Change, challenges and technology

One of the things I like about technology is the change, the growth, the challenge of working on new things, inventing new ways of doing things and solving new problems.

As companies grow in today's world, why do so many of those who could be at the forefront of change and coming up with ways to apply these new inventions (yes I call the evolutionary growth and leaps in technology, invention; but I also call invention that creativity of the people who give us practical application of new things, and inventors, those people who look at new technology and see the ways to make it useful to our daily education, business and lives) practically fear that change, fear that success?

The sadder part of this is that the companies that could benefit from this creative thought, scare it away or push it away into a pool of process entrenched in buzzwords like ITIL or QMS or ISO. Are these things bad in of themselves? No, they aren't. In fact all of them are good, they help build frameworks around the good things companies do in business; making them repeatable, sustainable and hopefully generating efficiencies that will help weed out the bad things we do and replace them with the good.

So, what is the bad? What is the complaint about these things. The complaint is that very few companies understand that these frameworks need to be flexible enough to encourage the change and innovation with the courage that takes them to their next level, or give them their next product or service to sell. But, instead of embracing the flexibility that helps us grow, companies embrace the structure, they think the framework is the solution and forget that the innovation and change brought on by the innovation of people are what make them successful.

In the struggle to embrace the framework, the people who generate and embrace change and new ideas are forced by their respective corporate policies to shut up and embrace or be punished. Punishments range from lectures, firings, demotions, promotion passovers, being passed over for pay raises etc...

What happens to the innovators when these punishments are passed on? Some pull up their own courage and move on. Some pull up their own courage and continue to force for change. And then some adapt, and become the automotons the corporation thinks they want.

Sometimes months, sometimes years later companies realize what has happened. They realize it when other companies stop buying their goods, services or both. Some companies plug the bleeding holes with soluble solutions such as new process fads or new CEO's or new layoffs. However, making shareholders feel good doesn't really contribute to the overall health of a company. Throwing away the things that made shareholders want to own pieces of something great, something growing and alive doesn't really fix things.

Is all bad, no... some is good... because some companies get off the treadmill before it's too late. They embrace change and learn to live in it. Growing pains show them new ways to grow, new ways to change, new ways to lead. These companies are on the cusp of innovation, but more than that, their people lead us into the future.

While corporate community is a macrocosm of motion, so are we all individuals microcosms of it. We have the ability to lead that change, to break the mold, to break out of our fear zones and courageously use the innovation in front of us. We need to embrace ideas, imagination and change. We need to be willing to make mistakes and successes. Start small and work big.

People around you will catch the excitement of that change. The excitement of fresh ideas is contagious. Maybe it'll rub off on your management, their management and your companies board of directors. Start something exciting, start something new and you may find that innovation and new ideas addictive.

Wacky World of Warcraft News

Seems a group of WoW geeks over at Novell, had a bit of a problem with a server that was hosting their guild site. It seems to have been used as a bounce point for port scanning lots of Internet hosts. You can check it out at ComputerWorld - Novell Server Hacked

Assuming it was Suse linux; This brings up an interesting point for how Novell handles this newer acquisition and integration with their platforms. Don't you think this was a good product test for how SUSE performs OOB?

Maybe Novell should be using this as a jumping point into locking down security in this Open Source offering even more.

They could also use this as an opportunity to bring some of these employees more into making this stuff somewhat secure on first install, cuz out of the box didn't work.

It doesn't hurt to perform end user/customer testing. This would be a great market study for Novell also, allowing questions like "When my customers get this product, what do they have when they are done setting it up?" So, being a World of Warcraft player and Novell fan myself, I hope they make an opportunity out of this and not smush employees for enjoying some downtime!

Fun Stuff - A lesson in economics or law?

My son was able to learn about a fun little law that Michigan implemented a long time ago to fight negligence on the side of retail businesses. The Michigan Bar Code law was put into place to keep businesses from advertising one set of prices and charging another at the register. The problem was so bad that the legislature stepped in and created that cool little law stating if a consumer found the problem and came back into the store with it, they got their refund plus 10 times the amount mischarged up to a certain dollar amount.

He was overcharged by 40 cents for a little notebook and was very happy to walk out with an extra $4.00.

WRV54G VPN Router tips

Update 9.29.05 - We now have this WRV54G VPN router up and running. The current firmware version (2.37 12.02.2004) allows you to set up a tunnel and connect via VPN client without disturbing either one. People were also complaining, saying they couldn't get it to work with the RV042 VPN Router. We tested this one with the WRV54G router and were able to get it working also. So, Linksys, Cisco... whoever have done a lot of work to make these compatible with each other. Based on our current experience, I would give this router an "Exceeds Expectations" for the small-business customer.

Tech Notes for the day:

Wow, having problems setting up a Linksys WRV54G with a tunnel. Unfortunately found the thread too late in the day to continue with setup tonight. From a pretty cool robustness stage, one of the routers had the web server lock up, but was still allowing VPN access to the network and then connectivity to the servers. Guess tomorrow or Friday will be the days when we try the following tips:

TIP 1: For Linksys QuickVPN usage:

or Linksys Quickvpn Client to WRV54G Connection, do the following:

1) Disable PPTP, L2TP, and IPSEC Passthru
2 Disable VPN Gateway, VPN Tunnels, Key Management, Encryption, Authentication, and PFS Shared Key
3) Until you're able to connect with quickvpn, disable ports 1723, 500, 443, and 4500; these settings "might" disrupt communication between the client and the WRV54g

Quickvpn will make its own secure tunnel with the WRV54g "without" all the following things I just mentioned that you need to disable. The above configuration is what you would do "if" you're WRV54G is acting as an "endpoint" and people are using quickvpn to connect "to" your router. As the VPN termination point, "you" do not need to enable the services in items #1 and #2; if "you" were a quickvpn user who needed to connect "to" a WRV54G vpn router, then "you" would enable pptp, L2tp, and IPSEC Pass-thru on "your" router.
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Now, if you want to connect your vpn router to another vpn router, then you would have to open up a tunnel between your router and the other vpn router and slowly start opening "ports" (i.e. 1723 etc...) one by one as a means of process of elimination:

Tunnel: Enabled
Gateway: Disabled

Tunnel Name: Linksys

Local Sec. Grp (Your Lan): 192.168.1.10
255.255.255.0

Remote Sec. Grp (Other Lan) 192.168.2.10
255.255.255.0

Remote Sec. Gtwy (Other Lan's Wan IP) 24.255.34.154

Encryption: 3DES (Suggested)
Authentication: Sha1 (Suggested)

Key Management: Auto(IKE)

PFS: Enabled

Pre-Shared Key: (Enter a password)

Key Lifetime: 3600 (Suggested)

Make sure your settings in the Advanced VPN Configuration Tunnel are similar...


TIP 2: Really an extension of TIP 1:

Internet connection type: Automatic Configuration - DHCP
MTU: Manual
MTU Size: 1500 (1500 is the Max)

Setting my MTU to manual and to 1500 stabilized "ALOT" of the problems I was having. Doing this cut down on 98% of the rebooting. You don't have to have the router itself set to a static ip; just make sure your clients are connecting via static ip if they are behind a router on another land or with a WAN ip if connected directly to a cable modem (dhcp might also work). FYI, I got a dynamic ip address "FOR FREE" from www.webreactor.net. I was up and running my ftp server in under 30 mins. I tried setting my wrv54g up with a static setting, but it had a tendency to lose it's WAN connectivity every couple of days in that configuration. So, I leave it set for DHCP (in case the ip happens to change) and I have no problems in that respect anymore.

Make sure the DHCP server feature is enabled so your vpn clients can pull an IP address once they connect. Additionally, make sure all vpn clients connection to your router have a static ip address. Let's try it from this angle and see what happens...

As stated before, the quickvpn client will create its own tunnel with the wrv54g, so don't bother with the directions linksys put out; that appears to be for people using 2000 server.

For those of you who've just joined onto this thread, my WRV54G is running "while utilizing the linksys quickvpn client" with all the settings mentioned in my posts. Prior to getting Linksys to send me beta firmware 2.36.5, I was able to connect via vpn with firmware 2.36.