Welcome to News from trif.com! First time readers, I am glad you're here! Returning readers, welcome back!

Greetings and welcome to our Newsletter! We wanted to share the many photos we have taken of places, people and things throughout the country and beyond. Each month our headline photo will be something new and different. The caption will present a small explanation. We hope you enjoy. Keep in mind, we don't want to waste your time. Articles will contain generally less than 250 words. Please have a look and give us your feedback. By all means, forward to a friend using the link at the bottom of the Newsletter. Thanks. Questions? Send me an email!

Get connected for $200 with a Chromebook

I have been looking for an inexpensive way for people not otherwise connected to email and the Internet to get connected. A Chromebook is about as easy as it gets. For the elderly or the extreme novice, setting up a Chromebook is fast and easy. If someone you know does not yet have email, a Chromebook and a gmail account is a great way to get them connected.

The Chromebook pictured was bought on line for $200. It is a reconditioned HP-14, but you can get an Acer 720 brand new for $199.

A Chromebook is based on the Chrome operating system from Google. It is basically a computer that allows you to do everything Google including Chrome browser, gmail, Google Calendar, Google Maps, Google Drive, Google Docs, Google Sheet, Google Slides and Google Play. But you can also install Kindle, Dropbox, Games and even Remote Desktop. There are hundreds of other applications available, but isn't that enough for a light weight connection to the Internet. My initial review is very positive. It has a long lasting battery, boots up super fast, quick browser access to the Internet and a wide choice of applications. It is evident that computing is moving to the cloud.

The Goodest Country

In a recent TED talk I watched, I was intrigued by a talk by Simon Anholt (Simon Anholt is an independent policy advisor who helps national, regional and city governments develop and implement strategies for enhanced economic, political and cultural engagement with other countries.)

Which country does the most good for the world. With the word becoming more and more globalized, each country is transitioning from an inward, self-centered and self-absorbed member of a global community of countries. Mr. Anholt devised a scale to evaluate every country as a member of this global community rated by the amount of good it does not for itself, but for the rest of the world - that is, for the greater good. He evaluated culture, science and technology, peace and security, climate and care for the planet, prosperity, equality, health and wellbeing. You will be surprised by the results. The United States was not even in the top 10 but rather 21st in a list of 125 nations around the world. The United States is barely in the top 10 for health and wellbeing and not even close to the top in any other area.

The point? According to Mr. Anholt, "Because the biggest challenges facing humanity today are global and borderless: climate change, economic crisis, terrorism, drug trafficking, slavery, pandemics, poverty and inequality, population growth, food and water shortages, energy, species loss, human rights, migration ... the list goes on. All of these problems stretch across national borders, so the only way they can be properly tackled is through international efforts. The trouble is, most countries carry on behaving as if they were islands, focusing on developing domestic solutions to domestic problems. We’ll never get anywhere unless we start to change this habit. "

Web Site Hosting, What is Involved?

Recently, a client chose to move their domain, website and email from our hosting service to another hosting service. At TRI, we manage DNS, Web Hosting, Email Hosting and everything in between. Unfortunately, my client chose to handle this on their own and it turned out to be quite an involved project spanning days and unfortunately was not as smooth as it could or should have been.

Most people do not realize all the details that are involved in Domain and DNS management. I thought I would give a short primer and list some of the items requiring configuration.

A Domain name is a unique name and associated to an Internet resource, like http://www.trif.com is our web domain (our URL or Uniform Resource Locator). You can get information on your domain from our resource page. Select DNS Stuff and run a DNS Report for your domain name. It takes a while to compile, but when complete, you will see all the components and any issues or problems. These items need to be considered when moving things around. Here are some of the pieces of the puzzle that you should be familiar with if you are transferring a domain, web site or email:

• Registrar; this is the organization that controls your domain. We use Network Solutions. Go Daddy is another popular option.
• IP Address; this is the number assigned to your domain and possibly it's web site or email server address. Every domain and every computer connected and open to the Internet has a distinct IP address. These are referred to as public IP's. There are also internal or private IP ranges that apply within your office or home network. The IP is made up of four sets of numbers divided by a dot, like 50.87.5.173 or 199.167.147.80.
• Ports; along with an IP address there are also ports that can be opened, closed translated or secured. A port is used for communication. Port 80 is the port used for web servers to host a web site. There are special ports used for sending email, accessing a SQL Server and FTP.
• NS Servers; These are name servers that manage the translation of your domain name to an IP address
• Domain Record; the world wide web uses names and translates them to IP numbers. The IP number of the Domain Record corresponds to the Web Server hosting your web site.
• MX Record, Mail and SMTP; is the mail exchange record and again points to domain names and IP Addresses

All of these items need to be configured or reconfigured when moving a domain or a portion of a domain.

When moving a domain, web or email, all data from web server or email server needs to be backed up from the old location and copied to the new location.

Tools that can help:

• PING; is a utility that will convert a domain name to an IP address and search for that IP on the Internet and is used from a command prompt on your computer, as in ping www.trif.com will return 50.97.5.173
• Tracert; is a utility that will trace the route (called hops) used to connect one IP to another across the Internet and how fast the response times are from hop to hop. It is also issued from a command prompt. It is often used to determine where a bottleneck might be when accessing an Internet resource. Type tracert www.google.com and you will see a list of names or ip addresses of switches accessed across the Internet to get from where you are to google.com and how long each hop took in milliseconds. It might take as many as 15 or 20 hops each hop taking 10 to 75 milliseconds.

If you are interested in moving from one hosting service to another, we can help make it a smooth transition. Just ask.