You're not as anonymous as you think, and your password is way too easy to guess

Twitter has had so many problems with accounts getting hijacked that they have now banned 370 common passwords that were way to easy to guess. See the complete list at Business Insider http://ow.ly/QvZd.

If you see your own password, today is a good time to change it. No, no - not tomorrow. Today.

Pub fined $14,000 for Customer's Illegal Download

This is a story from the UK and US laws are different, but a hotel that does not protect itself should not assume there is no legal liability.

Having a clear 'Terms and Conditions' or 'Usage Agreement' page requires some type of Public Access Controller (we strongly prefer HP's), but requiring a positive acknowledgement ('I Agree' button) and recording that acknowledgement are the only way to confirm that the guest user was informed.

http://www.guardian.co.uk/technology/blog/2009/nov/27/pub-file-sharing-cloud-fine

A risk that's hard to recognize but easy to prevent

We have a customer site that's been off the Internet for two days through no fault of their own. It may be another three days before it gets fixed - and they are completely booked.

Here's how you can avoid the risk of room credits and lost business for less than $50/month.

http://rev31k.com/letting-someone-shoot-you-in-the-head

More, more, more!

Even with occupancy down, demand for bandwidth continues to increase.

The growth comes from several sources:

• Use of new applications like streaming video
• More leisure travelers with laptops
• Guests with multiple wireless devices - like iPhones, XBoxes and even 2nd laptops
  

Years ago you could could expect to service up to 16 rooms with one wireless access point and keep everyone happy with one T1 - not anymore. Today you really can't keep guests happy with more than 8 to 12 rooms per access point, and a T1 will only satisfy 8 guests at a time.

We have properties with more computers than rooms - where the guests regularly consume the equivalent of 5 T1s per 100 rooms. But keeping up with that kind of demand doesn't have to cost a lot.

By using a load-balancing firewall and carefully selecting the right Internet carriers, you can get 3 to 4 times the performance of a T1 for half the cost. We've done exactly this for several properties in the last two years and they have all gained the benefit of redundancy - if one Internet connection goes down, they have a second to keep them running.

Don't forget - that same benefit applies to the Front Desk and offices as well!

WiFi is just a fad, no?

Survey: Airport Wi-Fi More Important Than Food http://bit.ly/wYmkb (RT @TechmemeFH)

Just when you thought it was old - Wireless Internet use up 133% in the last 19 months, kinda. http://bit.ly/F3Rdh

There can be only one. To connect a wired device to a wireless network forget Linksys etc. - you want Pepwave's Surf AP http://bit.ly/2HXwCj

short one this week - future posts will move to posterous.

The Operator: July 19, 2009

Equipment - what we like, why, and how long you should expect it to last

There are planty of companies who want to sell you hardware, software and services - and many of them do an excellent job at a fair price. But that doesn't mean that their objectives are in line with your own.

No one (well, no one I know) is in a hurry to buy more equipment than they need, to pay too much for it, or to have to replace it any sooner than absolutely necessary. So how do you find a solution that fits exactly your needs when there are a hundred models of every widget you can imagine?

It's not a new question, and the age-old answer is to seek the advice of someone who has been dealing with the same problem longer, more successfully or at a larger scale than you.

Now, being geeks, we really like doing that. Every day. And in excrutiating detail. But we also know that we have to live with the equipment that we choose and recommend, not just sell it and walk away. That has made all the difference.

Anything that we recommend or sell we assume that we are going to have to install, maintain and even swap under warranty for no additional service costs. Typically, we get paid the same whether a piece of equipment is flawless or funky. Balance that against the realization that the more we ask someone to spend on stuff, the less they can get done - now you know where we are coming from.

So here are our simplest recommendations - you are under no obligation to concur or comply, but our preferences are based on the thousands of unique users we connect and support every month, and the calls that we take 24 x 7 to keep things humming:

Desktops and Servers: HP - the BUSINESS CLASS models with 3 year warranty (and buy a spare for critical roles!)

Hotel Wireless Gear: HP, hands down (lifetime warranty, SOAP support, half the cost of Cisco and Nomadix for more functionality and better remote support for hotel use), HP bought Colubris last fall.

Network Switches: HP (lifetime warranty), but on occasion we use Netgear for PoE

Backup Services: Mozy Pro (cheap and easy) or VaultLogix (PCIcompliant)

Every one of these recommendations should provide reliable service for 3 to 5 years. You were hoping for 7? Hmmm. We need to talk about risk and business continuity.

The Operator: July 12, 2009

What should be documented, how and why.

I'll be the first to admit that I tend to put work before paperwork. But when it comes to documenting your network and IT assets, every hour of paperwork can save you several hours of work.

Last week's installation is a great example. We installed a new HP controller, a PoE switch (not HP, though we tried and that's another story) and 12 new HP wireless access points for a client's hotel. That was the easy part. The hard part was salvaging the 9 existing 3Com access points from the old system. No, they didn't need 21 total, they needed 18 for 170 rooms + 5 meeting rooms - but when we surveyed we only found 6 3Com APs.

Because there was no documentation available, it took several hours to find and reconfigure the old units. 7 were in the ceiling of the 2nd floor (no, installs on the 200 level DO NOT provide good coverage for 3 floors!), but 2 were putting out very little signal, making them hard to track down.

The two that were easy to find were in the conference center. One other thing made those two units stand out - they had never been configured. They were removed from the box and placed in the ceiling without being set up. That might work for some equipment, but in this case those units put out NO SIGNAL until they were configured.

Guests had good reason for complaining.

Now they have capacity for 200+ users, no login/password (which they hated and couldn't work around) and a coverage map showing the signal level in every corner of the property. When they need to make another change, they'll have the exact location of all 24 pieces of equipment.

I could go into some great geeky detail about how we save config files (so that we can drop-ship replacements and get things back in operation overnight), but the important part is this:

None of that 'stuff' in the back room is bulletproof - eventually something's going to break. Documentation is the difference between a quick recovery and days of downtime. Having it means that when you need to consider changes you don't have to start from scratch. Not having it means you chose an IT vendor who is either lazy and sloppy or who wants you to be dependent on them in case of failure.

- Matt

The Operator: July 6, 2009

Sometimes paranoia pays. When we're asked about PMS and front desk hardware, we've given the same advice for a while now, and I've used the same illustration to explain the importance. And a week ago the worst-case scenario that I've described many times came true for one of our clients.

If your PMS server fails on a Friday after 5pm, the soonest you may be able to reach the manufacturer is Monday morning. Most likely, your repair or replacement will take until Wednesday to have in place. That's five days of trying to run your property on paper!

The simplest answer is to ensure that at least ONE of your other workstations uses hardware identical to the server. That generally adds $100-500 to your hardware costs (since the workstation probably needs less power), but it can put you back in operation in less than an hour instead of nearly a week. By moving the hard drive from the server to the identically equipped workstation, you can have your server back. You'll be short a workstation, but that computer wouldn't have been much help without the server.

You do need to take one additional precaution - make sure that you are backing up your data and make sure that your backups are rotated off-site so that a fire or flood cannot render your system unrecoverable. And remember - your backup is only as good as your ability to restore from it, which you can only be sure of by doing a test restore at least once per year. That can be a pain to schedule, but I have yet to see a disaster that was scheduled.

- Matt