We would like to update that the 23 domains that were seized by Microsoft has been returned to No-IP ! 

However, as time is needed for the DNS to fully propagate, please allow up to 24 hours for your sub-domains to be fully functional again.

For more information, please refer to No-IP’s blog at http://www.noip.com/blog/2014/07/03/update-microsoft-takedown/

We were surprised to receive a couple of calls from our customers this morning, all of which are using dynamic IP broadband or fibre plans from their respective ISPs. These customers have called and all of which are due to the same reason:

They are unable to access their remote devices, including their servers, printers, CCTVs and many others.

When we test with our office systems, we have no problem accessing them, and pinging the devices also yield positive results. And yet, when we remote access to our customers’ system, they are not as lucky as us.

Upon further investigations with our different systems, some of which are located geographically far apart and in different countries, it seems that those devices which has their DNS pointing to Google’s DNS server, namely google-public-dns-a.google.com (8.8.8.8) and google-public-dns-b.google.com (8.8.4.4), are unable to ping nor locate the subdomains using the Dynamic Domain Name Service (DDNS) provided by No-IP.com

It seems that Google’s DNS server has refused or unable to reply when comes to these domains and subdomains. In total, about 23 domains were affected.

In the end, we managed to find out the reason and it is NOT because of any technical issue. For that would be rather easy and fast to resolve by No-IP or Google itself.

The reason is because Microsoft served a federal court order and seized 23 of No-IP most commonly used domains because they claimed that some of the subdomains have been abused by creators of malware.

To aggravate the matter, Microsoft did not bothered to contact nor ask No-IP to block these subdomains, and that’s despite the fact that No-IP and Microsoft have an open line of communications between their corporate executives!

As it is of now, Microsoft claim that their intent is to only filter out the known bad hostnames in each seized domain, while continuing to allow the good hostnames to resolve. However, this is not happening. Apparently, the Microsoft infrastructure is not able to handle the billions of queries from No-IP customers. Millions of innocent users are experiencing outages to their services because of Microsoft’s attempt to remediate hostnames associated with a few bad actors.

To summarise, this heavy-handed action by Microsoft benefits no one. Not at all !!

For the time being, we have managed to inform our customers to either purchase the DDNS from No-IP and use their other domains which are not affected, or to move some of our customers to use the services from DynDNS, which cost a little more. Those that prefers to use the free services from No-IP will have to content with accessing their remote devices via IP addresses instead of DDNS, and pray hard that their ISP do not change their IP addresses during these period of time.

To read more about the statement from No-IP, please visit their blog at http://www.noip.com/blog/2014/06/30/ips-formal-statement-microsoft-takedown/

Pre-installed with Microsoft Windows 7 Professional, her new system has almost all the games disabled by default, by Microsoft, of course. The reason is probably Microsoft’s way of telling users that this is a business system and not a gaming one!

Anyway, to turn on the default games back again, just follow the steps below and you can have fun while you work then (just wonder how to do both at the same time ??)

1. Go to Control Panel
2. Click on <<Programs and Features>> and then click on Turn Windows Features On/Off on the left panel.
3. A dialog box will be shown, as seen below:
   

   Turn Windows Features On or Off

4. Tick the Games option to enable all games or select whichever you want by putting a tick next to the games.

Have fun!

It is our 2-prong promotion with special discounts of up to 15% off for Microsoft OLP Licences and on top of it, you get to enjoy our purchase-with-purchase promotions, offering tremendous discounts for other computer peripherals! See our promotion details as follows:-

i) Business Productivity Solution Stack Discount Structure

Redeem for Microsoft Office 2010 training voucher with every purchase of Microsoft Office 2010 (max claim of 5 seats per customer) and get up to 15% discount for every Microsoft Windows Server applications.

Microsoft Office 2010

Microsoft Windows Server 2008 R2

Microsoft Exchange Server 2010

Microsoft SQL Server 2008 R2

ii) Purchase-With-Purchase Promotion

Buy the following products with exceptional pricing and great discounts when purchased together with your Microsoft Open License purchases.

Terms & Conditions

• This product purchase-with-purchase promotion is valid till May 28th, 2010
• This offer is only applicable for Microsoft License purchased under Microsoft Open Business and Open Value programs
• Limited to 1 claim per customer per qualifying PO value Tier
• Minimum purchase of S$2,500 on Microsoft Open/ Open Value licenses
• Not applicable for Microsoft academic and charity license purchases
• Purchases under this promotion are not returnable and not exchangeable
• We reserve the right to terminate this pr0motion or amend the “Terms & Conditions” at any time without prior notice
• The “Free Microsoft Office 2010 Training Workshop” is limited to 5 seats claim per customer only.
  • customers to claim directly through the Training Centre with a copy of our invoice
  • Workshop session would commence from June 4th, 2010.

I’m writing this because recently I’ve just blown one deal for multiple licenses of Adobe Acrobat, and though yes, I felt the pain in my heart when I do so, but the matter of fact is, if I don’t blow the deal, I will feel that I’m not doing my job well.

So what happen?

Actually, it’s just that this customer had asked me to quote them 5 licenses of Adobe Acrobat and when I presented them the quote, they were kinda shock at the price and was asking me for any other alternatives. So, I dived in further with them and in the end of the day, all they need is just to save their document into PDF formats so that they can email to their suppliers and/or their customers and that’s all.

They don’t need to edit the PDFs, they don’t need to add more pages or remove any pages from any PDFs, they don’t need annotating their PDFs and basically, they just don’t need Adobe Acrobat!!

Their operation is very simple and in their systems, they only have some basic software and Microsoft Office 2007, which they purchased from me. They just need to generate the PDFs from their Microsoft Office 2007 and that’s all.

I told the boss if that’s the case, why not sign up a maintenance contract with my company and in return, I’ll teach him how to produce these PDF files without spending a dollar on any software, and of course, legitimately. He agrees and the bet is on.

I show him how it was done, and he sign the contract with us

I show him how it was done, and he sign the contract with us

Actually, he had wanted to sign the contract with us already but just that he thought he need to purchase the Adobe Acrobat, the contract have to be postponed to a later date. When I managed to show him my trick, the money is saved and our contract is done. So, by helping him save the money and lost the deal for Adobe Acrobat licenses, I managed to make more for my company by having the contract signed. Not a bad deal after all.

So, how do I do it? Simple, just follow the steps below:-

• Open Microsoft Word 2007 (Microsoft Excel 2007 also can)
• Press F1 to go to Help and type PDF in the search box and press Enter
• Scroll to and click Enable Support For Other File Formats, Such As PDF And XPS.
• Under “What Do You Want To Do?” click Install And Use The Publish As PDF Or XPS Add-In From Microsoft.
• When the Web page displays, click Microsoft Save A PDF Or XPS Add-In For 2007 Microsoft Office Programs.
• Follow the instructions to download the add-in.

Of course, to do the above, your computer MUST be connected to the Internet.

Now, to save any documents as a PDF file, follow the steps below:-

• Open the document
• Click the Microsoft Office button, move to Save As, and click PDF Or XPS.
• Click the Options button to set Bookmarks, choose whether you want to save a part of the document or the entire document, and/or exclude document elements from the file. Click OK.
• Click the appropriate button for Standard or Minimize optimization.
• Click Publish.

You only need to download the support once and you can use this method for your Microsoft PowerPoint 2007 documents too.

Neat huh