob Metcalfe and David Boggs invented Ethernet while working at Xerox PARC. At that time, Ethernet's top speed was 3 Megabits per second (Mbps). This version was installed in a few sites including Boeing, the White House, and various academic institutions. In the early 1980s, the original …
Posted on in Information Systems
Proxy servers have become increasingly popular security devices in corporate networks. It is becoming a standard practice to use a dedicated proxy server to relay Hypertext Transfer Protocol (HTTP) requests to web servers protected by a firewall. In addition to relaying HTTP requests, proxy servers can also be used to …
Posted on in Information Systems
The National Telecommunications and Information Administration (NTIA) and Rural Utilities Service (RUS) have made a searchable database of Broadband Initiatives Program (BIP) and Broadband Technology Opportunities Program (BTOP) applications available online. The database is meant to give the public an opportunity to research projects that affect them directly. Unfortunately, although …
