planb

Name: planb
Address: 47 Vernon Crescent, Lancaster, LA20LX, GB
Telephone: +441524881270

planb is built on a simple business ethic of cost effective solutions, transparency, trust and value.

We appreciate our customers and always try to go the extra mile to look after them. planb is a local Lancaster IT business that offers backup solutions, IT support and advice and hosted services such as email and hosting. We don't plan to be the biggest company in Lancaster but to offer a fair, cost effective, personal service to all our customers.

24/08/2026

Quick leased line repair this morning, well by repair i mean diagnostic. Turns out after talking to the carrier and there being nothing wrong one of the fibre cables was damaged and some of the RJ45 cabling was lets say interesting. New fibre dropped in and tested and getting the full speed now.

07/08/2026

Its been busy this month at planb, we have had a few leased line installs. Attending a school in Fleetwood out of term time to upgrade servers, some programming and the usual data recovery jobs all being topped off with out work Insignia sadly dying so you may not see our car out and about like usual.

However the replacement work vehicle is here and it will be getting a livery soon enough.

06/07/2026

Another week and another data recovery job, the key to successful recovery is to stop using the failed device immediately. Continued use reduced the chances of a successful recovery. As it happens thats exactly what this user did they stopped using it and contacted us. As a result we have recovered all the data successfully.

01/07/2026

Latest project completed... this time for IWS Recruit aka Industrial Work Solutions on whitelund. This has been an interesting project as they had a very clear brief which made the project easier as it takes the guess work out of it.

Full details at www.iwsrecruit.co.uk

25/06/2026

It's not just desktop computers, laptops, and servers that we work on. Most equipment today runs on some form of Linux, Android, or Windows — and that includes industrial machinery.

Today's challenge was a Windows-based lathe. This particular unit runs Windows 7 Professional from an mSATA drive buried deep inside the machine.

The problem was a failing mSATA disk, but after a couple of hours of work we were able to recover the file system and migrate it onto a SATA SSD for testing. Everything is running perfectly again — all that's left is imaging it back onto a fresh mSATA drive and reinstalling the unit.

Back in business!

22/06/2026

Quick one today — scraping Indeed jobs without an official API key.

The approach uses SerpAPI with Google as the data provider, pulling raw JSON and filtering out the Indeed listings from the noise. The cleaned results get shaped into an array of objects, ready to style and render on a page.

To keep polling costs down, I'm planning to cache the results in a database and only refresh the index every 50 requests or so.

The trick, as ever, is browser impersonation — spoofing the user-agent and related headers so the request doesn't get flagged. Something most of us on the web scraping side have been doing for the better part of two decades at this point.

09/06/2026

Quick website design for a local sole trader this week, just to tie up the mobile CSS and put the website live. We don't often do websites these days but its good to be able to help small businesses out once in a while.

27/04/2026

Starlink install completed and it was one of those jobs where if stuff can go wrong it will. Ladders too short, snapped rivnut tool and a couple of other dramas but its all installed and working well in the end. Within minutes there was a massive improvement.

23/04/2026

Todays been a day of connectivity jobs, other than popping in to see Castlegate Security Services to sort a we**am issue today we have provsioned a leased line and got everything up and running and configured another Starlink installation although this ones a bit different as it will be installed in bypass mode, the customer already has their own established network with servers and an enterprise class router. Also we have done some work on anotehr customers VOIP system and done a survey of a potentional new site for yet another customer.

21/04/2026

Todays been a busy one installing firewalls and finishing off installing Starlink on a local farm. Satellite broadband has come along way over the years.

Address

47 Vernon Crescent
Lancaster
LA20LX

Telephone

+441524881270

Website

http://www.planb-it.co.uk/

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