Welcome to SMBIT

Hello! I'm Eric Louie, and an independent IT consultant in San Diego, California. My customer base is local small businesses in San Diego County. I provide them their IT support, mostly on a Time and Materials or Break/Fix basis, and I'm slowly transforming my business into a Continuous Care model of support. I'm a sole proprietor, though I started in this independent business 6 years ago with a terrific and gifted business partner who left for Oregon 2 years ago to raise his family in a better environment.

I'm active in the small business technical community here, and I get a lot of my technical information from different newsgroups, mailing lists, blogs, online discussion groups, and local user groups. In the work that we do, it has become apparent to me that we need to share our solutions when we've found them, and the more places to search and possibly find the solution, the better.

I participate and really try to give 100% in my participation to everything. My disclaimer - I am not an expert at anything. I'm not even a specialist in anything (yet). I am not a Microsoft evangelist. I do my best to keep an open mind to all possible solutions to my customers' business problems.

What I will do is share my views on how to get things done in the small and medium business IT environment, where we have budgetary issues, training deficiencies, knowledge limitations, resource problems, and customers' lack of understanding the importance of maintenance of Information Technology.

The posts here will initially be divided into the following categories:

• Marketing (efforts to make our businesses known to possible customers)
• SBS2003 (discussions specific to the nuances of Small Business Server 2003)
• Win2003 (Windows Server 2003 - general Active Directory, DNS, DHCP, File and Print Sharing, IIS)
• WinXP (Windows XP Home, Professional, and Media Center Editions)
• WinVista (Windows Vista operating system)
• Cisco (networking with Cisco routers and switches)
• Consulting (for the business people in the crowd)
• Linux (Warning - My Linux knowledge is limited - this will be me sharing my learning experiences with Linux)
• Desktop (workstation hardware and software solutions and issues)
• Server (server hardware and software solutions and issues)
• Philosophy (ramblings on what I found works and doesnt work)
• MSPtech (Managed Services Provider technology - includes products, services, monitoring and management)
• MSPbiz (Managed Services Provider business - includes customer and vendor negotiations)
• Alliances (how to create alliances and associations with other technology partners)
• Microsoft (General Microsoft news, product announcements, public betas)
• Layer123 (Layer 1 cabling issues, Layer 2 Basic and advanced Ethernet switching and bridging, & Layer 3 routing, port forwarding, TCP/IP, Network Address Translation)
• NetSec (Network security, firewalling, anti-virus, intrusion detection, malware)
• SMB (issues that are specific to the small and medium business environment)
• MSPartner (my experiences in the Microsoft Partner community)
• UserGroup (anything that I get that can be pointed back to the communities that I'm aligned with)
  
  A few self-imposed ground rules for my blog:
• I have a real distaste for abbreviations (I call it acronymophobia). I'll spell out alot in English - it may take me longer, but I type pretty well.
• Jargon - I try to stay away from it, except when it is commonly accepted slang in the technical community. I'd ask the same from any commenters.
• Complete information - I'll do my best to provide a complete solution here, with this caveat - if there is something that I believe is basic knowledge to operations, I might not spell out all of those steps.
• I won't post anything here that I wouldn't want my customers to see. I have somewhere else that I vent. I am a professional, and will conduct myself to that standard.
• I won't post rumors or partial factual information. I'm not a fan of hysteria or FUD (fear, uncertainty, and doubt). Therefore, I'll carefully research anything I post. As a result, you might not see "the latest and greatest" here, but you will find solid solutions that I've proven to work for my customers or myself.
• I'll try to be as impartial as possible because that's also part of my job with my customers - vendor neutrality and technology neutrality are important to me. However, when a specific technology works in a specific business need, I'll advocate it.
  
  My goal is to have a good resource that you can refer to for specific problems and solutions. If you know of another source of information, I'll be very happy to link to it.