This evening I had the opportunity to call up a local restaurant to make reservations… The employee @ El Dorado’s stated it might be up to 50 minutes for a table for 11. We hung up after agreeing on a time – and then I received a telephone call back in under 5 minutes stating – the table was ready when we were.

I have often ordered take out from El Dorado’s and always experience the same thing… My order is always ready sooner than promised. The first time this happened I looked at it like wow – must be a slower night then they expected… the second – perhaps this is a coincidence…

I ordered wireless from a company called Country Connections and was given a delivery date longer than I would have liked — and then in just under two days later my service was installed.
I called this week to let them know the service was less than stellar – and was told they would schedule a tech to review the situation early next week. Today they replaced the radio unit that services my house. This is more than just small town America companies helping out their customers – it is Smart Business. Each of these two organizations are performing what is perhaps the oldest marketing trick in the book – one that players like Time Warner, Vectren Gas, and most other service organizations have forgotten.. Announce the minimum of service and then give your best to deliver more that expected without bragging or making much noise about it.

The end result is the basically the same every time – A Positive effect on the customer. This creates word of mouth about the excellent level of service… not only did they deliver on what they promised – but… they provided much much much more…

Mark Stephenson, of Country Connections stated: ” We work hard and will not give any promises that we cannot meet.”

He and the team @ Country Connections succeeded in making me happy – and I will tell all my friends that I am a fan of their service.

And – next time your in Washington Court House Ohio make it a point to visit El Dorado’s and ask for Jessica to be your waitress. The service is stellar.

Recently we attended the cPanel conference in Hoston TX.  The event, like usual, was put on by a professional staff – and there is much we learned.   It is important to note however security did not seem to be a concern when it came to the networking side of things at the event.

The first day, as tweeted, the cPanel event lacked WiFi for the better 1/2 of the morning due to issues with the Hotel itself.  This rose to a number of rouge access points being setup, of which multiple persons logged into.   These access points were giving the SSID such as “Official cPanel Wifi”, “cPanel Wireless” and many more various flavors using the cPanel name.

We logged into one such interface and turned on my systems security just to see what would happen and sure enough – someone came knocking and trying to gain access to our file system.   The real fun part here is that virtually all of these fake access points were “point-to-point” connections and folks were hooking into someone’s laptop.

Next Year for 2010 – cPanel should think about setting up a captive Portal – one for which upon registration at the conference one is given their own user/pass to gain access to the network.   A simple x86 system running PFSense would do this in a heartbeat.   Through that system it would be wise to turn off netbios and other system-to-system traffic as well as redirect all port 2086 traffic to port 2087.    Sadly – many users at the event are green behind the ears when it comes to security and systems administration…

While it is important to note – cPanel did nothing wrong here – it is also important to note that cPanel in the future would be wise to setup the infrastructure to assist in protecting their more greener clients from the bad boys in the room.

Just on our Mac alone – we saw a ton of cPanel employee computers sitting in the connection bin via Bonjour , as was Softlayers, the Planet, Microsoft’s  and HostDimes.  Blocking these types of services would be a great start in ensuring the security of the cPanel users both seasoned and the newbies on the block.

As for our Macs – We run through ssh and proxy always

WEP is easily broken – and now WPA is just the same ! – at least according to a pair of researchers in Japan that say they have successfully broken WPA encryption in just about 60 seconds.

Back in 2008 Erik Tews and Martin Beck demonstrated the ability to break the TKIP (Temporal KJey Integrity Protocol) that provdes WPA security in 15 minutes – now with a 60 second hack… it begs the question —

Is your network secure?  More information HERE