VS Informatique
As an information technology engineer, my work among the staff of VS Informatique was to assess and address the needs of our business customers and provide them counsel, support and solutions. My knowledges in systems (both Unix/Linux and MS Windows) and networks (both from an architectural and security point of view) also allowed me to develop tools and procedures for our own internal use, and train our staff accordingly.
Evolving in the economic environment of the Valais part of Switzerland - one still relying mainly on agriculture, construction and tourism as its main sources of income - proved to be quite a challenge, the level of professionalism and budgets involved in information systems and technologies not being as high as what is commonly considered the standard in more economically active parts of Switzerland. We thus had to propose solutions that would both stand up to today's level of expertise and meet our customers objectives (both from a cost and an operational point of view).
A set of VSI.Solutions have thus been developed, answering the concerns and needs of our customers in the most appropriate way.
VSI.Monitoring
With the common strategy for many companies to outsource all information systems tasks and knowledge, it has de facto proven difficult to achieve a trulyhigh level of service (i.e. systems and data availability), the latency between the occurence of a problem and its solving being necessarly higher than if knowledgeable people were kept on site (this being said without mentionning the SLAs binding one company with the other).
A way to solve this dilemma is to be as proactive as possible and anticipate situations before they actually become a problem. This involves the ability to closely monitor all strategic systems, whether software or hardware, and be informed of arising situations as soon as they occure.
VSI.Monitoring aims towards achieving this proactive monitoring goal, while keeping cost in the range of the budget of our customers. Relying on proven Open Source software, VSI.Monitoring allows to monitor software and hardware systems in real time, maintenance and service people being automatically alerted (through e-mails and mobile telephone messaging services) of arising situations, through their different levels of seriousness.
VSI.Monitoring allows to monitor any system that produces proper exit codes or activity logs. One challenge was to have an MS Windows monitoring agent that would solve the lack of a genuine (Unix-like) scripting language on the MS Windows platform. Among many other key systems, VSI.Monitoring is able to monitor: public network-based services (such as a web or messaging server), anti-virus protection status, backup operations, system resources (disk and memory space, running processes, software versions, etc.), ...
Related technologies : Linux (Fedora Core) monitoring server, Nagios monitoring software, shell and command-line scripting.
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The Nagios monitoring interface
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VSI.Support
Offering first and second-level support being a corner stone of our company, it was more than highly desirable to have a tool that would allow us to take control of our customer's computer remotely, and troubleshoot his problem in the most efficient way, meaning having the user show you what the problem is and having him see how to solve it.
The main challenge was to have a tool that would work regardless of the customer network configuration, especially concerning firewall settings. Open Source software and appropriate bundling (and branding) allowed us to circumvent this problem.
VSI.Support is thus a genuine online support tool, allowing quick and efficient remote troubleshooting of users-encountered problems.
Related technologies : UltraVNC remote access software, Visual Basic scripting.
VSI.VPN
Not a day comes whithout a customer enquiring about remote access to its information systems resources, when working at home or while roaming outside of its company premises. While many solutions exist - from telephone-based dial-up to PKI-based VPNs - it is becoming more and more difficult to set up a remote access system that meets both today's bandwidth needs (thus exluding legacy dial-up technologies) and security considerations (thus excluding untunneled Terminal Services, poorly-secured tunnel protocols such as PPTP, etc.).
VSI.VPN aims towards offering state-of-the-art port forwarding or tunneling solutions, while again keeping their cost in the range of the budget of our customers.
Open Source products today allow to meet this goal, achieving a very high level of security and being both easy to set up and very reliable. PKI-based (Public Key Infrastructure) solutions - whether relying on a chain of trust, i.e. certificating authorities, or not - are readily accessible and easy to set up.
On the other hand, common and well-proven hardware suppliers now include VPN solutions in their entry-level products, making it affordable even for small to medium-sized companies. Besides, DSL-based modem and point-to-point wireless technologies today allow to look forward to setting up genuine circuit-based private networks, with cost cut by orders of magnitude compared to what it used to be.
Related technologies : OpenSSL (PKI), OpenSSH (port forwarding) and OpenVPN (tunneling) Open Source solutions, shell scripting; ZyXEL and Linksys products, IPSec networking.
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A VPN-client interface
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VSI.Network
Small companies or individuals often lack the understanding of what resources networking nowadays make possible, from data centralization and resources sharing to mobility.
Some others, while appropriately taking advantage of existing technologies, forget to assess all the implications of their setup, especially when it comes to network security.
From appropriate ADSL configuration to properly secured wireless networks (WiFi), VSI.Network is a set of whitepapers and procedures to help our technicians and customers to know: what are the existing technologies; how to efficiently take advantage of these technologies; and how to set up each technology appropriately... and securely!
Related technologies : Ethernet-based networking, WiFi-based networking and security, xDSL-based connexions, NAT and firewalling (including IPTables), network protocols (HTTP, SMTP, POP3, IMAP, MIME, etc.), Linux and MS Windows-based network services (Apache/MS IIS, Exim/QMail/sendmail/MS Exchange, DNS/DHCP), anti-virus solutions (ClamAV, NOD32 and Panda Software), content filtering (including Maildrop, SpamAssassin and TMDA) .
VSI.Backup
Small to medium companies rely more and more on computers to handle their daily work and flow of data, while not always understanding the dangers involved. It has thus been an highly important task - and a genuine endeavour on our part - to inform our customers of the different threats endangering their data, and the health and perennity of their company.
In order to minimize the cost of setting up genuine backup and restore systems, we developed standardized solutions, based on low-price while well-proven hardware, and involving efficient while simple to follow backup schemes.
VSI.Backup is thus both a short overview material on what data protection and recovery actually means, according to the different existing threats, and standardized proven systems and procedures to achieve this goal.
Related technologies : Veritas Backup Exec and NT Backup backup solutions, command-line scripting; Hewlett-Packard and iOmega products.
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VSI.Backup whitepaper
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VSI.Rescue
Disaster prevention and recovery has always been a nightmare for technicians and administrators. With information systems being more and more involded in daily business, while never achieving a genuine level of reliability - especially when cost comes into the picture - it is absolutely necessary to have tools and procedures that allow to minimize downtime in the case of a system failure.
Be it through recovering an image of the entire system (operating system, services and data) or migrating data to a new (or standing-by) system, the task of recovery is always a cumbersome one, especially when the failing system is seriously crumbled.
Genuine prevention depending on backup schemes or systems distribution, VSI.Rescue aims towards dommage assessment and recovery, providing technicians and administrators with a set of tools and procedures to asses the status of a failing system and proceed with system and/or data recovery in the most efficient way possible.
Related technologies : Symantec Ghost imaging solutions, command-line scripting, DOS-based networking.
VSI.OEM
Assembling a personal computer (both a from an hardware and software point of view) and making it ready to be delivered to the end-user is a time consuming task, especially when proper preparation - according to today's needs and market expectations - requires installing many add-ons along with the operating system. This task becomes even more consuming when one has to keep track of the upgrades and updates of the involved components.
VSI.OEM thus aims towards reducing the installation process time as much as possible, as well as reducing the administrative burden of following upgrades and updates. Taking advantage of Microsoft Windows Pre-installation Environment (WinPE) and systematic packaging of required add-ons, VSI.OEM allows to reduce the actual installation (or maintenance) work of a personal computer from 1-2 hours to 10-20 minutes, while in the same time achieving genuine standardization of procedures and components, and including the required branding of the handled equipment.
Related technologies : Microsoft Windows Pre-installation Environment, INF installation file, command-line scripting.