Vadim Chobanu

Recently I had a task of streamlining the contacts and team collaboration workflow. As the business grows, the usual outlook contacts, tasks and appointments are running out of functionality, so the natural choice was a good CRM solution. A custom software was probably the best thing, however the budget didn’t allow for it, so I began my homework on researching the ready made solutions available, ideally a free one or not more than £10 per month per user. I came across SalesForce free, which was integrating nicely with outlook, however I didn’t like that all my outgoing emails sent from CRM had the ’sent by salesforce on behalf of’, plus a few more downsides. The paid version obviously didn’t have this, so I felt like doing a bit more research before making any decisions. I came across a few more ready made free solutions, out of which SugarCRM seemed the next best choice at the time as they have an open-source community version, which means that all I have to worry is about hosting it myself. Sounded very promising, so I installed it on my server and then moved on to making it work with the email. The Community version has a slight downside – they didnt provide outlook integration, however there are a few 3-rd party softwares that do the same job, so next thing was to obtain a trial for them. As I am running windows 7, 2 of these applications didn’t seem stable enough, so I was about to give up and go back to salesforce. Then I came across another 3-rd party application which was integrating the CRM with exchange server, however the problem with it was the actual price – from $1400. No budget for that, sorry. Next! was I just about to say, when I found one more 3-rd party soft which was integrating contacts, tasks and calendar with an exchange-like-server called Zarafa and was free for up to three users. How handy I thought – we are three partners in the business, so we will even save some money by not paying for a hosted exchange solution each month.

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Unbelievable! If anyone has tried to access my sites for the past 24 hours, i guess there was no much success unfortunately.

My current hosting provider is (still) webfusion.co.uk and i had a dedicated ‘managed’ server from them with 24/7 support. Yep, managed if you keep the server as it is without updates and their first line support is so useless, they don’t know how to check DNS records or how to clear the DNS cache of a windows PC. I am not a command line guru by no means, but this is something any first line support should know! And this advertised 24/7 useless support is non existent after 8pm!

I was going mad today – no emails coming in, felt like disconnected from the rest of the world. We take emails for granted now, but they do indeed mean a lot in our modern lives.

Anyway, i just thought I will let you know why the website was down (probably for the 3rd time in the last 3 months) and soon I will make a full report on my experience with them. Oh, i think to sue them too, so I will do a bit of reading first if I go ahead.

For now, if anyone who thinks of getting a hosting from these companies, think twice and look forward to my full report on them. Absolute nightmare!

Bluetooth Plantronics Pulsair 590A

Ohoooo! Time for a new PC hardware related blog. Nothing extreme though, just a pair of headphones. Basically, over the past year or so I changed quite a few headphones and I wasn’t 100% happy with any of them. I tried a few Logitech, I tried the Steel Series, Razer, Creative ones. I liked the Creative gaming headphones more or less, but still I wasn’t overly impressed. The reason of so many changes was that the majority of current headphones do press against my ears enough to cause discomfort from just a few hours of gameplay or music listening as I am wearing glasses. Lately I did also feel the need for wireless headphones, so I decided to see if Bluetooth headphones can fit my needs. As time wasn’t particularly something I was short of for the past few months, I did my home work well in researching what to buy. As they say – measure 7 times and cut once, and reading about the Plantronics 590A, seemed exactly what I needed – portability, long battery life with excellent sound specs – 20hz to 20Mhz.

My main purpose was to be able to walk around the house and listen to music from my laptop, or media centre, get the same headphones with me and connect them to my HTC mobile, play games, use them for skype and occasionally conect them to TV if I need to, without bothering anyone around. Isn’t it too much you may ask? I am sure it is, but thanks to Bluetooth – it’s all possible.

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Let’s be honest – who has the confidence in windows to take care of their precious memories? Especially when one frequently experiments with the OS, or upgrade. An interesting event happened to me a good few years ago that changed the way I look at data, when I obtained a copy of Windows Longhorn alpha (now developed into Vista) and I couldn’t wait to play with. At the time, I was still a student (hadn’t started Vadim Computers yet) and I had no other HD than my main 60Gb system drive which I partitioned as a 20Gb for my Primary OS, 15Gb for my experiments and 25Gb for data. Interestingly enough, it was shortly after my wedding and the only copy of my wedding pictures were on that same HD, the storage 25Gb partition. Nonetheless, I rebooted, inserted the longhorn alpha CD in, got the to the partition select screen, selected the empty 15Gbpartition, got windows to install, rebooted – all seemed fine, got to admire the new OS and started playing with. A few hours later, I realise the partition is a bit larger than 15Gb and looked on my storage drive to find NO PICTURES! Imagine the panic I was in. The newly created family was in jeopardy – no way would my wife have forgiven the loss of all the wedding pictures…restart to Windows XP – no pictures there either! In fury, I formatted the longhorn partition and then I said – calm down, deep breath, remember the grandfather said – there is always a solution out of any problem. So time for data recovery it was, a long day and night with no sleep until I recovered them all one by one. So since then obviously there is no more playing with the drive where I keep the data

However, storing the data on a USB HD I found it rather inconvenient as I do require remote access to my data and I can explain why. Just one example, please don’t laugh though, I know – I have my issues, but hey – who doesn’t! I am an workaholic, so even when I go on holidays, I like to keep busy in the mornings when I can’t sleep, so having access to all my files is essential if I want to have some work done.

Therefore, a fileserver was more suited for my needs, however I am not particularly a big fan of having one to burn some few hundred watts per hour just for some pictures, music and the growing number of documents, so I have watched closely the NAS market and its developments over the past few years. The idea of using a low power CPU and memory to have a file server in my opinion is great.

My first experience with a NAS box was a WD MyBook World II – dual HD RAID NAS with gigabit connection. I purchased it for the company about 1.5 years ago as it was needed as a network backup location. Nice little device, that could do RAID0, RAID1 and JBOD, but a little bit too slow. The CPU was quite weak – an Oxford Semiconductor running at 200Mhz. Nevertheless, I did the SSH hack and gave it a try in the Linux environment. I installed transmission on it (a Bittorrent and download manager application for Linux) and I did face all sorts of problems while doing so, combined with the slow speed I gave up and left it for use just as a Network share.

However about 6 months ago I decided to get a NAS box for my personal use and having seen so much noise around the Thecus brand, i decided to get their entry level n299 NAS, without even doing my research. I am not going to go into details about this one, but it made me remember the words of a good old friend – ‘I am not that rich to buy cheap stuff’, so it ended up on eBay and I was back to basics – what to buy. This time i took my time and read everything available about current NAS boxes, before I finally decided to give Netgear a go. I know, the Netgear’s old SC101 was rubbish, however the new ReadyNas Duo looked very promising.

Below I took a few pictures of what it looks like and what’s inside when you take the panels off. 

ReadyNas Duo