Each company has its own it needs that evolve over time.  For this reason, the future of network technical support lies mostly in using external IT consultants that work largely with remote assistant technologies.

Many businesses have realised that they do not require an internal IT staff as they will outsource for service when it is required. These businesses are thus able to get the help of IT professionals that would have been out of their financial league.

Secondly, with remote network technical support, businesses can save dough as they will only have to pay for services they need. Such businesses do not have to employ IT professionals on a full-time basis because it will be too expensive to pay full time wages to an entire department. With remote IT support, these businesses only emply IT services when required rather than having a regular staff. The IT professional can also charge a lot less for remote management as it cuts down on travelling time and can monitor your system to know of a problem before you do.

Thirdly, IT skills are evolving as new technology is being developed. Therefore, IT professionals must keep upgrading their skills to keep up with the times. This can be a budget pitfall for companies as they essentially have to constantly train their in-house staff to do their jobs! Successful businesses have found it useful to use external IT professionals that keep up to date with technology in their own time, rather than at the dime of their employers.  

Fourthly, IT is moving towards web-based applications that will not require too much maintenance. Thus, an in house department will become obsolete. People will be interested in remote support that will help them to deal with their rarer IT issues and to prevent such issues from occurring through automated monitoring.

In conclusion, it is apparent that the future of IT support is changing through the rise of web-application and automated monitoring as companies are focussing on the their business rather than worrying about their IT issues.

While remote assistance technologies can help your business increase productivity, some problems require onsite assistance. Onsite assistance is when an IT professional comes to your business and physically troubleshoots whatever issues you are having with your technology.

Some of these problems are:

1.     If you don’t employ staff to address IT problems in the office. Getting a professional onsite can help you get your business up and running and ultimately save you money. It is not wise to try and repair an issue that you do not understand as you may worsen the problem.

2.     When you need immediate same day service for a critical problem.  Imagine you are running an eftpos machine and it stops working. Not only can this problem probably not be fixed remotely, you also need this machine up and running pronto.
 
3.     Problems may remain unresolved if maintenance is done offsite. In this case, onsite support will be needed to fix the problem. Physical access to your computer system is the best access an IT professional can have and even in this day and age of advanced networking, physical access might still be required.

4.     If your network is down and you have no internet access then your IT consultant will not be able to access your computer remotely via the internet. In this case, an onsite visit will be required to ascertain the problem.

Onsite IT support is convenient because the IT professional comes straight to your door and deals with your system directly.  Thus, you should not hesitate to call for onsite support in a situation similar to those listed above.

The IT industry is evolving with the rapid changes in technology these days. With this evolution come transformations to careers in IT. IT professionals need to move with these changes or they will fall behind.

Let’s have a look at some key roles for IT professionals in the future.

1: IT Consultants

Aside from large corporations that can afford to have IT professionals on staff, most businesses will outsource IT work to external consultants. These companies will thus get IT services on an as needed basis. This helps cut down costs as the company only has to pay IT staff when they need them. Companies can thus afford to pay for experts who they could not afford to be on a regular payroll. The company still received 24/7 support from their IT consultants.

2. Project Managers

In the future, a large number of permanent IT staff will work in the role of project manager. . These individuals spread out throughout different departments and provide guidance on projects. Their main role is to work as business advisers to help managers make the right technological decisions. Part of their job will be to keep on the lookout for new technologies that can help the business. These people also act as a liaison between the company, technology suppliers and external IT consultants.

3. IT Developers

The largest number of IT professionals will be employed as software developers.  . Although IT support used to focus on deploying and maintaining hardware and software, the future of IT is in web-based applications that that are largely user-friendly and maintained by the client. The role of the IT professional is thus largely moving away from computer repairs and deployment to the creation of web-based applications and utilities. More and more companies are demanding the services of largely web-based application development. 

We assumed that a job to add two Apple Macs to an existing PC network would be easy. It turns out we were wrong. This turned out to be one of our most challenging computer jobs to date. To save others experiencing the same pain I thought I would share some of our experiences. 

I will start with some background. Prior to adding the Macs we had a stable network of three PCs. We had set these machines up over two years ago. Since setup the network had never had any significant issues. A good router was installed and the server computer was properly specced for the task. The PCs were running Windows 7 and the Mac’s were running Max OSX 10.6.8 Lion. 

The addition of the Macs to the network did have any immediately noticeable effect on the PCs. However when the Macs attempted to use to the PCs file sharing we could see file access was slow, and rewrite operations often failed. After about two days the client showed us a message stating: 
“There was an error connecting to the server "Server". Check the server name or IP address, and then try again. If you are unable to resolve the problem contact your system administrator”.

We immediately ruled out the possibility of infrastructure problems because Internet remained up during all of these problems. Further the Internet proved to be fast. On investigating we saw that the drive had been formatted to NTFS despite the fact that we request it to be formatted in FAT. We backed up the clients data and then reformatted the drive. This fixed problem of intermittent read write errors but introduced a new set of problems.

The Macs would regularly get bumped off the PCs, and when viewing files they would often show for a second, then disappear, and then reappear almost two minutes later. To cap it all off the problems were intermittent. At this point we decided to further investigate the server.  An inspection of the event viewer revealed a “The server was unable to allocate from the system nonpaged pool because the server reached the configured limit for nonpaged pool allocations.” Error 2017”.

Fortunately we found Alan LaMielle’s fix. This pointed us to the fact that SMB problems were regular and caused by a restriction Microsoft placed in Windows  7 to encourage people to buy a server operating system. Two registry changes recommended by Alan and we thought we had the problem fixed.

First, set HKLM\SYSTEM\CurrentControlSet\Control\Session Manager\Memory Management\LargeSystemCache to ‘1’.

Second, set HKLM\SYSTEM\CurrentControlSet\Services\LanmanServer\Parameters\Size to ’3′.

Unfortunately the network was really slow and the intermittent disconnections persisted.  We returned to looking at the Macs.  Research revealed they we needed to adjust the network configuration of the Macs. We typed into terminal

sudo sysctl -w net.inet.tcp.delayed_ack=0

This is supposed to change the way the packets are sent around the network. There are four settings (from http://www.small-tree.com/kb_results.asp?id=1):

delayed_ack=0 responds after every packet (OFF)
delayed_ack=1 always employs delayed ack, 6 packets can get 1 ack
delayed_ack=2 immediate ack after 2nd packet, 2 packets per ack  (Compatibility Mode)
delayed_ack=3 should auto detect when to employ delayed ack, 4 packets per ack.  (DEFAULT)

We executed this command and restarted the Macs. The connection sped up but the unreliability remained. Further research advised that we should enable Internet Connection Sharing. We did this and there was no change at all. Further researches recommended disabling IPv6. This improved the stability of the connection but the network connections still dropped every three days. When they dropped out the only solution was to restart the server.

We decided to reinvestigate the server. Further research revealed we needed to disable SMB2 in the server. To do this we changed the registry.

HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SYSTEM\CurrentControlSet\Services\LanmanServer\Parameters\SMB2\ was set to a dword value of 00000000.

Network performance was still considered slow but the network was now reliable. To speed up the network we have now configured the server service on the Windows 7 server to restart at the start of every day. Not an optimum solution but it works well. We notice that approximately every 24 hours there is an error 2019 recorded in the event viewer. This error is caused by a memory leak. I am not sure why all these changes would cause a memory leak but it all seems to be working well now so we are leaving what works alone. When the system has proved to be completely stable I will probably take Robert Pearman's advice and use Polmon to see what is causing the memory leak.

Sometimes computer repairs are only solved by a mixture of persistence and pragmatism as was the case in this example.