Category: Technical Resources

Data Recovery Tips for Sharepoint Sites

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These tips were gathered from the excellent presentation made by Mr Joel Oleson (http://www.sharepointjoel.com/default.aspx).

1. Sharepoint Recycle bins
2. Sharepoint Central Website, Operations / Perform Backup
3. stsadm -o backp
4. SQL backup and restore
5. SQL clusters, database mirroring, log shipping

The key takeaway is that sharepoint relies on a lot of services to be running, and so, simply backing up the sql database would not be enough to recover a site. You will need to backup a lot of other files as well. The shortcut, just use the Sharepoint Central website’s Perform Backup to do this.

Green Virtualized Dedicated Server Hosting Package

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Green Virtualized dedicated Servers from BNS Hosting offers the twin benefit of high performance AND lower power usage. The Green Virtualized Servers uses newer Quad Xeon Processors that provides the horsepower to run demanding applications and at the same time uses less energy- decreasing our carbon footprint.

This Virtualized Dedicated server hosting package runs on top of Microsoft Windows 2003 and virtualization technics that combines to cater to our client’s needs – better control over their server at a significantly affordable package.

The Green Virtualized dedicated server hosting includes the following specifications:

·         15 GB of storage space

·         100 GB of bandwidth per month

·         256 MB of guaranteed memory burstable up to 512 mb RAM

·         2 FREE support incidents per month

·         Quad XEON processors

You control your virutalized dedicated server via Microsoft’s RDP (Remote Desktop Protocol) and install applications on your server. You create your own user authentication database and use your dedicated IP address. This dedicated IP address isolates your server from common problems associated with shared hosting —shared  IP address being listed in spam blacklists.

We can customize the Green virtualized Dedicated server Package by adding options to it. Bigger storage space, higher bandwidth, higher memory, more support incidents are some of the features that can be modified to suit your needs. Give us a call or email us at team[at]bnshosting.net to learn more about our Green virtualized dedicated server hosting package.

Reducing NDR Spams with SenderID tool

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First of all, what is NDR?

NDR stands for Non-delivery Report. These are emails. Basically, you receive this type of NDR emails because an email you sent to someone did not reach the intended recipient.

But why are you getting NDRs from mail servers for mail you NEVER sent? The answer: Spammers are spoofing your email address. They are claiming to be YOU when they send out emails (oh yes it can be done easily).

So let us say that your email address is user@domain.com. A spammer got hold of your email and then ’spoofs’ it. This means that the spammer is now sending out spam using YOUR email address. Because spammers send out thousands of emails – (some to wrong address), the mail servers of the domain will naturally send out a notice that the email could not be sent (either the reciepient is non-existent, or the mailbox is full).

These Non delivery notices via email are then sent to the sender’s email address. In the above scenario, they will be sent back to you. Even if you did not really send the email in the first place! And that explains why you are getting tons of NDR emails even if you did not send any emails out!

The internet community has come up with a way to combat or reduce these types of NDRs and spams. It is called the SPF (Sender provider framework). In simple terms, we put up a record on your domain that says email from your domain can only be sent out from a list of accredited email servers. This makes it hard for spammers that use their own mail servers to ’spoof’ your identity anymore. This will reduce the spam they send out, and also reduce the NDR spams you get!!

Interesting now isnt it? So how do you enable SPF on your domain? The solution is fairly simply as well!

Use Microsoft’s senderID tool and follow the prompts. For our hosted clients that need us to enable their SPF on their domains, kindly contact your account executive to start the process! Do let us know if this has helped you and your experience with NDR once the SPF has been implemented.

Ensuring your website is ready for Internet Explorer 8

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Consistent with our efforts to promote further interoperability across the Web, Microsoft will be releasing Internet Explorer 8 to render content in its most standards-compliant way by default.  Giving top priority to Web standards interoperability allows us to help web developers and designers drive toward the ideal of “write once, run anywhere”, freeing up more time to innovate rather than modify content for different browsers.  This commitment also addresses several development and design pain points from previous Internet Explorer releases.

However, browsing with this default setting may cause content written for previous versions of Internet Explorer to display differently than intended.  This creates a call to action for site owners to ensure their content will continue to display seamlessly in Internet Explorer 8.  As such, we have provided a meta-tag usable on a per-page or per-site level to maintain backwards compatibility with Internet Explorer 7.  Adding this tag instructs Internet Explorer 8 to render content like it did in Internet Explorer 7, without requiring any additional changes.

We are encouraging site administrators to get their sites ready now for broad adoption of Internet Explorer 8, as there will be a beta release in the third quarter of this year targeted for all consumers.  To learn more and get started, please follow the step-by-step instructions located at the following link:  http://go.microsoft.com/fwlink/?LinkId=120024 .

Additional Resources

The following links provide additional information you may find useful:

·         Internet Explorer 8 main site:  http://www.microsoft.com/ie/ie8

·         Internet Explorer Team Blog:  http://blogs.msdn.com/ie

·         Internet Explorer Developer Center:  http://msdn2.microsoft.com/en-us/ie/default.aspx

·         Internet Explorer 8 Readiness Toolkit (for web designers and developers): http://www.microsoft.com/windows/products/winfamily/ie/ie8/readiness/default.htm

·         Microsoft Interoperability Principles:  http://www.microsoft.com/interop/principles/default.mspx

 

Avoiding Duplicate Titles

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Most wordpress sites are now being penalized by Google because of the “Duplicate Title Tags” problem.  WordPress blogs will have the multiple links pointing to the same title tag in two locations a sample will look as follows:

/business-process/transcript-twisorg-dec-25-2007/‎
To Google, this fact alone makes your site look spammy and it will delist the page and result in your site not being found in search engine results. So obviously, you need to correct this. An easy solution to avoid this duplicate title tag would be to use robots.txt file containing the following entries:
User-agent: Googlebot
Disallow: /*/trackback
Disallow: /*/feed
Disallow: /*/comments
Disallow: /*?*
Disallow: /*?
Disallow: /*page/*
User-agent: *
Disallow: /cgi-bin/
Disallow: /wp-admin/
Disallow: /wp-includes/
Disallow: /wp-contents/plugins/
Disallow: /wp-contents/themes/
Disallow: /trackback
Disallow: /comments
Disallow: /feed

Making your Website PCI Compliant

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The Payment Card Industry (PCI)’s Data Security Standard is increasingly being demanded by tech savvy clients, so it is important that your hosting provider is able to offer PCI Compliant Hosting.

PCI Compliant Hosting providers have grown in importance as the scale of financial transactions are more and more being done online. At BNS we implement the major aspects of PCI standards to make these PCI standard hosting services. Both physical and logical barriers are in place to restrict access and secure data to only those individuals that are properly authenticated and authorized to access the servers.

We employ things like certificate based security, encrypted communications,  IP access control list, full audit entry logs and physical access control measures that employ biometrics.

How to make your website PCI Compliant?

Step 1: Find out the level of PCI Compliance needed:

  • Level 1: Merchants which process over 6 million annual transactions or have already suffered an attack resulting in compromised data·  
  • Level 2: Merchants which process between 150,000 to 6 million annual transactions
  • Level 3: Merchants which process between 20,000 and 150,000 annual transactions
  • Level 4: Merchants which process less than 20,000 annual transactions

The requirements for each level are:

  • Level 1: Annual on-site security audit and quarterly network security scan.
  • Level 2 and 3: Annual self assessment questionnaire and quarterly scan by an approved PCI scanning vendor
  • Level 4: No need to report compliance but must maintain compliance

Step 2: Engage a PCI approved scanning vender to have your Web site scanned for vulnerabilities.  Be sure to continue the scanning on a quarterly basis.

Step 3: Report your compliance by sending the PCI scan and self-assessment to your merchant bank.

If you want to know more about PCI standards:

PCI Security Standards

PCI Self Assessment

PCI FAQs

Feel free to contact us about your PCI compliant hosting requirements