IT CHALLENGES

I work with a very large enterprise company that has a very distributed environment (international with many small remote locations). In today’s world, the use of the Internet is crucial to day to day business operations. Even with firewalls and anti-virus software, users still get infected with virus’s and malware. Most notable is the drive by downloads and related vectors of infection. The most common example would be the rouge, fake anti-virus programs. As we look forward to windows 7 in the enterprise along with the enhancements that cloud computing bring to the anti-virus software, is there a better way to ...

I represent a small business, with a single computer running Ubuntu and several virtual machines. I have set up a virtual machine on my Ubuntu box running WinXP, and joined it to my domain. Sadly, I only allotted 6GB of space for the image, and now I am running out of space. Is there a way to resize the disk image that wouldn't take longer than simply reinstalling the OS in a new virtual machine?

Our Web site, TweakTV.com, has been growing incredibly fast, and we have gotten to the point that our current servers are not keeping up with the growth. In the past we have had both the database services and Apache running on the same server, but as this was too much for the server, we moved the services to separate servers. As we have continued to grow, we now see periodic “hangs” on the site where it can take upwards of 30 seconds for the page to show.  When analyzing these hangs, we see that it is being caused by heavy disk use ...

In our business we will be selling desktop software, and we expect to get thousands of new customers each month. When a customer buys the product they will automatically be eligible for one year of e-mail based support from purchase date. I am looking for a solution where I can support these customers through e-mail in an organized manner. Having thousands of new customers each month means that we need a structured way of supporting them. Therefore, we need some type of helpdesk system so that when we receive an e-mail to support@ourcompany.com, the e-mail goes into a system where it ...

We’re a small, 30-person commercial contracting company. Because of the nature of our business, everybody has a laptop that they take home with them. The problem is that these laptops are running either XP or Vista, with different software on each, and because the users use them at home they end up with viruses and spyware, and Windows patches are often out of date. How can we force users to always keep their systems patched, virus software installed & updated, and free of spyware without being too restrictive or causing a headache for our single IT guy? In addition, how ...