Proverbial Talk

20 Powerful Tips For Advancing Your Career

By Bonnie Lowe

ou don’t want to stay in your current position forever… you want to move up! Here are 20 ways to boost your chances of getting that nice promotion:

1. Do more than is expected of you. Prove that you’re capable of handing more responsibility. Volunteer for special assignments.
2. Take initiative and do what needs to be done, before being asked.
3. Learn the skills you’ll need to advance. Take advantage of on-the-job training, but don’t rely exclusively on that. Consider taking (and paying for) skill-enhancing courses on your own.
4. Be loyal to your boss, your team, and your company. (Yes, you can be loyal without being a “brown-noser.”)
5. Be patient and don’t expect to be promoted without demonstrating your abilities over time.
6. View the big picture and understand your company’s mission. Find ways to help them accomplish it.
7. Save money for your company by identifying ways to boost revenues, reduce expenses, or streamline processes.
8. Offer solutions to the problems you must take to your boss.
9. Show respect to everyone — superiors, peers, subordinates, and especially customers.
10. Don’t be afraid to say “I don’t know.” If you don’t know something, say so; don’t try to fake it. Find the answers you need.
11. Take responsibility for your actions. If you’re at fault, admit it and take the blame. If you’re wrong, apologize.
12. Never gossip. Gossip can hurt the careers of two people: the person being talked about, and the person doing the talking.
13. Never say “That’s not my job.” Don’t think you are above anything. Pitch in and set a good example, especially if the job is one that nobody else wants to do. Your willingness to do so will be noticed and appreciated!
14. Share the credit. People who share credit with others make a much better impression than those who take all the credit themselves.
15. Ask for help when you need it. Don’t let a difficult task get out of hand. When you need help, ask for it — before things get worse.
16. Keep your dislike to yourself. If you don’t like someone, don’t let it show. Never burn bridges or offend others as you move ahead in your career.
17. Don’t hold grudges. Life isn’t always fair. If you were passed over for promotion, didn’t get the project you wanted, etc., let it go. Be gracious and diplomatic, focus on the future and move on. Harboring grudges won’t advance your career.
18. Be humble. When you’re right, don’t gloat about it. Never say “I told you so!”
19. Make others feel important. Compliment others, emphasize their strengths and contributions, and help them whenever you can. They will enthusiastically help you in return.
20. Join associations and professional organizations related to your career. In addition to helping you learn more about your industry, this can provide invaluable networking opportunities.

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17 Surefire Ways to Annoy Potential Employers

By Bonnie Lowe

Despite the President’s encouraging words, the job market is still in sorry shape. There are more job seekers than job openings, so do NOT make things harder on yourself by doing any of the things on this list! Never, ever do these!

1. Apply for jobs you are not qualified for.
2. Send a generic cover letter that doesn’t identify the position you’re interested in, or match your qualifications to the job.
3. Put a useless, seen-it-a-million-times Objective on your resume that says you want a “challenging opportunity with a forward-looking company where I can utilize my knowledge, experience and skills to our mutual advantage.”
4. Make your resume a list of past duties instead of accomplishments.
5. Lie, brag or exaggerate about ANYTHING.
6. Keep making repetitive “notice-me” calls to ask if your resume was received.
7. Fail to respond quickly to messages left on your answering machine or voicemail.
8. Expect them to schedule your phone-screening interview after normal business hours.
9. Refuse to give your salary requirements when requested prior to the interview.
10. Fail to research the company prior to the interview.
11. Arrive at the interview late.
12. Be rude to the receptionist.
13. Put “See attached resume” instead of filling out the application completely.
14. Be unprepared at the interview.
15. Ask “What’s in it for ME?” type questions at the interview.
16. Fail to send a thank-you letter after the interview.
17. Call to ask about the status of the position days before when you were told they’d make a decision.

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Categorizing & Organizing Electronic Data for Maximum Backup Efficiency

By Bud Stoddard

Article published by Capital Remodeling

Most companies today, whether large or small, are experiencing data overload. According to industry studies, many organizations are finding that they have to double their storage capacities every six to 12 months. With recent regulations such as Sarbanes-Oxley, HIPAA and others requiring businesses to accurately record and report and thus generate more data, this explosion of data will not subside anytime soon. In fact, as additional regulations are being anticipated for banking and other industries it is likely to continue it’s rapid increase.

To protect your mission-critical data and keep your company up and running, certainly having an efficient backup and recovery solution is key. However, in order to achieve and maintain backup efficiency, categorizing and organizing your data is also important, not only to ensure that necessary files are backed up but to minimize costs. Today, this is an especially complex task given remote offices and more and more mobile devices in use.

First and foremost, administration of data protection procedures must be centralized in order to maintain consistency and control. This will ensure that branch office data is also adequately protected. It is then incumbent upon the administrator to encourage the branch offices to save any and all data to the server, rather than on local hard drives, so that it can be backed up in accordance with the set backup schedule.

Categorizing your files into different groups with different backup schedules can help reduce your costs considerably. MP3 files for example, might only need to be backed up once a week otherwise, they might unnecessarily expand your backup window and depending upon what type of backup solution you use, your costs. You can begin by grouping your file data by type and access. The data type identifies data by purpose, while data access identifies data by usage and rate of change. Data type involves categorizing the data by Operating System, Operating System (OS) Data, Applications and User Data. Data access identifies the data’s usage and change rate. For some data, there might not be any modification because the data is archive data. For other data, there might be low, medium or high change. This process will help you determine how often your data should be backed up and how long it should be stored.

The following questions should be asked:

* Does the data support a critical business function?

* Does the data support a legal or auditing concern?

* Is the data sensitive?

* Is the data difficult or expensive to reproduce?

This will help determine how often to backup and how long to store the data in question. For example, data that supports a critical business function should be copied off-site on a regular basis and should have a brief retention period because of its high rate of change. Data that supports a legal or auditing concern should also be copied off-site on a somewhat regular basis; however, it should have a long or permanent retention period because of its nature. Sensitive data, such as patents or trade secrets, should be copied off-site on a regular basis and should be permanently archived. Data, such as historical information, that is difficult or expensive to reproduce, should be copied off-site once and should be permanently archived.

How you organize your data is also important. Structuring your system so the data files discussed above are organized in one area facilitates pointing the backup program to one area rather than having to gather files from widespread locations. Having personnel save their documents to a designated folder on the server is the ideal option. For example, each employee can have their own named folder where they can save their files. Typically, through the Preferences option, programs can be redirected to do this by default. Through this set-up, you can easily see which files need to be backed up and plan accordingly.

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How to Secure Your Small Business with a PIX Firewall

By Ron Jones

One of the more popular firewall products for the small business market is the Cisco PIX 501. Out of the box it requires just a few configuration entries and you are up and running.

In this guide, we will walk through the steps for configuring your brand new pix at the network edge.

This guide is written for the user who has no knowledge of the PIX firewall. As such, it is not a treatise on network security, but a quick, by-the numbers guide to configuring a PIX firewall with as little jargon as possible.

We are assuming that you have an internet connection with at least one static IP address. While the PIX can easily handle a dynamic IP address (that is the default configuration), you won’t be able to easily configure remote access, VPNs, Mail, or web servers without a static IP address.

Your PIX should have come with an AC adapter, a yellow CAT 5 cable, an orange CAT5 cable and a flat, (typically) baby blue cable with a 9-pin serial connector on one end and an RJ-45 plug on the other.

The yellow CAT5 cable is a standard Ethernet cable and is used to connect your pc or server to the 4-port Ethernet switch built into the PIX. The Orange CAT5 cable is a cross-over cable and may be required to connect the outside interface of the PIX to your ISP’s router (if your PC’s or workstations are plugged into a Cisco switch inside the network, you will also require a cross-over cable for connecting to one of the switch ports on the PIX).

What we are going to use for our configuration is the baby blue rollover cable. Insert the serial jack into one of the serial ports on the back of the PC or laptop you will be using to configure the PIX. Then, insert the RJ-45 plug into the port on the back of the PIX labeled “console.”

Windows has a built in application that is used for (among other things) configuring serial devices. Using the start menu, go to Start > Programs > Accessories > Communications > Hyper Terminal.

Choose the Hyper Terminal application. You may get a dialog box asking if you’d like to make Hyper Terminal your default telnet application. Unless you have a preference, go ahead and choose yes.

Then you will be asked for the area code from which you are dialing, although it isn’t applicable here, the program still wants to know, so fill it in and click ‘next’ or ‘ok.’

You can call the connection anything you’d like; in this example we’ll use PIX. Click ‘ok’ to move on.

Next, we’ll be asked to enter the details for the phone number we’d like to dial. Since we aren’t dialing a phone number, use the drop-down selector at the bottom of the box to choose COM1 or COM2 (whichever is applicable). If you have no idea which one is which, you may need to try it both ways.

Now, you will be expected to tell the application some specifics about the port settings so that it can effectively communicate with the PIX.

Luckily, it isn’t too complex, just remember 9600, 8, none, and 1. Enter these settings into the drop down selectors of the box on your screen.

Now we are ready to set up the PIX. Insert the power cable and you will be greeted with the startup monologue (it’s not a dialog in this case; it’s just informing you of what is occurring).

Then, you will be greeted with a screen that asks if you’d like to program the PIX using interactive prompts. For the purpose of this exercise, type no and click ‘enter’.

You will now get a prompt that looks like this:
pixfirewall>
Type the word ‘enable’ (no quotes), when prompted for the password, just click ‘enter’ as the default is no password.

The prompt has changed to a hash mark:
Pixfirewall#
Type the phrase ‘configure terminal’ (no quotes); you are telling the PIX that you want to enter the global configuration mode and you will be doing your configuration via the terminal window.

Your prompt will now look like this:
pixfirewall(config)#

The first thing we want to do is give your pix a host name. The PIX command syntax is:
Variable name

Thus, to set the hostname we will enter:
pixfirewall(config)# hostname mypix

Now, the domain name; it’s alright if you don’t have a domain set up on your network, you can call it whatever you like. However, give some thought to whether a domain might be a possibility at some point and plan your naming scheme appropriately.
pixfirewall(config)# domain-name mydomain.com

As you can see from the configuration above, the ethernet0 interface is the outside interface, with a security setting of 0, while ethernet1 is the inside interface with a security setting of 100. Additionally, you can see that the interfaces are shutdown. All we need do to bring them up is enter the speed at which they should operate. As they are Ethernet interfaces, any software version after 6.3(3) will take 100full, prior to that, use 10full.

pixfirewall(config)# interface ethernet0 100full
pixfirewall(config)# lnterface ethernet1 100full

Now to assign an address to the inside and outside interfaces; the ip address command sets the ip address of an interface. The syntax is as follows:
Ip address

An example might be as follows:
Ip address outside
pixfirewall(config)# ip address outside 12.25.241.2 255.255.255.252 (this IP address, netmask combination should not be used, it is shown here for example only. Use the IP address/mask given to you by your ISP).

Then the inside IP address
ip address inside
pixfirewall(config)# Ip address inside 192.168.0.1 255.255.255.0

A brief word about IP addressing is in order here.

One way that is used to conserve public IP addresses is through the use of non-routable IP addressing blocks specified in RFC 1597. You may sometimes hear them referred to as “private” IP addresses, which is fine, but not quite technically accurate. There are three different blocks to choose from:
10.0.0.0 – 10.255.255.255 with a netmask of 255.0.0.0
172.16.0.0 – 172.31.255.255 with a netmask of 255.255.0.0
192.168.0.0 – 192.168.255.255 with a netmask of 255.255.255.0

as long as your internal network’s IP addresses are all within one of those blocks of address space, you will not need to introduce the complexity of routing within your LAN. An example scheme for those who are not familiar is shown below:
PIX – 192.168.0.1 netmask 255.255.255.0
File/DHCP server – 192.168.0.2 netmask 255.255.255.0
Workstations – 192.168.0.10 – 192.168.0.254 netmask (each) 255.255.255.0
* I intentionally skipped over the 192.168.0.3-9 addresses to plan for future expansion and the possible need for additional servers, you don’t have to do this.
* Configure your DHCP server to hand out addresses in the specified block using your ISP-provided DNS servers for name resolution. Make sure to change this should you ever decide to install a name server within your own network.
* If you don’t want to set up a DHCP server, just configure each PC with the IP address, default gateway, netmask & DNS servers

It is very important now to add a default route to the PIX configuration. Another term for default route is the “default gateway.” You need to tell the PIX that if it receives traffic destined for a network that isn’t directly connected, it should send it to the connected ISP router. Your ISP should have given you the IP address of your default gateway when you received your setup information.

Here is the syntax:
Route
The English translation is “if packets destined for interface on the network specified by network address are bounded by mask then route it via a next hop at the optional command is used to give an indication of distance.

For example
pixfirewall(config)# Route outside 0 0 <12.25.241.1> 1
(if packets are destined outside the network to any ip address with any netmask, send them through the ISPs default gateway, which is one hop away, meaning it is the device to which the PIX is connected on the outside interface).

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