No hosted data, including websites, databases and emails were lost in the migration, and each individual customer was only briefly unavailable for less than 30 minutes.

The end result is we are now hosted on faster and in theory more reliable and stable hardware and we have the ability to scale and cater for more users as and when.

If anyone has any problems this morning with email access (some people may need to open a cmd prompt window and type “ipconfig /flushdns” and then “ipconfig /registerdns”), then please get in touch with Alex, who is available all morning to deal with these queries.

Once again, thank you for your co-operation and understanding during this last month!

I need to stress that no user data has been deleted in this downtime and (in theory) no emails have been lost.

If you experience any issues after this downtime, or have any queries or want to know more about what happened, please contact Alex in the normal way and we are sorry for any inconvenience caused, especially as this was an unscheduled downtime.

For any out-of-hour emergencies for contracted customers, please use your normal number!

Mark Russinovich is quite a clever person who programmed a great tool called NewSID many moons ago and his company has been consumed by the all mighty Microsoft in recent years. He posted a blog entry recently where he removed his great tool from circulation. I was quite bemused by this and read the complete post in full. It goes into lots of detail, but suffices to say, the end result is that I now do not use his tool, but use Microsoft SysPrep in many more situations than I did before. It works behind the scenes using a much more systematic approach than Mark could ever have employed and does the job wonderfully.

Just goes to show that there is so much we can learn, even about things that are seemingly set in stone. I am still learning the whole topic of SID’S over again since I taught myself about NewSID and SysPrep and if you are at all interested in the technicalities, just drop me a mail and I will try and explain some of it.

If you experience any issues after this maintenance window, please contact Alex in the normal ways and we are sorry for any inconvenience caused, especially so soon after the last emergency mainetance in October.

If you experience any issues after this upgrade, please contact Alex in the normal ways and we are sorry for any inconvenience caused.

A server is essentially a specialised computer that is used to manage information and resources in a centralised location. This powerful box of tricks is loaded with a specialist server operating system that is designed to perform specific tasks such as print processing, internet connectivity and internal email for all of the client computers attached to it.

• Your computers are already networked in some way, but the performance is affected every time someone prints a large document.
• You spend lots of time searching for files or copying them from one machine to another.
• You want to restrict access to confidential files because you are worried that a nosey employee might find sensitive data on your network.
• You want to accommodate flexible or home-working for you or your staff, but don’t know where to start.
• You keep buying printers, fax machines and internet accounts as and when you get new staff and IT costs seem to be spiralling out of control.
• You have lots of IT hassle such as viruses and network problems which are starting to impact on your productivity and profitability.

If you match even one of the above six, then you should still strongly consider contacting us to get a small server installed, but if you match two or more it is essential that you contact Freedom I.T. Systems as soon as possible to arrange a consultation as you are missing out.

If you’re feeling generous today and you have had work done by Alex in the past, you may also want to write a review for Freedom I.T. Systems Limited to let other people know how good we are!