Intel has just bought McAfee

Intel has just bought its neighbour in Santa Clara.

Well there’s a surprise. According to today’s Wall Street Journal it’s a done deal at $48/share (about £5bn). Paul Otellini (Intel’s CEO) has been saying that “security was becoming important” in addition to energy efficiency and connectivity. This lack of insight does not bode well.

I’ve been expecting something like this since Microsoft really got its act together with “Security Essentials”, its own PC virus scanner by another name. Unlike other PC virus scanners, Microsoft’s just sits in the background and gets on with the job without slugging the PC’s performance. Why would anyone stick with McAfee and Symantec products in these circumstances?

Whether PC virus scanners have much benefit in today’s security landscape is questionable, but at least the Microsoft one does no harm.

Intel has (apparently) paid about £5bn in cash for McAfee. I wonder if they’ve paid too much. It’ll generate revenue while lusers and luser IT managers are too scared to stop paying the subscription, but as anti-virus becomes built in to Windows this is going to dry up. I suspect McAfee was aware of this situation ad was moving on to mobile device security – not by developing anything itself, but by buying out companies that are.

When McAfee bought Dr Solomons in 1998, it was basically to pinch their technology for detecting polymorphic viruses and close down their European rival, which they did – everyone lost their jobs and the office closed. (Declaration of interest: Dr Solomons was a client of mine). Whether McAfee has any technology worth plundering isn’t so obvious, so presumably Intel is buying them as a ready-made security division.

McAfee does, of course, have some good researchers in the background – we all know the score.

India’s $10 laptop joke

There was a time when “Made in Hong Kong” was a byword for a cheap and nasty knock-off of the real thing, that didn’t really work. This was in the early 1970’s, and was pretty much true. In the late 1970’s I was horrified to discover that I’d bought a piece of electronic equipment “Made in Hong Kong”, but as it turned out, it was of really good quality and still works flawlessly today.

Hong Kong has now been assimilated by mainland China, and it seems that everything is made there – and is often none the worse for that. India has taken over Hong Kong’s mantel, although in this time of political correctness you don’t hear comedians joking about it.

But why is this? India seems to be a country desperate to be taken seriously – it has a space programme for no other reason than this. But artefacts manufactured in India tend to be either rough and ready, or inferior and semi-functional knock-offs of something made better elsewhere.

While still musing on the above I was sent this:

Apparently this thing, which looks like an iPad and runs Linux, would soon be produced for as little as $10. This in incredible. (Not credible). India’s Education Minister knows nothing about electronics or computing, and has announced this in spectacular style to the world. Apparently it was designed by the Indian Institute of Technology, and the Indian Institute of Science. Apparently they’re “elite” and “prestigious”. Their spokeswoman, Mamta Varma, said the device was feasible because of falling hardware costs. What they actually are, if this is anything to go by, is a laughing stock.

Of course, most people don’t know much about computing devices, but generally they have the good sense not to pretend they do. For the benefit of this majority: There is no way you can put a processor, colour touch-screen display and enough memory into a box for $10. It’d cost that for the battery and power supply.

Apparently this marvel has the facilities for video conferencing (i.e. a fast processor and a camera) and can run on solar power. Hmm. You’d need more than $10 worth of solar cells, for a start.

However, this won’t be “Made in India” – Sibal stated they were in discussions with a Taiwanese company about manufacturer. For $10? I don’t think so!

If India doesn’t want to be treated as a joke it needs to start by muzzling its ministers.

No Justice for Ian Tomlinson

The CPS isn’t going to prosecute anyone over the death of Mr Tomlinson at the G20 protests following an unprovoked attack by a police officer (Simon Harwood). They say that he was definitely assaulted, but they can’t prove the link between the assault and his subsequent death. “There is no reasonable chance of a conviction” because of this. Two pathologists though he was killed because the injuries lead to a heart attack, one thought it was a heart attack that might have been from natural causes.

Actual Bodily Harm was also ruled out because, apparently, there’s dispute as to whether the internal injuries caused by fall lead to his death, and the appropriate charge would then be manslaughter – and you can’t have both.

Common assault (from the baton attack), which caused a less serious injury, can’t be pursued because the six month time limit has expired.

The Director of Public Prosecutions (Kier Starmer QC), Steven O’Doherty and Tim Owen QC are responsible for this decision. Kier Starmer (named after Keir Hardie) is, of course, closely associated with the Labour party and the previous government (appointed in 2008) .

This is a disgrace. There’s nothing more to say.

Raoul Moat was a dangerous killer

Am I missing something here? Raoul Moat, a established life-long violent criminal, went on a rampage with some guns and shot three people, killing one of them. The police finally corner him, and at great risk to themselves, try to talk him into surrendering. When he finally gets around to shooting himself, the next thing we hear is that the Police Complaints Commission is going to investigate, and BBC journalists are wringing their hands and talking to his friends and relatives, who are moaning and wailing about their tragic loss. What about the relatives of the people he murdered or seriously injured?

Good riddance! The only reason I can think of for the police not to have shot him on sight (once identify had been established and he hadn’t relinquished his weapons) was so that he could hang later – but that’s wishful thinking.

I wouldn’t normally approve of the police shooting criminals, but in this case the facts appear so clear cut – no misidentification, and clearly armed and dangerous. Whoever got close enough to fire a Taser at him deserves a medal for bravery. I can only hope it hurt like hell.

Andrew Lansley and Jamie Oliver

Health Secretary Andrew Lansley and media personality Jamie Oliver are on a collision course, if you read the headlines. But they’re both right.

Jamie Oliver headed a campaign a couple of years ago, the thrust of which was that we shouldn’t be feeding children junk, and school dinners were a prime example of junk. Andrew Lansley said it wasn’t the business of the establishment to go lecturing people, and to do so was counterproductive. This isn’t the same as saying Oliver’s point was wrong.

Statistics are now being bandied about, the latest being that the uptake of school dinners has risen slightly. Very slightly. Yesterday’s statistics were used to suggest that less children were eating school dinners than before the campaign.

This is missing the point – it’d still have been a success if the numbers had halved. Apparently about 40% of pupils have school dinners. This means that over the last couple of years, 40% of pupils have stopped eating junk and are now eating something decent. Result!

Lansley is also right – there’s no point in lecturing idiots. Intelligent people can, and will, review the evidence and make a good choice. You don’t need to lecture them. We will always have idiots, too, and they’ll always fly in the face of the facts – more so if you keep mentioning them. Whatever the solution to the junk food problem is, lecturing idiots is not the answer.

Speaking of statistics, I’ve recently heard the one about life expectancy being much reduced for lower social classes being trotted out, especially by New Labour types. It’s true. Someone living in an inner-city dump in Scotland lives on average 10 years less (in rough terms) than someone classed as “affluent” and living in London. However, if you look at these figures alongside the smoking and alcohol consumption rates in the same areas you’ll see it has nothing to do with disposable income or educational level. More people die young in Glasgow because more of them smoke. This is nothing new, but it’s not mentioned by “social” politicians trying to get a bigger handout for their part of the country. Attenuate these statistics with diet too, and I suspect the death rate disparity will disappear altogether.

Sage data files

Sage Line 50 ACCDATA contains a load of files, and nowhere have I found any useful documentation as to what they are. Here’s a summary of what I think they are. They’re all data files unless otherwise stated. Most of the rest are indexes to the corresponding data files.

Anyone with more information is positively encouraged to leave a comment! Presumably Sage know, but they don’t seem that keen on publishing the information.

1..n.COA

Chart of Accounts
ACCESS.DTA

Access rights for users
ACCOUNT.DTA

Control Information (stuff across all accounts – VAT?
ACCRUAL.DTA

Accruals
ACCRUAL.DTA

Currency
ACCSTAT.DTA

Account Status
ASSETS.DTA

Fixed Asset
ASTCAT.DTA

Fixed Asset Categories file
ASTINDEX.DTA

Fixed Asset index file
BANK.DTA

Bank
BANKWWW.DTA

Bank WWW data
BILLS.DTA

Bills
BNKINDEX.DTA

Bank index file
CATEGORY.DTA

Category definitions
CONTACT.DTA

Contacts
CONTINDA.DTA

Contact Records index file
CONTINDD.DTA

Contact Date index file
COURWWW.DTA

Courier Resources
CREDWWW.DTA

Credit Resources
DEPARTM.DTA

Departments
FINRATES.DTA

Credit Charge
HEADERS.DTA

Transaction Headers file
INVINDEX.DTA

Invoice Record index file
INVITEM.DTA

Invoice Line Items file
INVOICE.DTA

Invoice Headers
MISCWWW.DTA

Miscellaneous Resources
NOMINAL.DTA

Nominal
NOMINDEX.DTA

Nominal Record index file
PREPAY.DTA

Prepayments
PUOINDEX.DTA

Purchase Order index file
PUOITEM.DTA

Purchase Order Line Items file
PUORDER.DTA

Purchase Order Headers
PURCHASE.DTA

Suppliers
PURINDEX.DTA

Suppliers record index file
QUEUE.DTA

List of users currently using
RECUR.DTA

Recurring Entries
REMIT.DTA

Remittance Line
REMITIDX.DTA

Remittance Line index file
SALES.DTA

Customers
SALINDEX.DTA

Customer Record index file
SAOINDEX.DTA

Sales Order index file
SAOITEM.DTA

Sales Order Line Items file
SAORDER.DTA

Sales Order Headers
SETUP.DTA

Setup information – manager passwords &c
SPLITS.DTA

Transaction Splits file
STKCAT.DTA

Stock Category
STKINDEX.DTA

Stock Record index file
STKTRANS.DTA

Stock Transactions file
STOCK.DTA

Stock
TODO.DTA

Task Manager
TODOIDX.DTA

Task Manager index file
USAGE.DTA

Transaction Usage’s file

Low Energy Lightbulbs are not that bright

Have you replaced a 60W traditional tungsten bulb with a 60W-equivalent low energy compact fluorescent and thought it’s not as bright as it was. You’re not imagining it. I’ve been doing some tests of my own, and they’re not equivalent.

Comparing light sources is a bit of art as well as science, and lacking other equipment, I decided to use a simple photographic exposure to give me some idea of the real-world performance. I pointed the meter at a wall, floor and table top. I didn’t point it at the light itself – that’s not what users of light bulbs care about.

The results were fairly consistent: Low energy light bulbs produce the same amount of light as a standard bulb of three to four times the rating. The older the fluorescent, the dimmer it was, reaching output of a third at a thousand hours use. Given that the lamps are rated at two to eight thousand hours, it’s reasonable to take the lower output figure as typical as this is how it will spend the majority of its working life.
This gives a more realistic equivalence table as:

CFL
Wattage
Quoted GLS
equivalent
Realistic GLS
equivalent
8W 40W 25-30W
11W 60W 35-45W
14W 75W 40-55W
18W 100W 55-70W

Table showing true equivalence of Compact Fluorescent (CFL) vs. conventional light bulbs (GLS)

So what’s going on here? Is there a conspiracy amongst light-bulb manufacturers to tell fibs about their performance? Well, yes. It turns out that the figures they use are worked out by the Institute of Lighting Engineers, in a lab. They measured the light output of a frosted lamp and compared that to a CFL. The problem is that the frosting on frosted lamps blocks out quite a bit of light, which is why people generally use clear glass bulbs. But if you’re trying to make your product look good it pays to compare your best case with the completion’s worst case. So they have.

But all good conspiracies involve the government somewhere, and in this case the manufactures can justify their methods with support from the EU. The regulations allow the manufactures to do some pretty wild things. If you want to look at the basis, it can be found starting here:

For example, after a compact fluorescent has been turned on it only has to reach an unimpressive 60% of its output after a staggering one minute! I’ve got some lamps that are good starters, others are terrible – and the EU permits them to be sold without warning or differentiation. One good thing the EU is doing, however, is insisting that CFL manufacturers state the light output in lumens in the future, and more prominently than the power consumption in Watts. This takes effect in 2010. Apparently. Hmm. Not on the packages I can see; some don’t even mention it in the small print (notably Philips).

However, fluorescent lamps do save energy, even if it’s only 65% instead of the claimed 80%. All other things being equal, they’re worth it. Unfortunately the other things are not equal, because you have the lifetime of the unit to consider.

A standard fluorescent tube (around since the 1930’s) is pretty efficient, especially with modern electronics driving it (ballast and starter). When the tube fails the electronics are retained, as they’re built in to the fitting. The Compact Florescent Lamps (CFL) that replace conventional bulbs have the electronics built in to the base so they can be used in existing fittings where a conventional bulb is expected. This means the electronics are discarded when the tube fails. The disposable electronics are made as cheaply as possible, so it may fail before the tube.

Proponents of CFLs says that it is still worth it, because the CFLs last so much longer than standard bulbs. I’m not convinced. A conventional bulb is made of glass, steel, cooper and tungsten and should be easy enough to recycle – unlike complex electronics.

The story gets worse when you consider what goes in to the fluorescent tubes – mercury vapour, antinomy, rare-earth elements and all sorts of nasty looking stuff in the various phosphor coatings. It’s true that the amount of mercury in a single tube is relatively small, and doesn’t create much of a risk in a domestic environment even if the tube cracks, but what about a large pile of broken tubes in a recycling centre?

So, CFLs are under-specified and polluting and wasteful to manufacture, but they do save energy. It’d be better to change light fittings to use proper fluorescent tubes, however. They work better than CFLs, with less waste. I don’t see it happening though. At the moment descrete tubes actually cost more because they fit relatively few fittings. People are very protective of their fittings. The snag is that with CFLs you need at least 50% more bulb sockets to get enough light out of them.

Standard bulbs produce less light than they could because a lot of the energy is turned into heat (more so than with a CFL). However, this heat could be useful – if your light bulbs aren’t heating the room you’d need something else. This is particularly true of passageways and so on, where there may be no other heating and a little warmth is needed to keep the damp away. The CFL camp rubbishes this idea, pointing out that in summer you don’t need heat. Actually, in summer, you don’t need much artificial light either, so they’d be off anyway. Take a look at document “BNXS05 The Heat Replacement Effect” found starting here for an interesting study into the matter – it’s from the government’s own researchers.
But still, CFLs save energy.

Personally, however, I look forward to the day when they’re all replaced by LED technology. These should last ten times longer (100,000 hours), be more efficient still, and contains no mercury anyway , nor even any glass to break.  The snag is that they run on a low voltage and the world is wired up for mains-voltage light fittings. I envisage whole light fittings, possibly with built-in transformers, pre-wired with fixed LEDs which will last for 50 years – after which you’d probably change the whole fitting anyway.

Ah yes, I hear the moaners starting, but I want to keep my existing light fitting. Okay, sit it the gloom under your compact fluorescents then.

 

Barack Obama uses BP as excuse to invade Iran

Could Barack Obama be using the Deepwater Horizon accident as an excuse to invade Iran?

I always had my suspicions about him, but to be fair I’d suspect anyone wily enough to convince the Americans to elect them president. Just look at who they’ve voted for in the past. Incidentally a lot of the British voted for Blair/Brown so it’s not a purely an American issue.

Democratic politics is all about image, not substance, and saying the right things in public is everything if you want to get votes. Many of my thinking American friends wanted “anyone but Bush” and would have probably voted for Kermit the Frog if the Democrats selected him as their candidate. And even that would have been the least-worst choice. But Obama rose to the top.

The last few days have seen Obama and the American news media jumping up and down about “British Petroleum” and how foreigners are responsible for polluting their Gulf of Mexico. I see little concern for the American oil workers killed in the explosion – just a rush to blame whatever foreigners are available at the time. Same old story. Time for a reality check:

  1. BP (not “British Petroleum”) is an international company, a large part of which is owned and based in American.
  2. The Deepwater Horizon rig (the one that blew up) was owned and operated by another international company (Transocean) – originally American and the division operating it was was based in Houston, Texas, USA.
  3. The engineering company responsible for lining the well (which I believe was the cause of the accident) was Halliburton – based in… Houston, Texas, USA.
  4. The crew of the rig were American.
  5. The regulator responsible for the safe operation of the rig was the American Government.

So why is Obama jumping up and down blaming a “foreign” company he’s decided to call “British Petroleum” for this, and demanding they pay for everything? He’s either pig-ignorant or he’s lying through his teeth for political reasons. Given that he’s a politician, it’s almost certainly the latter.

As he’s inherited a wrecked economy, getting a large amount of money from an international company is going to be a good thing as far as his short-term political career is concerned. It’s also important to deflect attention from the fact that his government licensed, regulated and derived a huge amount of income from this operation – even if it was set up before his time in office.

I’m no fan of oil companies, but why should BP foot the bill? This is an accident, with BP being one link in a chain of responsibility running from Halliburton to the US Government. The only commercial reason to blame BP is that it’s the link with the most money. Why are companies operating in America paying the government all this money? For sound regulation and the provision of services. It’s probably a fact that only BP has the knowledge needed to deal with this disaster anyway, but the US government is just as complicit as anyone else. They take the money and the oil, but have a big problem when it comes to taking responsibility. Nothing new there. America is, of course, the biggest consumer of oil in the world.

But what’s really worrying is that this new-age reforming “black” liberal politician is using the American people’s xenophobia for political ends – plain and simple. Anyone But Bush?

To recap: We have another American President playing to the gallery and blaming all the USA’s problems on foreigners to distract attention from his administration’s shortcomings. The Americans seem to be lapping this up, and the rest of the world is back to looking at American rhetoric in disbelief and bewilderment.

So where’s this going to lead? Is Obama looking for an excuse to invade St James’s Square (the location of BP’s rather small global HQ)? I think that’s taking it a bit far.

But wait – BP used to be called the “Anglo-Iranian Oil Company”. The Iranians still remember this, even if most of us have forgotten. It was associated with previous Iranian regimes, some of which are somewhat unpopular. From this point you’re free to make up your own conspiracy theories.

Personally I’ll stick to Occam’s Razer  – the simple answer is that Obama is just another stain on the office of US President, albeit nothing like as scary as the alternatives. So far.

Electric Cool-box (or Esky) review

We’ve all seen them and wondered. Every gadget suppler has a small electric fridge or cool-box, usually supplied with a cable to run it off a 12V vehicle supply. I’ve even seen some very favourable reviews of these devices, from people with no credentials. Then, last week I needed to cool down various perishable foodstuffs whilst on a road trip, so I bought one. This is a review of this particular unit, but the principles will apply to the whole family of products.

I opted for the Halfords 8-litre cool-box, largely because I knew where to find a Halfords and I knew I’d seen cool-boxes there. I chose the 8L version because I knew the cooling principle they all utilise isn’t very energy efficient; I didn’t want to cool more space than I needed.

The Halfords 8L cool-box is certainly well-made and insulated. It’s very solid, with a hinged lid and catch that suggests quality. This is only to be expected; the Halfords models are not cheap.

Cable storage compartment in Halfords Coolbox
The cable storage compartment is a thoughtful touch

One nice feature of the 8L box is a fitting to hold it securely between two rear seats of a car using the lap belt, allowing it to double as an arm-rest. It’s also small enough to tuck away easily on one side of a boot. After fitting the supplied strap it’s also easy to carry and in another thoughtful touch there’s even a small compartment to store the power cable.

The power lead itself is long enough to reach from the dashboard to the boot without too much trouble and is fitted with a standard lighter plug on one end. The cool-box end of the lead has a proprietary connecting plug fitted, which might be tricky if a replacement is needed. Halfords do sell spare leads, but they’re not cheap!

Halfords 8L Coolbox
Coolbox (with test supply and thermometers)

Halfords also sells a mains adapter for something like £25 – ouch! This is one of the most expensive 12V adapters I’ve seen, but the cool-box is rated at 3A so you do need something a bit chunky. I decided against this purchase.

So far so good – the food was loaded into the cool-box and off we went with the cooler running while the engine was on. 3A is no problem for a car’s alternator but I didn’t want to drain the battery. The instructions also made it clear that running of the battery alone wasn’t a good idea.

However, at the end of the day’s driving, which amounted to several hours, it wasn’t at all clear that the inside of the box was any cooler than the outside. On our return I decided to test it properly to see what was going on.

Theory

These coolers all work using a thermoelectric effect. If you really want to know /how/ this works try looking up the Peltier or Seebeck effects in a good physics textbook. The short story is that if you take two plates made of different metals and place them together you can make a heat pump. As heat passes from the hot plate to the cold plate it generates a potential difference (voltage) between them. This is one of those electrical effects that works both ways, so if the plates are the same temperature and you pass a current across the plates they’ll drag heat from one plate to the other. In other words, is you pass a current through the two plates one gets hot by taking heat from the other, which gets cold.

This sounds very useful! All you need to do is place the plate that’s getting cold inside the box, and cool the plate that’s outside the box with a fan. This gives you a fridge with no moving parts apart from a fan, and as moving parts go, fan’s are a lot easier to manage than compressors and the associated plumbing for the coolant. Unfortunately there’s a snag – it’s not a particularly efficient process. Just how efficient it was in practice, I decided to find out.

Testing

Using a lab power supply and a several thermometers with remote probes to measure temperatures inside and outside the box I left the subject running while empty, after sealing down the lid. The inside and outside temperatures were recorded, with the inside being measured by the temperature of the plate.

Graph 1: temperature over time when empty
Graph 1 – Temperature over time (empty)

The manufactures claim that it can reduce the temperature of the contents by up to 20C compared to the outside. With the normal summer temperature tending to be 20-25C and a reasonable fridge temperature being 5-10C this would certainly be a suitable performance even allowing for a margin implied by the ‘up to’ preceding the actual figure stated.

The actual performance is shown in Graph 1. As you can see, after about an hour the temperature inside dropped from the ambient 22C outside to just 3C inside, where it stabilised; a drop of 19C. Pretty impressive! But remember the 3A current drain – it turns out it needs 3A constantly so you definitely can’t run this without taking power off the engine. Sill, once cooled it should stay cool for a reasonable period, right? Actually, wrong. Take a look at Graph 2.

After disconnecting the power it returned to room temperature in about 20 minutes. Very disappointing!

Graph 2 – Temperature restored when empty

However, this isn’t really a good test, is it? Who needs to cool down a empty box – you really need to cool the contents, and what matters is how long the contents then stay cool once the power is removed. To test this I chose to use 1.5L of water in a sealed plastic box as the payload.

Test payload in Halfords Coolbox

This choice was largely governed by the sealed plastic boxes I had available. There wasn’t space for 2L of water, so 1.5L was a compromise to make calculations easer – and besides, 1.5L or 1.5Kg of food is a reasonable payload for an 8L box. The results can be seen in Graph 3 below.

Graph 3 – Cooling effect when full

As you can see, after a full hour the temperature had only fallen by 3C – not much good to anyone. I decided to keep the experiment running for a further eight hours, during which the payload’s temperature eventually stabilised at 10C below ambient. The graph shows the measured temperature a bit lower, but by this stage the outside temperature had also dropped, so it was 10C less.

This isn’t really much good for cooling food down; even after running it all day it’s unable to reach ‘refrigerator’ temperature; your food wouldn’t last long. The only useful thing you can do with it is put pre-cooled items in it and hope they stay that way due to the insulation, because even with the power full on it’s only going to stabilise at about 10C . Graph 4 shows what happened.

Graph 4 – Warming up when full

As you can see, thanks to the insulation of the box it does at least manage to keep its contents cool. The tests were carried out away from the wind and sun – ideal conditions, but only sensible.

Conclusion

This is a nicely made piece of equipment, but its real-world performance makes it completely unsuitable for its intended purpose. The best you can say is that if you place cold items in it, it’ll keep them cool as long as you keep it supplied with a lot of power. If you don’t use the electric cooler it’ll work almost as well thanks to its insulated construction.

If you are looking for a workable solution to the problem, and insulated box and a block of ice will easily out-perform this arrangement, at far lower purchase and running costs. The low-tech conventional cool-box (Esky) and freezer pack still has a lot going for it. Don’t waste your money on one of these.

Halfords refunded my money very quickly.

How to improve Sage network performance

If you accept that Sage Line 50 is fundamentally flawed when working over a network you’re not left with many options other than waiting for Sage to fix it. All you can do is throw hardware at it. But what hardware actually works?

First the bad news – the difference in speed between a standard server and a turbo-nutter-bastard model isn’t actually that great. If you’re lucky, on a straight run you might get a four-times improvement from a user’s perspective. The reason for spending lots of money on a server has little to do with the speed a user’s sees; it’s much more to do with the number of concurrent users.

So, if you happen to have a really duff server and you throw lots of money at a new one you might see something that took a totally unacceptable 90 minutes now taking a totally unacceptable 20 minutes. If you spend a lot of money, and you’re lucky.

The fact is that on analysing the server side of this equation I’ve yet to see the server itself struggling with CPU time, or running out of memory or any anything else to suggest that it’s the problem. With the most problematic client they started with a Dual Core processor and 512Mb of RAM – a reasonable specification for a few years back. At no time did I see issues to do with the memory size and the processor utilisation was only a few percent on one of the cores.

I’d go as far as to say that the only reason for upgrading the server is to allow multiple users to access it on terminal server sessions, bypassing the network access to the Sage files completely. However, whilst this gives the fastest possible access to the data on the disk, it doesn’t overcome the architectural problems involved with sharing a disk file, so multiple users are going to have problems regardless. They’ll still clash, but when they’re not clashing it will be faster.

But, assuming want to run Line 50 multi-user the way it was intended, installing the software on the client PCs, you’re going to have to look away from the server itself to find a solution.

The next thing Sage will tell you is to upgrade to 1Gb Ethernet – it’s ten times faster than 100Mb, so you’ll get a 1000% performance boost. Yeah, right!

It’s true that the network file access is the bottleneck, but it’s not the raw speed that matters.

I’ll let you into a secret: not all network cards are the same.

They might communicate at a line speed of 100Mb, but this does not mean that the computer can process data at that speed, and it does not mean it will pass through the switch at that speed. This is even more true at 1Gb.

This week at Infosec I’ve been looking at some 10Gb network cards that really can do the job – communicate at full speed without dropping packets and pre-sort the data so a multi-CPU box could make sense of it. They cost $10,000 each. They’re probably worth it.

Have you any idea what kind of network card came built in to the motherboard of your cheap-and-cheerful Dell? I thought not! But I bet it wasn’t the high-end type though.

The next thing you’ve got to worry about is the cable. There’s no point looking at the wires themselves or what the LAN card says it’s doing. You’ll never know. Testing a cable has the right wires on the right pins is not going to tell you what it’s going to do when you put data down it at high speeds. Unless the cable’s perfect its going to pick up interference to some extent; most likely from the wire running right next to it. But you’ll never know how much this is affecting performance. The wonder of modern networking means that errors on the line are corrected automatically without worrying the user about it. If 50% of your data gets corrupted and needs re-transmission, by the time you’ve waited for the error to be detected, the replacement requested, the intervening data to be put on hold and so on your 100Mb line could easily be clogged with 90% junk – but the line speed will still be saying 100Mb with minimal utilisation.

Testing network cables properly requires some really expensive equipment, and the only way around it is to have the cabling installed by someone who really knows what they’re doing with high-frequency cable to reduce the likelihood of trouble. If you can, hire some proper test gear anyway. What you don’t want to do is let an electrician wire it up for you in a simplistic way. They all think they can, but believe me, they can’t.

Next down the line is the network switch and this could be the biggest problem you’ve got. Switches sold to small business are designed to be ignored, and people ignore them. “Plug and Play”.

You’d be forgiven for thinking that there wasn’t much to a switch, but in reality it’s got a critical job, which it may or may not do very well in all circumstances. When it receives a packet (sequence of data, a message from one PC to another) on one of its ports it has to decide which port to send it out of to reach its intended destination. If it receives multiple packets on multiple ports it has handle them all at once. Or one at a time. Or give up and ask most of the senders to try again later.

What your switch is doing is probably a mystery, as most small businesses use unmanaged “intelligent” switches. A managed switch, on the other hand, lets you connect to it using a web browser and actually see what’s going on. You can also configure it to give more priority to certain ports, protect the network from “packet storms” caused by accident or malicious software and generally debug poorly performing networks. This isn’t intended to be a tutorial on managed switches; just take it from me that in the right hands they can be used to help the situation a lot.

Unfortunately, managed switches cost a lot more than the standard variety. But they’re intended for the big boys to play with, and consequently they tend to switch more simultaneous packets and stand up to heavier loads.

Several weeks back I upgraded the site with the most problems from good quality standard switches to some nice expensive managed ones, and guess what? It’s made a big difference. My idea was partly to use the switch to snoop on the traffic and figure out what was going on, but as a bonus it appears to have improved performance, and most importantly, reliability considerably too.

If you’re going to try this, connect the server directly to the switch at 1Gb. It doesn’t appear to make a great deal of difference whether the client PCs are 100Mb or 1Gb, possibly due to the cheapo network interfaces they have, but if you have multiple clients connected to the switch at 100Mb they can all simultaneously access the server down the 1Gb pipe at full speed (to them).

This is a long way from a solution, and it’s hardly been conclusively tested, but the extra reliability and resilience of the network has, at least allow a Sage system to run without crashing and corrupting data all the time.

If you’re using reasonably okay workstations and a file server, my advice (at present) is to look at the switch first, before spending money on anything else.

Then there’s the nuclear option, which actually works. Don’t bother trying to run the reports in Sage itself. Instead dump the data to a proper database and use Crystal Reports (or the generator of your choice) to produce them. I know someone who was tearing their hair out because a Sage report took three hours to run; the same report took less than five minutes using Crustal Reports. The strategy is to dump the data overnight and knock yourself out running reports the following day. Okay, the data may be a day old but if it’s taking most of the day to run the report on the last data, what have you really lost?

I’d be really interested to hear how other people get on.