Heathdale Networks Limited

26/08/2021

Did you know that if you use Gmail, Outlook.com or Microsoft 365 you can use hundreds of easy alternative email addresses to help you fight spammers, etc. What's more, you don't have to do any work to make this happen!

When signing up for a site, instead of entering [email protected], for example, put a + sign after yourname and then a unique word to identify the site, such as:

yourname+[email protected]

Any email coming to that address will still get delivered to your regular mailbox, but you can now double check that it did come from the place you signed up to. If it didn't, then you know where the leak came from....

Also, if you use gmail, you can put periods (.) anywhere in yourname part of the email and these too will be delivered to your regular mailbox. So:

[email protected]

and

[email protected]

and

[email protected]

all go to the same place, but again, you can tell the difference.

If you use Yahoo, there's something similar, but it's a bit more involved.

Hope this helps. Stay cybersafe out there!

17/08/2020

Are you a small business looking for a change in phone service provider? Need to fix call costs?

Heathdale Networks can offer you 5000 UK landline and mobile minutes per month on a 4 channel SIP trunk for £13 + VAT per month. Yes, you read that right.

Ask us how!

28/01/2020

As a small business ourselves, we monitor Internet activity of actors trying to break into our network. So, we wrote a program to extract data from our firewall logs over the last month. What we've found wasn't particularly surprising, but does point to where you need to focus your security efforts.

Firstly, what were the attackers looking for:

1. Telnet - a remote access protocol to get on servers
2. MS SQL Server - database access
3. Microsoft Active Directory
4. SIP (IP Telephony)
5. Ethereum - bitcoin mining
6. Microsoft Remote Desktop
7. Web services
8. FTP (file transfer)

The list goes on, but those accounted for over 50% of the ports scanned in the month.

The top countries that originated attacks were:

1. Romania
2. Germany
3. Russia
4. Facebook Ireland!

There were over 200,000 attempts in the month and the top 6 IP address ranges accounted for well over 25% of those.

Now, we have a business class firewall and none of these attempts went anywhere. A lesser firewall, or one that is badly configured, could easily open up your network to malware or worse.

If you're concerned about your network security, feel free to give us a call to discuss options.

25/11/2019

With Christmas coming up, it's a good time to look at your IT portfolio and maybe spend some time doing all the maintenance jobs that you've put off during the year.

If you need help getting ready for the new year, give us a call!

28/10/2019

Still running on Windows 7? Note that support for this OS is ending on January 14th, 2020. Not a reason to panic, but you might want to start looking at upgrade options for any systems still using it.

09/10/2019

We've had a few people on Windows 7 complaining about running out of disk space recently. If you run into this, double check the system temporary folder - usually:

C:\Windows\Temp

and delete anything in there ending in .txt, .log and all files starting with "cab" (no quotes).

You may need admin rights to do this. However, we've freed up over 250GB from some systems this way!

30/07/2019

Are you one of many businesses with a dusty old PC in the corner that's running software you rely on that you can't get any longer? Are you worried that this machine may break and leave you with a major headache?

At Heathdale Networks, we have experience converting physical computers into virtual ones that can be hosted on newer, often more powerful, hardware. Depending on your situation, this might be the perfect way to save space, reduce stress and increase performance.

Interested? Just get in touch for a no-obligation discussion.

05/06/2019

The newest version of Windows 10, known variously as 1903 and 19H1, has a new "light" theme. The images below show the before and after of applying it. The whole desktop has a flatter feel to it. We're liking it. Get to this via Settings -> Personalisation -> Themes.

Also, allied to that. We've applied a setting that changes the colour of the mouse cursor depending on where it is on the screen. It makes the cursor MUCH easier to spot. Get to this via Settings -> Ease of Access -> Cursor & Pointer. Select the colour wheel entry under "Change pointer colour" and choose a colour. Lots of other fun stuff in this area too.

26/04/2019

Starting with the next release of Windows 10, known as 1903, probably coming next month, Microsoft will be reserving 32GB of disk space on your machines to allow it to install updates.

Already it reserves 20GB, so this is an ADDITIONAL 12GB, which for most of you will be OK, but if you're on a machine with limited disk space (like a 128GB SSD), this could be a problem. So be warned.

Also, there a reports of machines with an external USB drive or memory disk plugged in, or an SD card, having problems upgrading to this new version, so the "fix" is to remove any such thing BEFORE starting the upgrade.

15/03/2019

Here's the video I mentioned about the Intel NUC. Fantastic small PC, great performance in a tiny package.

A brief introduction to the Intel NUC8i5BEK small form factor computer.