Quality Systems Solutions, Inc. Participates in HTG Peer Group

Quality Systems Solutions, Inc. invests time by participating in the Heartland Tech Groups (HTG), leading IT industry Peer Group committed to ensuring that trusted technology industry professionals continue to maintain a rock solid foundation and build for the future.

Carpentersville, IL – Feb. 19, 2009 – Heartland Tech Groups (HTG), a leading provider of peer group programs for the IT solution provider industry, recently held the group’s quarterly event and Quality Systems Solutions, Inc. played an important role in the overall success of this event. Technology firms across the country link up quarterly and share best practices, invest in understand the future and how to navigate the growing economic concerns, labor shortfalls and competitive landscape in today’s high paced technology world. HTG members focus on key business issues and learn from others in the small business, hi-tech industry.

With this involvement in HTG, Quality Systems Solutions, Inc. learns many new skills that allow them to have a competitive advantage in each member’s geographic location. Members of HTG immediately execute and put to practice fundamental business learning that leads to enhanced quality of service to each member’s customer base. The business lessons, close relationships with key industry vendors, lessons from colleagues, deeper understanding of business and the new skills that each member obtain will provide Quality Systems Solutions, Inc. with strategies to better service clients, become a trusted advisor to business and separate them from the pack in each members local economy. Each HTG member works with small to midsize business to better understand how technology impacts business, especially in today’s economic downturn.

“Our members and leadership team have brought HTG to a new level in terms of value, execution and opportunity. The peer group model helps our members deal with challenging economic times. Our recent meeting produced a number of firsts that we can build on going forward into 2009,” said Arlin Sorensen, founder of HTG.

About Company
Quality Systems Solutions, Inc. is a full-service solution provider offering hardware, software and services specifically geared toward helping small businesses succeed. We have partnered with leading companies such as Microsoft, HP, Symantec, TREND Micro, Lenovo, and SONICWALL to provide you with perfect solutions for your information technology needs. Our trained staff can identify and implement a solution tailor made for your situation.
In addition to serving small and medium sized businesses in suburban Chicago, we offer hosted services and remote monitoring and management solutions throughout North America.

About Heartland Tech Groups

Heartland Tech Groups were founded by Arlin Sorensen in 2001 to bring Iowa-based IT partners together to leverage each other’s talents following the post-dot com downturn. Over the years, HTG has grown from a purchasing group to a serious group of business owners, sales professionals, marketing managers and senior management of IT firms in non-competing geographies who meet for two days each quarter to work on key businesses issues and opportunities for growth.


Quality Systems Solutions, Inc. Press Contact
Rick Bahl
President
847-426-9548 ext. 100
rick@qualitysystemssolutions.com

HTG Press Contact
Stuart Crawford
HTG Press and Media Relations
403.206.2233
htgmedia@htgmembers.com

SonicWall GMS DOS

This may be somewhat of a unique problem that only I faced, as I couldn't find any posts of similar problems, but here we go... We are a SonicWall partner and it is our preferred solution for perimeter protection on our client networks. The tool that SonicWall provides to manage its devices is called Global Management System (GMS). GMS is an application that is installed on a server behind a UTM device at HQ. In our case we are a Managed Service Provider, so GMS was installed on an IBM server behind our SonicWall Pro 2040.

Our GMS system "managed" about half a dozen devices ranging from TZ 170 to Pro 2040. At one point, we lost control of the GUI for our GMS application. That was a problem, it just wasn't a big problem. All of the devices were still communicating and everything was stable. The biggest inconvenience for us was that we could not manage the reporting function. Short story is that fixing the problem was put on the ToDo list. Not very high on the list, at that.

As I was preparing to implement our new Zenith BDR solution internally, a topic I should really discuss in a subsequent post, I decided to do some "prep" work on the GMS host. The fact of the matter is that the host did more than GMS. It's real purpose is to be the SQL server for our SharePoint implementation. I decided that since GMS wasn't really working the way I wanted it to, I would just uninstall it. I had already decided that the "fix" involved a new installation on a different box.

There are many more twists and turns in this story than I am about to share, but this is the "key" learning point. Do NOT disable your GMS services or uninstall the application without first disabling GMS on ALL remote devices. Essentially what occurred was the equivalent of a DOS attack on our network. Each remote device continually tried to contact the GMS host and the host continually responded with a "Service not available" message. CONTINUOUSLY. That effectively saturated the upstream channel of our DSL connection.

Once I figured out what was going on, the solution was fairly simple. As I said, logon to each remote device and disable GMS. It just took me a while to put two an two together.