O’RourkeTech Synology Silver Certified

Synology Network Attached Storage (PRNewsFoto/Synology America Corp.)

It’s important to us to always provide the best solutions to our clients. After trying all of the major players in the small business network storage space, there was no denying that Synology was the cream of the crop. We are proud to announce that we are now both Synology authorized re-sellers as well as Synology Silver Certified.

If you don’t know what a Network Attached Storage is, at it’s core I’ts a hard drive that is attached to your network instead of directly to your computer. Synology’s offerings use redundant disks for better reliability and have a ton of great features. You can back up your windows or apple computer to them as well as store your important files directly on the device and have it back up your data to the cloud as well. The list of features is too long to mention here in fact. If you feel yo need more storage or a more reliable place to backup your data, let us know. We’ll design a solution that meets your needs and budget

Security Best Practices for Browsing

It seems like every day now there is new news about a breach of security at a company or a new breed of virus that is sweeping across the internet. While there is no magic shield we can put up to protect us from the bad guys, there are some best practices we can follow as internet users both at home and at work to keep ourselves as safe as possible.

Antivirus

It probably seems silly to say this in 2015, but, PC or Mac you need to be running antivirus software. This software typically scans and prevents established threats and may be effective against new threats that behave in similar ways to old ones.

Best Apple Antivirus:

Sophos Antivirus for the Mac – Free Home Edition
Lightweight, effective, free

Best PC Antivirus For Home Users

Webroot Secure Anywhere Antivirus

Webroot has made amazing progress on over the last few years and has gone from a fringe player to offering the best possible protection for home users. This year it has dethroned BitDefender as my product of choice. As of today a 1 year subscription is only $37.99. I recommend subscribing for only 1 year. The choice for best product can easily change in 12 to 18 months.

Best PC Antivirus For Business Users

Webroot Business User Protection

This product can be rolled out to all users easily and is administered from a cloud based interface where you (or your IT staff) can get a quick, real-time snapshot of the threats that have been blocked and the anti-virus status of your computers as well as allowing company wide policy changes to be made in seconds. The product can be configured to run in complete silience, sending all notification and actions to the cloud control panel and never bothering your users, or allowing them to disable or modify the software. A mid-year upgrade is not wasted, as this product can run along side other antivirus and give you added protection until your current AV subscription expires. Subscriptions start at $25/year for 5 workstations with additional volume discounts.

Web Browser

As a dyed in the wool Chrome fanatic for many years, it brings a tear to my eye to say that I have personally switched to Firefox and I recommend that home users as well as businesses that allow users to control their own settings do so as well. Firefox has changed their slogan to “When it’s personal, Choose Firefox” and have made privacy and security central to their market position and branding. Google has continued to produce a more bloated and vulnerable application with each iteration. Loving technology means loving change.

Businesses that control user’s browsing through IT restrictions should stick with Internet Explorer with content blocking and flash disabled.

Browser Add-Ons:

Security does not stop at choosing the right browser, there are many add-ons for Firefox that can further enhance security, these are the best…

LastPass:

LastPass Lets you create a secure vault for all your passwords and will automatically log you into sites across your devices. You create a master password, it needs to be strong, and you MUST keep a copy somewhere safe. If you loose it, not even LastPass can get it back. But you only have to ever remember one password. When you create new accounts LastPass helps you create strong passwords and then stores them in your encrypted vault. For bonus points, go back and change all your old passwords too!

Businesses can get the enterprise edition that allows you to manage your business passwords for accounts across the web, then give a Last Pass user account to an employee. They can log into the sites for the business but never see the actual passwords. If they leave, you can simply disable their LastPass account and they no longer have access to your company accounts and never knew the password to begin with.

The Ad Blocker:

uBlock Origin has eclipsed AdBlock plus as my blocker of choice. If you’ve never used an ad-blocker, it filters out annoying ads that appear in pages all over the web. Unlike AdBlock Plus, they don’t allow advertisers who pay them to show you ads. It is also quite lightweight and fast.

The Track Blocker

Disconnect is a great piece of software that blocks tracking and hacking attempts and prevents unwanted and possibly infected content from entering your browser. As a bonus, it highly reduces bandwith in doing so and can speed up your connections and page loads considerably.

The Script Smacker

The last plug-in on our list comes with a small warning: IT WILL ANNOY YOU FROM TIME TO TIME. However, it will protect you from literally 90% of all known and unknown attacks online. Many attacks these days come from emails or other communications that contain a link that when you open it, takes you to a website that has a malicious script of some sort. This is how attacks such as CryptoWall work. It is our reliance on convenience that often leaves us vulnerable.

NoScript is an add-on that changes the default behavior of Firefox to block ALL scripts. You need to specifically click the icon and then allow a site to run scripts on your computer. The idea is only to allow content from sites you trust. It will even allow you to block scripts coming from suspicious locations on pages you trust. Most of the time you can get all the info you need to decide that email was a scam without allowing a script to load. Once you have set up the tool to allow sites you trust, you’ll hardly even notice it. Until you click on that bad link and see a suspicions page with blocked content, you’ll be happy you had it.

O’RourkeTech Joins Microsoft Partner Network

O’RourkeTech is now proudly a member of the Microsoft Partner network, this allows us to offer Microsoft Licensing directly to our clients to ensure the best rates and most appropriate solutions for their needs.

Pointing DNS to Your Web Server with EntryDNS

This guide is intended for people who are hosting a site with a cloud-based server or a server with a public IP address. Folks who are hosting a site on a home computer with a home internet connection with a dynamic IP address need to use a dynamic DNS service. Namecheap is probably the best registrar to go to for this scenario, and here is a guide on how to set that up.

So you’ve decided to do your own web hosting and set up your own web server. You may have followed this guide on setting up a free/cheap virtual wordpress server on Amazon Web Services and liked the result. Now you want a pretty domain name to match your pretty wordpress hyperlinks.

Lets face it, http://54.XX.XX.XX/blog, just does not have that great of a ring to it.

You can get the rest of the way towards having “yourname.com” up and running in a few cheap and/or free steps. That is assuming your name is super unique. Trust me, if its not, its already registered.

There have been a million guides to registering your own domain name, basically you are going to have to pay between $5 and $10 per year at the registrar of your choice and follow their steps towards signing up and registering an available address. Coupole that with as low as $35 a year for your AWS micro instance and you’re looking at around $4 a month for a good looking website/blog. Here is a good article of the top 5 registrars.

Many or most of these also offer hosting plans, and you are free to use them but if you want complete control of your site, you have your own web server and it’s either cloud-based on something like AWS or its a real or virtual server and you’ve got your port 80 traffic going to it from your Public IP address.

The way to link these two things together is with DNS management services, which your registrar may or may not offer for free. If they do not offer free DNS management.

AWS itself offers cheap DNS management through it’s Route 53 console. However there is a long way between cheap and free and I like free.

Head over to entry DNS and sign up for a free account.

Then click the “Add Domain Button”

and you will enter your registered domain name, IP address of your server and take note of the name servers listed on the page, in this case

ns1.entrydns.net

Now just head back over to your registrar and enter this nameserver in the DNS settings and when people type in your domain it will point straight to your webserver and no longer show the ugly IP address in the address bar.

Here are guides for using your own name server with the registrars listed: 1 and 1, Namecheap, GoDaddy,