So we visited the customer and started investigating.  They have a few USB harddrives that have been plugged into the back of the Terastation to back it up over night.  Attempting to read the contents of these USB drives on a Windows or Mac based machine failed.  Neither OSs could read the filesystem on them and we decided to take them away and plug them into another terastation if necessary.  Though we didn’t try it I suspect that a Linux based machine would have been able to read their filesystems.

Reseating the disks and checking all the connections inside the Terastation’s chassis didn’t make any difference.  The Terastation would go through the boot process and then fail after about a minute with the same ‘No array info’ error.  The disks were all working so I decided to reload the firmware.

I downloaded the firmware from Buffalo’s site and set about loading it onto the Terastation.   After the upload was finished the unit restarted with its factory IP and authentication settings.  I logged into it to find that the original network shares and all the data were still there and accessible.  All the security and authentication settings had been lost though.

As this customer has out grown this kind of NAS unit we have replaced it with an HP Proliant.

One client in particular is launching a campaign through PRNewswire. Uticopa is a mental health forum and therapist directory that has a stated aim of ‘reducing the stigma attached to asking for help’. With the current economic turmoil it has never been more important to provide a secure site where people can discuss their issues in a non-judgemental environment, and find a local therapist who can help them. As people are not necessarily searching for a social media site like Uticopa at all, we need to cover all the bases, both on- and off-line to let people know they exist.

One familiar face that we spoke to was Robin Hamman, head of the social media team at Headshift.  Robin has ten years’ experience of working in social media, including six as a senior producer at the BBC, responsible for the corporation’s blog content. Robin was looking rather tired after a busy day which included a discussion with John Humphreys on Radio 4’s Today programme about whether blogging is dead. We last saw him giving a talk on blogging at an event in September. You can read Robin Hamman’s own blog here.

The main purpose of the even was to listen to presentations from Alex Smith and Jodie Ginsberg from Reuters. They advised us on how the Reuters system works and the best practices for submitting news to the agency. Once again we learned a lot and will be using this information in future promotional work for all of our clients.

Amongst the guest speakers were Mark Simpson (Managing Director of Maxymiser), Ewald Hoppen (web analyst at Wehkamp.nl) and Eric T. Peterson (CEO of WebAnalyticsDemystified and founder of Web Analytics Wednesdays). They gave all gave useful tips on maximising the value of web analytics results. Each of them showed how some very subtle changes to the layout and text of a web page can lead to a dramatic increase in the number of conversions from web visitor to product buyer. It’s all about testing new ideas and using your web traffic analysis to see for sure which changes make the biggest difference - and lead to the biggest profit.

We are keen to keep learning all the latest developments in SEO and web development, and we learned a lot of new tricks at this event, which we have already started to implement into our web traffic analysis and web site development strategies. The changes we are making should lead to a boost in our SEO customers’ returns on their investment.

If you are interested in promoting your business online with our ongoing SEO and web marketing services, contact i-Zimbra today to find out how we can help your website to get noticed - for all the right reasons.

Clients can come and see us in our new surroundings at 73 Church Road, Hove. Parking is easy, and we are 10 minutes walk from Hove and 20 minutes from Brighton railway stations.

Of course you don’t have to visit us to work with us, as our clients in Europe, the USA, and other parts of the world will tell you.

If you want to take advantage of the Christmas shopping rush, the advice is to start now. If you sell anything online - particularly toys, games, or other traditional Christmas presents - you really should be checking all systems are in place to deliver a bumper year.

Search marketing results can take a while to kick in, so deciding to market your web site in mid-November is unlikely to be as effective as a site that is promoted all year round to get it right. The 10 weeks before Christmas are a time for minor tweaks to your site and major sales.

For many companies problems that have been lingering or are not classed as ‘urgent’ suddenly become more important when the cost implications of their inaction becomes evident.

We have seen a number of projects where highly complicated networks that were ’state-of-the-art’ a few years ago are now unwieldy, difficult to run and often do not fit the size of organisation that they are deployed in. This is especially true where companies are very conscious of their bottom line.

Typical instances of this are:

• overly-complicated perimeter security hosted on older server equipment
• redundancy in equipment that is difficult to use when it’s needed
• unclear boundaries on the support and maintenance of resources causing duplicity of effort.

Therefore it becomes increasingly important for an organisation to recognise where new equipment or services will help reduce ongoing costs, reduce reliance on older technology that may be at the end of its service life. And of course it is also important to reduce costs and complexity in your processes.

The good news is: i-Zimbra can help.

We are currently dealing with network restructuring projects, migration from traditional client-server environments to web-based applications, security consolidation, and the streamlining of support processes.

As you would expect, we use class-leading products and a strong and proven skillset from our many years of IT experience.

How times have changed … as Google has started placing the top 3 paid results at the top of the natural search area, then started bringing in more and more local results, I started to crumble. And as I started to crumble I realised that creating great paid Ad Texts is just as difficult as working with organic search engine marketing. And imagine how powerful it is to be top of the top of the paid search engine listings AND top of the organic listings!

We have a client who we started off with Google AdWords while we waited for the natural search work on the new site to work. SInce then the links we put into their trade journal, their own site, and the wikipedia entry for their industry are full of refences to their site: and their AdWords entry is top. The result? They dominate
page 1 of Google.

Now we also provide AdWords to our clients - allowing everyone to dominate page one.