blog

An Arcade game? Really?!

Wed, 16 May 2012 21:08:12 -0400

So, you may be asking yourself what's all this about this arcade cabinet that we've been working on? We're going to be at the #VTExpo Vermont Chamber of Commerce Business Expo at the Sheraton Burlington next Wednesday and Thursday, May 22-23rd, and we thought that bringing an arcade game would be nerdy and cool. But we didn't just go get an arcade game and bring it to the show, oh no...

Instead, we got an old Crystal Castles arcade game, and proceeded to completely gut it, replace all it's internals with current locally built components (thanks, Logic Supply!), built a new control panel and rebuild all the controllers, painted it, stickered, and loaded it up with Linux. Just because we can.

So, we'll be at the expo with this kick-ass toy. But, in keeping with our mission to do good work, and do our part to make the world a better place, we'll be there with a purpose. We'll be there collecting funds for our friends at the #VTNetwork Vermont Network Against Domestic and Sexual Violence. Every quarter put in the machine will be donated, and matched by rbTech, to support the great work they do there.

So come up to #BTV and check us out, play a couple games of Tuxracer, and hang with the coolest bunch of nerds anywhere!

In addition to the game, we'll have a full complement of hardware including the amazing Intel MFSYSv2 small business blade server with us to show off. We hope to see you there!

Come see us at the VTExpo!

Wed, 25 Apr 2012 13:18:48 -0400

Come see rbTech at the Vermont Chamber Business and Industry Expo at the Sheraton Hotel and Conference Center in Burlington! We're gearing up for our booth at the Vt Business Expo in Burlington on May 23rd and 24th! We'll be there in force, showing off awesome gear like the Intel MFSYSv2. We're also going to be there with our awesome Open Source, Linux based Arcade machine running TuxRacer and collecting donations for the VT Network Against Domestic and Sexual Violence and supporting the amazing and important work they do throughout the state.

We have free passes to the Expo for anyone who would like to go, please give us a call for details! We hope to see you all there!

Rubin & the rbTech team

MIT Green Building Tetris hack

Mon, 23 Apr 2012 22:43:31 -0400

Today's bit of nerdy goodness... you have to love MIT! They've built a controller that runs the lights in the building, and in real time can be used to play a game of Tetris. Way cool, and way to go MIT! Check out the official page here...

Why are my favorite websites down today?

Wed, 18 Jan 2012 09:09:10 -0500

You've probably noticed that a number of high profile websites are offline today. Wikipedia, Craigslist, WordPress, Reddit, The Mozilla Foundation and others elected to take their enormously popular websites offline for up to 24 hours, and replace their front pages with information about this horrible legislation. Google has put the doodle on the right up as their homepage logo today as their contribution to the day of action.

We have vehemently opposed SOPA, PIPA, and the Senate version of the bill, ProtectIP (which Vermont's Senator Patrick Leahy not only supports, but is a sponsor of) from their introduction. We are no fans of stealing Intellectual Property or creative works. We don't condone the illegal use of someone else's work in any fashion. However I am a firm believer in the rule of law, and even more importantly the tenets of Due Process.

Legislation such as SOPA and ProtectIP unnecessarily short circuit the due process that we all have a responsibility to protect. Because while there are sites that exist primarily to steal or redistribute illegally obtained work, there's absolutely no need to short circuit the process of having law enforcement go before a judge, to get an injunction or a warrant. The fact of the matter is that at the end of the day, these are financial crimes, and they real impact is limited to stealing money. No one is getting hurt. There's no 'ticking time bomb'. No one's life, or livelihood, or liberty is at stake, or at risk if the offending site isn't taken down immediately. It's theft. Of money. And while that's a serious crime, it's certainly not one that should drive legislation that chips away at all of our 5th and 14th amendment rights to due process. And it most certainly doesn't justify the guilty-until-proven innocent stance that the legislation takes.

And the unintended consequence of this law is that the site owners, hosting operators and even ISPs that serve websites can potentially be held liable, or taken offline, if someone downstream of them is determined to be hosting 'finringing content'. For small operators and ISPs, this is an especially difficult position to be in - it effectively puts them in the position of being judge, jury and executioner of their customers, so that they themselves don't get shut down. Unfair? I certainly think so.

In the most amazingly hypocritical statement I've seen in a while, Chris Dodd, the former US Senator from Connecticut and current Chairman and CEO of the Motion Picture Association of America (MPAA), the organization that is the driving force behind the legislation, issued this statement blasting the blackout as a "stunt" to "punish elected and adminstration officials who are working diligently to protect American jobs from foreign criminals". In a statement laden with face-palm worthy irony, he says

"It is an irresponsible response and a disservice to people who rely on them for information and use their services. It is also an abuse of power given the freedoms these companies enjoy in the marketplace today. It’s a dangerous and troubling development when the platforms that serve as gateways to information intentionally skew the facts to incite their users in order to further their corporate interests."

Um, what? "rely on their information"? But this legislation has the genuine potential to allow law enforcement, with a simple judicial order (no trial, no due process), to take sites like Wikipedia, Scribd, YouTube, and any other site that shares user submitted information, down. Offline. With (and here's my favorite part of the law) *no legal recourse* if they're taken down wrongly. That's right - if your site is taken down wrongly, and you fight and win, you *can't sue for damages*. Whoops, says law enforcement and the accuser. We were wrong. Our bad, we're sorry. The reality is that the"stunt" is in fact a scary illustration of what the Internet will look likeshould this steaming pile of legalese be allowed to pass.

So today, get out there (even if it's just on the 'net, or the parts of it that are working today) and educate yourself on this legislation, and regardless of where you come down on the issue, get involved!

-Rubin

Sources:

http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/technology-16612628

http://www.washingtonpost.com/lifestyle/style/sopa-protests-black-out-top-websites/2012/01/18/gIQA7TQs7P_gallery.html

http://blogs.csoonline.com/1902/chris_dodds_strange_response_to_sopa_pipa_protests

http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/technology-16608314

http://www.fas.org/sgp/crs/misc/R41911.pdf

rbTech announces partnership with Zimbra

Wed, 13 Jul 2011 12:33:13 -0400

The rbTech team is excited to announce our partnership with VMWare's Zimbra collaboration suite. In following with our long committment to giving our clients a wide variety of best-of-breed technology choices, we've done a long and thorough evaluation of the Groupware suites available, and after our exhaustive testing, are very pleased to announce that the Zimbra Collaboration Suite is our top pick for companies that desire the stability, security and flexibility of running Linux on their servers, while providing full Outlook functionality to their users.

If you would like to learn more, please contact us today and we'll gladly set up a demonstration for you!

Rubin & the rbTech team

Growing again?!

Tue, 05 Apr 2011 22:26:00 -0400

It's true, we're growing again! We've added a Service manager and 2 full time technicians to our roster, so that we can continue to provide the fantastic support you're all used to, bringing our full time staff up to 6 people. We are happy to welcome Steve, Jessica and Kyle to the rbTech family!

rbTech is growing again!

Wed, 05 May 2010 15:44:00 -0400

rbTechnologies, LLC is pleased to announce the addition of a new member of our technical team, and our move in to our new headquarters in East Montpelier!

Chad Avery, founder of Montpelier Open Source, has joined the staff of rbTechnologies as our newest full time Information Technology consultant. Chad brings over 10 years of professional computer experience to the organization, and we are very pleased to welcome him as our 'new guy'! Chad's addition brings our total technical staff to 4 full time employees, with nearly 60 years of combined professional Information Technology experience!

rbTechnologies is now in its new location at 1970 Vt Route 14 South. The building served briefly as the hangar for the East Montpelier Airport and most recently housed Arthur Whitcomb/ Twin City Masonry. The purchase was completed in January, and renovations took about a month to complete as the space was re-fitted for its new role. This larger space offers much needed office, meeting, and storage room for the growing rbTech staff.

rbTechnologies, LLC is Central Vermont's premier provider of business computer network consulting. Founded in 1997, rbTechnologies is built on the principles of honesty, cost effectiveness, and social responsibility. We bring enterprise technologies to small and mid-sized businesses at an affordable price and do so while supporting the area's non-profit organizations through our 'Socially Responsible Computing' initiative.

We feel very fortunate to be enjoying steady growth in these economically tumultuous times, and we offer our humble thanks to our many loyal customers and clients, for without you we wouldn't be here!

Moving day!

Mon, 04 Jan 2010 21:01:00 -0500

It's official! We're moving! We have a purchase and sales agreement, and are closing on our new building on January 11th! The new space is at 1970 Route 14 South in East Montpelier (literally around the corner from the existing office), and we're all SUPER excited! Renovations start the day we close and we hope they'll take 2-4 weeks, and then we'll be announcing an open house/ office warming! Thanks to all of our customers for helping to make this growth in a down economy possible, we are truly grateful for your continued support, and we know that the new space will allow us to work better and more efficiently for you!

Fall update

Mon, 16 Nov 2009 09:16:00 -0500

Summer has turned into fall, and we're still up to our ears in projects! We're doing some really exciting things for a local school, and have polished our firewall code into a thing of beauty. We've beein installing new gear all over the state, and are looking forward to a busy winter season!

As many of you know, the office expansion has experienced a delay of game as we shift our approach away from expanding our current space to purchasing a neighboring commercial property. The new purchase is moving along, albeit slowly, as the legal gears do their things. We are *super* excited to move in to the new space, so stay tuned for updates!

Last, we have put the finishing touches on our new maintenance contracts. We're confident that our new offerings are affordable and attractive, and look forward to talking with you all about them in more detail!

Have a happy Thanksgiving!

Rubin & the rbTech team

A busy summer at rbTech

Wed, 15 Jul 2009 16:53:00 -0400

If you haven't seen a lot of the rbTech staff lately, it's likely because we're buckling down in preparation for our annual session of drinking from the firehose, also known as August. For whatever reason, August seems to be the month of choice for our clients to take on large I.T projects. Of course, when our Clients take on large I.T. projects, it invariably means that *we* take them on! We're staying abreast of the tsunami and will continue to do so of course, delivering on our ongoing commitment to responsible, proactive information systems management. We hope you are all having a great summer as well!

rbTechnologies takes on e-waste

Mon, 18 May 2009 10:38:00 -0400

As part of our ongoing commitment to environmental responsibility and keeping harmful electronics waste out of our landfills, rbTechnologies has partnered with Good Point Recycling to become an official e-waste collection point.

What this means is that we work directly with the e-waste recycling facility to do proper metals reclamation and hazardous materials mitigation in the equipment that we take in as part of our e-waste program.

For every new system or component we sell, we offer free recycling of the old item (i.e. Servers, PCs, monitors, hard drives and any other electronic components). In addition, if you have a closet full of old junk, let us pick it up for you! We'll reuse the items that we can by turning them into functioning equipment for a local non-profit, and responsibly e-cycle the rest.

rbTech helps you Untangle your network

Fri, 27 Mar 2009 15:19:00 -0400

rbTechnologies is a well established partner with Untangle, one of the worlds leading Spam and Web content filtering system. By deploying Untangle on our client sites (and our own), rbTechnologies keeps our clients in the driver's seat and in control of the traffic flowing through their networks.

See more about this impressive product at their website: http://untangle.com

rbTech goes VOIP

Wed, 25 Mar 2009 18:57:00 -0400

rbTechnologies is very pleased to announce a significant upgrade to our customer service and Information Technology support systems!

Many of you have expressed your dissatisfaction with the answering service that we were using, and after numerous attempts to update the call flow and get the operators to follow a script that was succinct and effective without being , we decided to change our approach and invest in a proper phone system. It took a while to implement as we set up the menus, recorded prompts, tested, tested, and tested some more, and then waited, oh so patiently, for the phone lines to be ported to our new SIP trunks from SimpleSignal. And now, it's official! Our brand new Voice Over IP (VOIP) phone system is live and running our office phones!

What does this mean for you? Well, first of all we want you to know that we hate being banished to Voicemail Hell just as much as you do, so if you call the office when we're there it means you'll get a very brief welcome message and then we'll answer the phone just like we've always done.

However, the real beauty of the system is revealed when we're not here to answer your call: If we don't answer the phone you'll get a fully interactive menu. The Interactive Voice Response accomplishes several goals:

Reachability: Dial us by name and get our individual extension or voice mail

Rubin: Extension 101

Steve: Extension 102

Keith: Extension 103

Chad: Extension 104

Jessica: Extension 105

Kyle: Extension 106

Issue reporting: You can open a new support incident, right from the phone menu

The phone system will open a ticket with your contact info in our Support Tracker queue management system, and report to us that a new issue has been opened.

Emergency Support: Report a computer or network emergency

If you use this option the phone system will open a new ticket in our Support Tracker Ticketing system, and that in turn will begin an increasingly obnoxious escalation procedure that pages us each in turn, sends emails and SMS messages to us and generally is able to track us down no matter where we are. It will annoy us relentlessly until your ticket is opened in the SupportTracker and you are contacted.

Communications: In addition, we now have in-house conferencing and call transfer and a whole host of other standard and not so standard PBX features.

Availability: The phone system is active 24 hours/day, 365 days a year (the same hours that we cover our pagers and phones for emergencies).

Last but not least, our new phone system allows us to carry on multiple simultaneous phone calls (we previously only had 2 phone lines). Looking to the future, the phone system supports up to 50 extensions, so (we hope) it will serve us for a long time to come!

We hope that you will find these upgrades to be positive and helpful. We welcome (and request) your feedback on the new system be it positive or negative; we are here to provide you with the best possible support for your Information Technology systems, and we always appreciate your honest feedback.

rbTechnologies partners with Digium

Wed, 07 Jan 2009 21:06:00 -0500

Vermont's premier Business computer networking service and support organization is pleased to announce our new status as a Digium Authorized Partner...

Founded in 1999, Digium is the creator and primary developer of Asterisk®, the industry's first open source telephony platform. rbTechnologies has been a strong proponent and contributor to the ideals of Free Software since the company was founded in 1997, and with this partnership, we now offer Small office VOIP phone systems, SIP phones and a full complement of accessories and switching gear to keep your phone system running smoothly.

A unified login for local students

Thu, 30 Oct 2008 16:26:00 -0400

rbTechnologies was contracted to design, build and deploy a solution for a local school with too many login environments.

WRVS had a mixed environment with a Windows 2003 Active directory server for the roughly 100 workstations running Windows XP Pro, and an Edubuntu K12 LTSP LInux Terminal server with 60 thin client workstations.

rbTechnologies was contracted to provide a unified desktop environment and document storage for users. Regardless of which environment or workstation they logged in to, they needed access to their documents and folders from both Windows and Linux.

rbTechnologies installed a CentOS5.2 server with hardware RAID and centralized backup software, running Samba (Windows file and print sharing for Linux and Unix). We integrated the K12LTSP server into the domain using Winbind for login authentication, and created user directories on the new Samba server that were accessible from both Windows and the LTSP logins.

In addition, rbTechnologies set up roaming profiles and Desktop and My Documents redirection for the Windows workstations, so that users storing large amounts of data on their desktops didn't experience the dreaded "Your roaming profile could not be found, using locally cached copy instead" error on login. This provided the added benefit of storing all user data on the fileserver, where it is backed up every evening.

As of this writing, we are in the process of deploying LDAP as the authentication mechanism for both the LTSP and Windows Domain logon environments, thus creating that holy grail of network computing, the Single Sign On!

We specialize in these sorts of complicated mixed environment problem solving: Let us help you with your next challenge and watch your productivity and user satisfaction increase.

rbTechnologies sets the bar for Network Productivity

Thu, 30 Oct 2008 16:26:00 -0400

rbTechnologies consistently delivers well designed, cost effective networks that help your staff work more efficiently and your company to run more smoothly, while saving you money and time.

Business leaders : Noyle W. Johnson Group, Vermont League of Cities and Towns, Vermont State Employees Association, Vermont College of Fine Arts, Adams Granite Company, Trans-video Cable, Inc., Norwich University, and many more.

rbTechnologies: a culture of empowerment

Thu, 30 Oct 2008 04:26:00 -0400

At rbTechnologies, we believe strongly in supplying our customers the freedom and empowerment to run your own technology infrastructure. As such we are more than happy to assist your internal staff with running any or all of the components we develop, design and deploy at your site.

We believe that by empowering you to run your own systems, you will be more likely to use our services when they're most needed: for the harder tasks associated with todays increasingly complex networks.

While we certainly don't mind doing the 'simple stuff', we really like doing the hard stuff. That's where the challenges lie, and the challenges inherent to I.T. are what keep us coming to work everyday.

rbTechnologies creates Efficiency Through Technology

Thu, 30 Oct 2008 04:26:00 -0400

rbTechnologies is a full service Business Computer network sales and support organization. Founded in 1997, we provide on demand and outsourced Information Technology services for companies both local and far away. We perform all aspects of network design, support and maintenance for companies from 2 employees to 4,000.

rbTechnologies supports all types of companies with their design, set-up, and maintenance of their I.T. systems, from SMBs to major groups. We work in all business sectors, with a special focus on the Insurance, Granite, and Real Estate Industries.

Our goals

Consistently deliver creative solutions to your I.T. needs, on time and on budget

Ensure that our communication is clear and open, so that miscommunications and misunderstandings are kept to a minumum.

Leverage industry leading technologies to balance our customers needs, our growth trajectory and ensure our continued success

Always giving our customers the personal, professional service that we ourselves demand of those with whom we do business.

We're Growing Again

Thu, 30 Oct 2008 04:26:00 -0400

rbTechnologies adds more staff! T. Andrew Hooper and Keith MacMartin have joined the rbTechnologies team!

T. Andrew Hooper joined the team at rbTechnologies in November of 2007. He brings a wealth of experience and expertise to our organization, from Windows Server, Database and programming expertise to routing and network security. With over 15 years of professional Information Technology experience, Andy is a great asset to our team.

Keith MacMartin joined rbTechnologies staff in August, 2008. Keith also beings a decade of experience working with Workstation and Server technology, as well as experience in Linux and networking technologies. He exudes a calm and helpful demeanor that our clients value greatly.

Between Rubin, Andy and Keith, rbTechnologies now has in excess of 4 decades of combined experience!

Read more about the great folks who make up rbTech in our Staff Directory!

rbTechnologies puts efficiency at your fingertips

Thu, 30 Oct 2008 04:26:00 -0400

By deploying Open standards based technologies, we deliver networks that are built around industry accepted best practices, minus the pitfalls of vendor lock-in and forced upgrades.