Then came Tineye.com. They developed a search function that could identify parts of your image, the “likeness” if you will, and then compare it to other images on the Internet. By their own description “TinEye creates a unique and compact digital signature or ‘fingerprint’ for it, then compares this fingerprint to every other image in our index to retrieve matches. TinEye can even find a partial fingerprint match. Our fingerprinting technologies have been developed by Idée Inc..”

It worked fairly well the few times I tried it. I found when looking for commercial images I always got the result I wanted. If I was trying to match a photo of a person or something more obscure I generally got nothing.

Then Google launched their reverse image lookup and soon integrated it into the standard image search and it worked REALLY well. Possibly because Google has permissions into more places and more powerful servers to cache and search existing images. You might have noticed when you search for images on Google there is a little blue camera icon now in the search bar, that is where you can upload your photo for the reverse search. http://images.google.com/ 

I think both of these services are limited by what they can peer into on the web. For instance, if you were sent a photo from someone’s Facebook page, but their profile or photos were set to private, I don’t think Google Images or Tineye.com can peer into those private accounts and match your photo to the one available in the Facebook profile.

One of the best things I’ve found about Google Images is that if you want to know where a photo originated you can do a search, then sort the results by date and find the oldest search result to get an idea of where it was first used and thus possibly find its origination.

Another great use is when you have a low res version of a photo and want something bigger you can search using the low res image and then sort the results or filter by image size in Google.

I’ve heard of people using it for dating purposes, someone you have found online sends you a photo and you can search to see where else that photo might appear…interesting possibilities there.

In all, these tools become more and more useful once you realize you have them at your disposal, you will think of reasons and ways to use them.

The benefits/downside of a Linux desktop are fairly straight forward. Linux is free, doesn’t get viruses (yet…some argue once market share is high enough viruses will come) and takes much less horsepower to run.  On the downside, it won’t run most Windows based programs. There are myriad other pros and cons to go on the lists, but these are the main things customers notice and care about.

So what does this have to do with the cloud and Windows?  It’s pretty simple really, most of our customers are moving to a Linux desktop OS because the cloud allows them to do so. Their applications and data are going to the cloud, which runs almost exclusively on browsers. Browsers run GREAT in Linux. So once your local Quickbooks, email and other Windows only programs have been replaced by cloud based services you really don’t have much tying you to a Windows desktop anymore. And thus no more viruses, paid upgrades and slow performance from a bulky OS.

The second and less common reason is virtualization. Many customers are seeing the light of terminal services or remote desktop solutions. Your local desktop machine is connecting to a terminal server or virtual desktop service and all of your data is being delivered from there. What local OS you run is a non-issue since you now use a browser or terminal services client to connect, which once again run GREAT in Linux.

All that being said, from a business perspective at least…Windows is waining in relevance for many of our customers since they no longer are running their applications on their local machines.

DNS is the glue that makes the web work. It translates a name (www.InterlinkSpokane.com) to an IP address that tells which web server is hosting the website. It also tells other email servers where to send email for a domain name using what is called the MX record.

Without DNS, when someone types in www.InterlinkSpokane.com in a web browser, there is no conversion of the name to an IP address and your web browser will return an error. Even through your website may be running fine, without DNS the web browser doesn’t know where to go to get to the site.

In the simplest terms, DNS let’s us use names like Yahoo or Google instead of strings of numbers like 74.125.224.18  Think of it as telling the Internet to “call Bob” instead of “dial 555-123-4567″

Hosting:

Website hosting provides server storage space and an IP address for your website. The website on that server can then be accessed from a web browser. Your web hosting provider is who gives your website the IP address that is entered into DNS. When someone types www.InterlinkSpokane.com the web browser goes to the hosting providers web server to pull up the pages for your website that you have stored on the server.

Registrars:

Domain registrars register a domain and enable it’s use on the rest of the internet. There is an annual recurring cost for this service. The one and only thing this service actually provides is to tell the rest of the web which DNS server to use for your domain.

Web hosts provide DNS hosting with web hosting accounts and will usually register domains for you at their preferred domain registrar. The upside to having your webhost provide DNS registration is typically they will renew the Domain for you each year at the registrar and send a bill with your hosting bill. So you will get nice fast reliable hosting, with friendly service, and a convenient all-in-one billing for your website and domain name needs.

You also have the option of managing it all yourself, or choosing a combination of options, like the webhost only hosting the website and the registrar providing DNS hosting.

Current Problems/challenges:
1.Constant virus and malware issues
2.Aging computers
3.Multiple versions of Windows (XP, XP Pro, Vista Pro, Vista Home, Vista Media Edition, Win 7 Home, Win 7 Pro)
4.The CPA who works on their Quickbooks comes to their location once a week and displaces someone from their workstation in order to do the books
5.No real server, just a Win 7 desktop computer with file-sharing and no permissions structure
6.No Firewall
7.No Remote Access
8.No centralized printing
9.Employees often want to work from someone else’s workstation or desk
10.No off-site backups of data

Solution:
An LTSP (Linux Terminal Server Project) multipurpose server with a virtualized XP instance on top.

The hope was to solve all of the problems with a long term solution for under $10K and under $300 proactive monthly maintenance costs.

How it worked and some of the challenges:

The first challenge in converting any Windows network (or group of workstations in this case since they had no domain controller, real server or managed network) is to see what will and won’t work on Linux.  One thing that has enabled us to do more Linux conversions is the popularity and growth of web based software. Their industry software for scheduling and CRM went 100% web based earlier in the year.  That, along with web based email meant we had little left in Windows only software to be run locally.

The 3 Windows based software applications left were Quickbooks, Microsoft Publisher and Microsoft Office.

First, the easy one, Publisher.  There are a few desktop publishing programs for Linux (all free) and we chose Scribus as the Publisher replacement.  They tried Scribus and didn’t really like it.  So we enabled Publisher on their virtual XP instance. (more about that a little later)

The second was Quickbooks…I will refrain from any IT negative comments on the monster that is QuickBooks, but alas almost everyone uses it and supporting it well distinguishes us from other IT vendors.  We had three options here, our virtual application server here in our data center where could give them a login to a virtual Windows desktop where their QuickBooks would be hosted, the second option was to create a Windows virtual machine on their LTSP server and the third to use QuickBooks’s cloud based offering where all data and computing is done on Intuit’s servers through a web browser.   We opted for the second, but just barely.  Really either of the first two solutions would have worked just fine, but keeping their QuickBooks on the in-house server was their preference.  QuickBooks’s cloud based offering is getting better, but still lacks some functionality and leaves you at the mercy of an Internet connection.  I would however speculate that this will become a more viable option very soon.

Along with QuickBooks installed on the virtual XP instance, we loaded a VPN onto the server so the CPA or the bookkeeper could log in remotely and work on QuickBooks or see anything else on the network.  This meant the CPA would no longer have to travel to the customer to do QuickBooks work.  (travel time the client was being billed for)

Third was Microsoft Office.  That one is fairly easy, Oracle’s Open Office has matured to the point where almost anyone can replace their Microsoft Office with Open Office and be on their merry way.  With a few exceptions in Excel and PowerPoint and the lack of Outlook, Open Office does everything Microsoft Office does, and with less horsepower required from the hardware.  Oh and it’s free…it never gets old telling clients we replaced something expensive with something free.

The switch from Windows Desktops to Linux is fairly painless for 90% of users.  A few things are in different places and like any conversion it takes a little getting used to, but there are generally no revolts or mutinies.

When we convert from stand-alone desktops to thin clients we will choose one of a few options for the desktop hardware.
1.We may just remove the desktop machine and replace it with a thin client, generally $250-$400 depending on setup.  $300 is the average
2.We may leave the desktop just like it is, even leaving the Windows OS complete in place and just tell the BIOS to net-boot from the server. (this works well just in case there are surprises like “oh I totally forgot we use Windows to XYZ” and you have to go back to Windows for something temporarily)
3.We may rip out the hard drives and strip the desktop machine down to essentially a bulky thin client with as few moving parts as possible.  (since the moving parts will die in a computer)

As the converted desktop machines die over time we replace them with thin client units and the savings  are substantial and more than just dollars.
1.The customer does not have to pay to have a PC built or configured.  Aside from the hardware savings, there is no setup, just add a user on the server (10 minutes of tech time)
2.The thin client unit itself is roughly one third the cost of a good desktop machine
3.The thin client lasts almost twice as long, so once again half the cost
4.It uses less than half the power of a desktop machine (you would be surprised how fast this adds up)
5.The thin client takes up about 1/10th the space of a desktop machine
6.You can extend the life of a 5 year old desktop that would normally be obsolete by converting it to a thin client
7.Any user can sit down at any desk, login and blamo it’s as if they were at their own desk
8.When a machine dies, you toss it and plug in your spare thin client, it’s a 90 second process

In the end the solutions works great and everyone is happy. It took us about two weeks to work out the bugs and little tweaks.  Not every printer wants to be plugged into a Linux LTSP server, so we made one printer change.
We did the whole project for under $6K with about $300 in monthly costs (including backup services)

Notes:
At one point we discussed housing their LTSP server here in our data center and having all work be remote login, but opted against due to flaky Comcast connection and no redundancy options for Internet.
We generally roll Debian based Linux systems and prefer Ubuntu for desktops.
Our experience is thin clients in general last anywhere from 8-10 years.  The average desktop is 4-6 with just under 5 being the average.

We did have a real issue with a couple models of HP desktops booting well from the LTSP server. Some of HP machines now are so proprietary it takes some bios tweaks to make them do anything other than run their native OS they were built for.

Converting a Windows Network to Linux Thin Clients:

We have a customer who works in the home care field, they have “caregivers” who visit residential homes and provide non-medical in home care. In total there are 70 people, about 10 in their corporate office and 60 caregivers in the field. We are dealing exclusively with their office network and those 10 users.

Current Problems/challenges:

1. Constant virus and malware issues

2. Aging computers

3. Multiple versions of Windows (XP, XP Pro, Vista Pro, Vista Home, Vista Media Edition, Win 7 Home, Win 7 Pro)

4. The CPA who works on their Quickbooks comes to their location once a week and displaces someone from their workstation in order to do the books

5. No real server, just a Win 7 desktop computer with file-sharing and no permissions

6. No Firewall

7. No Remote Access

8. No centralized print sharing

9. Employees often want to work from someone else’s workstation or desk

10. No off-site backups of data

Solution:

An LTSP (Linux Terminal Server Project) multipurpose server with a virtualized XP instance on top.

The idea was to solve all of the problems with a long term solution for under $10K and under $300 ongoing maintenance costs.

How it worked and some of the challenges:

The first challenge in converting any Windows network (or group of workstations in this case since they had no domain controller, real server or managed network) is to see what will and won’t work on Linux. One thing that has enabled us to do more Linux conversions is the migration to web based software. Their vertical application software for scheduling and CRM went 100% web based earlier in the year. That, along with web based email meant we had little left in Windows only software to be run locally.

The 3 Windows based software applications left were Intuit Quickbooks (QuickBooks), Microsoft Publisher and Microsoft Office.

First, the easy one, Publisher. There are a few desktop publishing programs for Linux (all free) and we chose Scribus as the Publisher replacement. They tried Scribus and didn’t really like it. So we enabled Publisher on their virtual XP instance.

The second was Quickbooks…I will refrain from any IT negative comments on the monster that is QuickBooks, but alas almost everyone uses it and supporting it well distinguishes us from other IT vendors. We had three options here, our virtual application server here in our data center where could give them a login to a virtual Windows desktop where their QuickBooks would be hosted, the second option was to create a Windows virtual machine on their LTSP server and the third to use QuickBooks’s cloud based offering where all data and computing is done on Intuit’s servers through a web browser. We opted for the second, but just barely. Really either of the first two solutions would have worked just fine, but keeping their QuickBooks on the in-house server was their preference. QuickBooks’s cloud based offering is getting better, but still lacks some functionality and leaves you at the mercy of an Internet connection. I would however speculate that this will become a more viable option very soon.

Along with QuickBooks installed on the virtual XP instance, we loaded a VPN onto the server so the CPA or internal accounting could log in remotely and work on QuickBooks or see anything else on the network. This meant the CPA would no longer have to travel to the customer to do QuickBooks work. (travel time the client was being billed for)

Third was Microsft Office. That one is fairly easy, Oracle’s Open Office has matured to the point where almost anyone can replace their Microsoft Office with Open Office and be on their merry way. With a few exceptions in Excel and PowerPoint and the lack of Outlook, Open Office does everything Microsoft Office does, and with less horsepower required from the hardware. Oh and it’s free…it never gets old telling clients we replaced something expensive with something free.

The switch from Windows Desktops to Linux is fairly painless for 90% of users. A few things are in different places and like any conversion it takes a little getting used to, but there are generally no revolts or mutinies.

When we convert from stand-alone desktops to thin clients we will choose one of a few options for the desktop hardware.

1. We may just remove the desktop machine and replace it with a thin client, generally $250-$400 depending on setup. $300 is the average

2. We may leave the desktop just like it is, even leaving the Windows OS complete in place and just tell the BIOS to net-boot from the server. (this works well just in case there are surprises like “oh I totally forgot we use Windows to XYZ” and you have to go back to Windows for something temporarily)

3. We may rip out the hard drives and strip the desktop machine down to essentially a bulky thin client with as few moving parts as possible. (since the moving parts will die in a computer)

As the converted desktop machines die over time we replace them with thin client units and the savings are substantial and more than just dollars.

1. The customer does not have to pay to have a PC built or configured. Aside from the hardware savings, there is no setup, just add a user on the server (10 minutes of tech time)

2. The thin client unit itself is roughly one third the cost of a good desktop machine

3. The thin client lasts almost twice as long, so once again half the cost

4. It uses less than half the power of a desktop machine (you would be surprised how fast this adds up)

5. The thin client takes up about 1/10^th the space of a desktop machine

6. You can extend the life of a 5 year old desktop that would normally be obsolete by converting it to a thin client

7. Any user can sit down at any desk, login and blamo it’s as if they were at their own desk

8. When a machine dies, you toss it and plug in your spare thin client, it’s a 90 second process

In the end the solutions works great and everyone is happy. It took us about two weeks to work out the bugs and little tweaks. Not every printer wants to be plugged into a Linux LTSP server, so we made one printer change.

We did the whole project for under $6K with about $300 in monthly costs (including backup services)

Notes:

• At one point we discussed housing their LTSP server here in our data center and having all work be remote login, but opted against due to non-redundant Internet connections

• We generally roll Debian based Linux systems and prefer Ubuntu for desktops.

• Our experience is thin clients in general last anywhere from 8-10 years. The average desktop is 4-6 with just under 5 being the average

The web firm will specialize in communications and audience assessments, design, and detailed programming.

For more information visit www.switchupweb.com

Kirt Runolfson is President of Interlink and CEO of Switch Up Web. Jennifer Ferrero is President of Switch Up Web.