Where’s the Remote?

Not long ago, my husband and I spent 20 minutes searching for the remote control in our bedroom.  We wanted to watch the news, so with the TV less than 5 feet away from us, I finally walked over and push the “power on” button – whew, crisis averted!    But with regard to technology, remote control is an essential technical support tool.  The days of walking a user through steps over the phone, or getting in a car to travel to a customer’s site, are almost things of the past.  Nowadays, technical support operates like Domino’s pizza delivery service;  if I (the Technical Support Engineer) can’t get your problem fixed in under 30 minutes, a link will be provided allowing me access to  fix the problem remotely.

Here at South River Technologies, our Support and Development Engineers use remote control software daily to solve customer problems; issues ranging from, “I can’t activate the license on my Titan MFT Server,”  to, ” My WebDrive will not connect to my WebDAV server.”  With SRT having customers all over the world, remote access saves us a bundle in long distance calls,  and there is no need to travel to a customer site. As long as we have the Internet, we can provide “on site” support.  I can’t describe the anxiety that washes over me when someone declines remote control access to their site.  You mean I actually have to walk you through this over the phone or write instructions? Someone please call the Police!

So, some may argue that remote control devices have made us lazy because now we sit back and watch someone else do the work, but aren’t lazy people the most inventive?   Think about it.

Programming…delicious, delicious programming

The SRT staff received this email from one of our programmers this morning:

GoToKitchen(DateTime time = DateTime.Now()) {

       lock(kitchenDoor)

       {

beginning:

              Enter();

              OpenItalianCroissant();

              HideIt();

              EatIt();

               if (likeIt)

              {

                     goto beginning;

              }

              if (hateIt)

              {

                   Reconsider();

                   goto beginning;

              }

       }

}

…Now, that’s good programming!

Document Collaboration

By definition, document collaboration is: cooperative arrangement in which two or more parties work jointly toward a common goal. Businesses collaborate on a daily basis  between various departments within their organizations. The sales department  is able to collaborate with the legal department, marketing with sales, sales managers with their field sales reps who in turn collaborate with external clients, vendors, and contractors etc.

Wouldn’t it be nice if there was a simple way to centrally store files and safely access them over the internet ? It’s always problematic to have one person keeping track of the changes when each department/person makes their own revsions and forwards those changes to the person in charge of the “master” document.   The right document collaboration tool, such as the GroupDrive Collaboration Suite, eliminates the need for countless hours of review to make sure nothing had been left out of an important document.  How nice would it be if , when working on a project or proposal, everyone who needs to contribute can access and work from the most current version of the document?  The GroupDrive Collaboration Suite enables you to do exactly that. Without the hassle of complicated content management systems,  GroupDrive allows users to securely and easily share files and collaborate in real-time. Users accessing the GroupDrive server can set up folders, access permissions, and share with specific users or departmental groups within the organization.

With security being one of the highest priorities in businesses, you want to make sure your business files are kept safe with encrypted sessions using industry proven SSL (Secure Sockets Layer), to secure your critical business documents. Most of us send files through email when needing to share with documents/files with our external clients, vendors and field employees.  But, let’s face it, email is not very secure and poses challenges when trying to send large files. GroupDrive gives users the ability to safely and easily create and send quicklinks to a securely stored file on the server. The quick link is a public link to a file or folder offering easy access by the recipient who can simply click on the link. Permissions, expiration timeframes, and passwords can be configured on the link to ensure security and limit access to the file.

To learn more please go to www.groupdrive.com, or contact sales at sales@southrivertech.com

Cybersecurity Awareness

 October is National Cybersecurity Awareness Month.  The website StaySafeOnline.org encourages you to make cybersecurity a priority and provides some “top tips” on how you can protect your business. While some of these tips are seemingly common sense (for example, “Know who you’re dealing with online.”), other tips speak directly to the capabilities of the software that you choose:

This tip immediately made me think of our secure FTP server solution, Titan MFT Server. Titan MFT Server is a managed file transfer solution, which, along with many other features that address cybersecurity (such as highly granular security settings that can restrict IP access and help to prevent DoS and FXP attacks) also provides strong authentication options and the ability to force complex password rules.

Titan MFT Server supports a variety of user authentication options, including native Titan Authentication, Windows NT/SAM authentication (for Windows 2000 Servers), Windows Active Directory authentication, LDAP authentication, and ODBC authentication.

Titan also provides S/Key password encryption and the ability to force the user to create passwords that are strong, which helps to prevent brute force password cracking. When this feature is enabled, passwords must be at least eight characters long with no spaces and must contain:

• one or more Latin uppercase letters (A through Z)
• one or more Latin lowercase letters (a through z)
• one or more digits (zero through nine)
• one or more non-alpha characters, such as ! # $^& , -+=

To learn more about how you can protect your business from cyberthreat by using Titan MFT Server, contact our sales team at sales@SouthRiverTech.com.

Oh Where, Oh Where has my Document Gone?

This week I came across an interesting statistic: the average knowledge worker spends nearly an hour per week searching for electronic files – and nearly 2 hours per week re-creating content that already exists!

We have files on our desktops, on LAN servers, on remote servers and in our email. We may even have documents in content management or collaboration systems. And it’s up to each of us to remember just where we put any given document!

Keeping track of many documents in a variety of places doesn’t have to be a daunting task. With a little bit of organization, and a few good tools, it’s possible to reduce or avoid the hours spent searching or recreating each month.

Organizing the files is the first step toward making it easier to find your documents. This is easier said than done in many cases. The important thing is to think about how you use the files. Do you want all proposals in a “proposals” folder, or would it be easier if the proposals were spread across individual customer folders? Do you want all status reports from your employees in one folder, or split across individual employee folders? Also consider what is best accessed locally vs. on a LAN drive or remote server. If you travel or frequently work from home, consider how you will access files that you work on when out of the office.

Desktop search utilities can be extremely valuable is solving this problem. Desktop search utilities will index the files on your local computer and store information in an index file. This enables you to search for any word or phrase and quickly find all files that contain a match. The match can be in the file name or in the document’s content.

Many desktop search utilities can be configured to index any file that can be accessed from your desktop through a drive letter. This extends the search to include files on a LAN drive. By installing a copy of WebDrive, you can also extend this capability to your remote servers: use WebDrive to map unique drive letters to your Amazon S3 storage, your SharePoint server, your FTP server and your externally hosted storage, backup or collaboration services. Configure your desktop search utility to index all of these drive letters and you can execute one search and get results from your local PC, LAN drives and all of your remote servers!

I use Microsoft Windows Search for this purpose and it works beautifully. I don’t have to think about where I stored the file, I just enter the search criteria and all files that match are returned to me regardless of location.

Now if I could just remember where I put my car keys….

 

South River Technologies

FREE Online Technical Support!

FREE Online Support

Now, more than ever, people want something for nothing, and why shouldn’t we?  It seems everything costs more now days.  South River Technologies believes that people deserve a break when it comes to seeking and receiving support. With every license purchased, customers receive FREE online technical support.  This goes beyond just a written Q&A section somewhere on the website.  Through our FREE online help desk, a submitted ticket is directed to the desk of a Technical Support Engineer (TSE); a live person willing to assist.

 The FREE online technical support option is a breath of fresh air for those who want to get their own answers in their own time, never to bother a live person.  We also realize that when people choose live interaction, sometimes a simple email exchange is not enough. In those instances,  the TSE may request access to the computer to resolve the issue.  He or she will initiate a streaming session with no added cost to the customer. Should someone need to escalate the level of support, the TSE will provide direction in purchasing a phone support ticket or annual support contract.

 Wait! Before you click to register your help ticket, take a few minutes to peruse the Knowledgebase Articles.  This FREE information will help you save time otherwise spent waiting in queue “for the next available representative.” This option provides 7×24 support to everyone, as our support center does not operate on a 24×7 schedule.

 It is always a good idea to consider the no-cost options before requesting phone support. You will find a plethora of supporting documentation on our website; to include Quick Start Guides and User Guides. These documents are available to everyone and provide a wealth of information on installing and using our software products.

Check them out today, do it for FREE!

  

www.southrivertech.com

A Recipe for SFTP

Ingredients:

• Server (Select your own hardware; recommend Server class machine)
• Operating System (recommend Windows 2003, 2008 various flavors)
• *Licensed operational Titan Enterprise or MFT Server (other SFTP Servers can be used but not as flavorful as Titan)
• Port 22
• Client SFTP software (we like to use WebDrive; Mac or Windows flavor)
• 2 Host Key Pair, 1 for Server and 1 for Client
• 1 Password for Private Key pair (required for Titan Server)

*Note if you attempt to use single Licensed Titan Server in the same recipe, you will receive bad results

 Preparation Time: 1 – 2 hours

 Prep:

 On your Server class machine, install your Operating system with either Windows 2003 or 2008 flavor, some people even like it with Windows XP.

 Refer to: our Titan Host Key Quick Start Guide (Steps 1 – 7) for detailed instructions on preparing your Titan Server with SFTP.

 Now that your Titan Server is ready, now you can add SFTP to make it incredible.

 To make SFTP (SSH’s Secure File Transfer Protocol) on this server select this check box and choose the port number using the up/down arrows. Choose the host key set by using the drop down arrow. To use SFTP services, you will need a host key pair that will be used by the Titan FTP Server. Use the Host Key Management utility to either create a new host key pair to be used by the Titan FTP Server or to import an existing host key pair from an external file set. Once you have created a host key pair, select it from the list and then type the password associated with the host key.

*Port 22 is reserved for SSH (Secure Shell)/SFTP and is the default/recommended port.

 Depending on your taste, choose your Host Key Type flavor: select a DSA host keys (must be 1024 bits in length), or  RSA keys, which do not have this restriction and can range from 512 bits in length to 4096 bits in length. A longer key length provides better taste, but takes longer to serve.  Shorter keys aren’t as good, but you can serve it quickly.

 Now add the finishing touches to your Titan server, and then you are ready to serve your guests.

 Before your guests can experience your server, they must use a password or a host key.  You’ll have to add the final component to the server to make this easier for your guests.

 We recommend you support both Password Authentication and Public Key Authentication (meaning that client can use either Password OR Public Key Authentication), then select the Allow Trusted Host Keys option and deselect the Require Trusted Host Keys option, but depending on your taste, select what you like.

 Before serving your guests, navigate to the guest’s public key filename and click.

* Note that the client host key pair will be created by each individual client.

They will then need to export their Public Host Key in SSH2 or OpenSSH format and send that .pub file to the Titan Administrator so that it can be imported into the Titan Host Key Database.

 Make sure your server is started prior to serving.  Enjoy!

The Gold Bug

An article in the Baltimore Sun this week about my cousin, Edgar Allan Poe, rekindled in me a desire to reread one of my childhood favorite short stories: The Gold Bug.

Assuming one can place into the context of 1820s South Carolina, the speech of one of the main characters, the manumitted slave Jupiter, the main thrust of the short story (it can be read in a couple of hours at the most) is about a treasure hunt. Poe was a master of the short story, one of the earliest to use the genre for full effect. He was also a master of mystery. Poe became one of the first authors to write about and explain cryptography in a work of literature.

If you have read The Gold Bug, perhaps in grade school, you know that the story is written about one William Legrand who stumbles on what amounts to a treasure map to a $1.5 million (probably worth several hundred million today) treasure buried somewhere near Charleston, SC by none other than Captain Kidd himself.

The key to finding this treasure is a cipher written by Captain Kidd in disappearing ink. The ink isn’t as interesting as the cipher. For those of you who haven’t gone back and read the story, here is the ciphertext:

53++!305))6*;4826)4+.)4+);806*;48!8`60))85;]8*:+*8!83(88)5*!;
46(;88*96*?;8)*+(;485);5*!2:*+(;4956*2(5*-4)8`8*; 4069285);)6
!8)4++;1(+9;48081;8:8+1;48!85;4)485!528806*81(+9;48;(88;4(+?3
4;48)4+;161;:188;+?;

For those of us who have worked in any significant way with modern computer based cryptography, we could really be fooled into not being able to solve this text because it uses a very simple key to decrypt it. This is a simple substitution cipher. That means that each of those symbols you see represents a letter, directly, no tricks, no bit-wise rotations, no mathematical transformations, just straight one to one character substitution. The story explains the method of decrypting the message.

One thing I found very interesting was the following paragraph, which is a statement by Legrand:

“Readily; I have solved others of an abstruseness ten thousand times greater. Circumstances, and a certain bias of mind, have led me to take interest in such riddles, and it may well be doubted whether human ingenuity can construct an enigma of the kind which human ingenuity may not, by proper application, resolve. In fact, having once established connected and legible characters, I scarcely gave a thought to the mere difficulty of developing their import.”

Note the fact that he says “it may well be doubted whether human ingenuity can construct an enigma of the kind which human ingenuity may not, by proper application, resolve.” This has long been the struggle of those with something to keep secret vs. those who want to discover those secrets. And so we come back to today, the same efforts are still expended to keep secret information secret and the same efforts are still expended to discover those secrets. Thankfully, computers have made great strides in the area of cryptography possible; from the Enigma Machine, to modern FIPS compliant AES, Triple DES, RSA, DSA, and ElGamal encryption and signature algorithms, found in products like Titan MFT Server, that secure transmission of data using SSH and SSL/TLS protocols.

Got Mac?

Hey all you MAC users. How would you like to easily access and transfer files over your FTP, SFTP, FTPS or WebDAV Servers? What would you say if I told you you could effortlessly mount a drive to connect to one or all of these servers? Well, now you can with WebDrive for MAC v2.0.

Unlike a typical FTP client, WebDrive allows you to open and edit server-based files without the additional step of downloading the file. Using the simple WebDrive site profile manager, you can configure WebDrive to mount a remote FTP server as a local file system device. By connecting through a ‘virtual’ device, there is no need to learn a separate FTP client interface. You access and edit files on the server the same way that you interact with files on your local Mac.

For more informaton visit us online at: http://www.southrivertech.com/products/webdrive/mac/index.html.

Or email us at:  sales@southrivertech.com

Simplifying the Installation of a Multi-seat WebDrive License

A little known feature of WebDrive, is that it can be easily set up for installation on multiple computers using the same configuration settings.  South River Technologies has developed a quick start guide to assist in large scale deployment of WebDrive. The guide is found on the support section of our website with many other technical articles and whitepapers. 

By ‘large scale’, we include installations from 10 to 10,000 or more desktops. Using the procedures and instructions in this guide, you will be able to:

• Create an initialization file; in the form of a Windows registry file, or a text based ‘ini’ file
• Assign the registration code
• Automatically activate the software
• Pre-configure your server connection database
• Turn off the ‘check for update’ feature
• Enable or disable various elements of the user interface.

Another feature of WebDrive, one that will appeal to system administrators, is the ability to update an existing installation without reinstalling the product. This is accomplished by creating a registry file that is automatically imported on a subsequent execution of WebDrive. One usage of this feature would be to add another server site definition to all the PCs using a WebDrive 50 seat license. This would be very useful in the case where a company added a second off-site SFTP file backup server for employees to save their work in progress files.

There are dozens of additional elements that can be pre-configured. Check out the Best Practices Guide for Large Scale Deployment to see if any of them will help you with your installation.

Add a comment to this post to share some of the ways that you use this feature, or suggest additional items for pre-configuration and assistance with multi-seat installation.