Diary of a Network Geek

TypePadfromIntel

Originally uploaded by Network Geek

The folks at WordPress better wake up and take notice.

So, you probably know by now that I run this blog via WordPress. And, in the past, I’ve recommended the free blogging service provided by WordPress.com. Well, while installing software on a new PC I’d put together at work today, I saw the screen to pictured here. If you click the link and take a closer look at the screen, you’ll see an option to install a three month TypePad account. TypePad, like WordPress.com, has both free and paid accounts. So, this would give someone three months of the paid TypePad service.

I don’t know what this cost the folks at SixApart, who own TypePad, but this is some damn clever marketing, in my opinion. If this is included with every Intel motherboard sold… Well, let’s just say that I think it would get a lot of people trying this service and starting a paid account. It’s like Microsoft giving schools huge rebates and offering student editions for cheap to make sure that their software is what the fresh crop of workers are trained to use. It’s good marketing. At least, it sure seems to have worked well for Microsoft.

WordPress, are you watching this?

At least, as much as you can secure anything.

Some time back, I pointed you all toward an article about extending your wireless connection. Some of you expressed concern regarding security in relation to wireless connections in general and, specifically, after expanding the range of your wifi router. So, I thought I should get you all some links on how to batten down the hatches, so to speak.
I do think it’s important, though, to say a little something about security in general first.
Nothing is totally secure. If a computer is on a network, it can be compromised eventually, given enough time and money. Security is a matter of degrees, of balancing ease-of-use with peace-of-mind. And, while having wifi makes mobile communication easy, it is, by it’s very nature, insecure. Anything that broadcasts over an unsecured medium can only be so secure, you know? So, I think it’s important as you look at the links below to keep in mind that a determined attacker is going to get into your wifi network, no matter what you do. And, personally, I am more than a little paranoid, so there are just some things I wouldn’t do over a wireless network.

Okay, so, without further ado, here are the links:
First, if you don’t mind the pop-ups on About.com, here are Ten Tips for Securing Your Home WiFi Network. They’re not bad, but, really, some of them aren’t all that secure. Or, rather, they just give a somewhat inflated sense of security. Still, they’re better than nothing.
Better than those tips, though, is the Lifehacker Guide to Setting Up a Wireless Home Network. This takes you through setting up a wifi router and network from scratch and gives you fairly good tips about securing it along the way. (But, make sure to follow the link to their article ToDo – Secure Your Wireless Home Network!) Better still, follow the article at Ars Technica titled The ABCs of Securing Your Wireless Network.
Freakishly, Microsoft, who’s not known for their security practices, has an article about making Windows XP wireless a little more secure. If you run XP, it’s worth a look.
And, finally, for those of you with a little extra time, some spare computer resources, and a high level of paranoia, read the Step-by-Step Guide at SearchWindowsSecurity.com titled How To Create A VPN For Your Wireless Network. (Or, if you’d rather download a printable PDF, check out TechRepublic’s A Secure Wireless LAN Hotspot For Anonymous Users. It’s another way to do the same thing.) Frankly, it doesn’t get much more secure than that!

Hopefully, that gives all those curious minds out there enough to chew on to keep you off the streets at night!

I love OpenSource software.

I especially love it when it’s free. I love free extensions for OpenSource software I use on a regular basis, too. Microsoft Office isn’t the only game in town and people do develop for OpenOffice.

If you haven’t yet, check them out.

There’s something about this that appeals to me.

When I was fresh out of college, I won a trip to Long Beach with a bunch of amenities. A buddy of mine and I went, since we were both single, and enjoyed ourselves, in spite of the worst rainy season the greater L.A. area has seen in more than 20 years. I mean, roads would shut down after we’d use them, forcing us to find another way back to the hotel and I think we only two days of sun. The day we arrived and the day we left.
But, what I remember most was a t-shirt I saw at a tourist shop on Catalina. It was a Parrothead shirt that had the lyric “I used to rule my world from a payphone” on the back, with a nice, relaxing picture of a hammock between two palm trees. The idea of being so unattached, free and mobile really appealed to me, but, alas, it’s a life I’ve never known.

Now, what does that have to do with a USB drive? Well, thanks to Lifehacker, more than you’d think. Have you ever thought about how nice it might be to travel with all your information and favorite applications, but leave your laptop behind? Yep, free and easy living. All you need is a good-sized USB thumb drive and three articles: Top 10 USB Thumb Drive Tricks , Carry Your Life On A Thumb Drive and Tiny USB Office (via LifeHacker). That’s it. Your key to carrying your life in your pocket. Well, your digital life, at any rate.

And, before you write this off, I know a guy who did just what they describe. He loaded everything that mattered to him on a thumb drive and had no computer at all for more than a year. Of course, now, he has a MacBook, so you can take that with a grain of salt. But, also, according to ZDNet, Microsoft is coming out with a product to help you do all this via their suite of programs and operating systems called “StartKey“. You know when Microsoft gets behind an idea, you’ll see it implemented, one way or another.
So, do you all think you could do it? Could you make the switch?

I don’t think I’ve mentioned this before.

Some time ago, I was having problems with traffic on my network. Something, somewhere was apparently causing some issues with bandwidth on our Internet connection. Or, at least, that’s what our ISP kept telling us. It was, I think, the excuse they were using to avoid dealing with an e-mail problem.
Regardless, I had to find a tool to monitor our network traffic. I ended up using Wireshark for that, but along the way, I discovered a number of OpenSource monitoring tools for various purposes. The one that impressed me the most was Nagios.

Nagios is, according to the opening paragraph on their website, “an Open Source host, service and network monitoring program.” While I never did configure anything to monitor the network, per se, I did configure this to watch both local servers and third-party web and mail servers.
First of all, it’s important to know that Nagios runs on Linux. So, to install the software, you first have to have an available Linux server on which to install it. I’m using an old workstation that I installed the latest version of Fedora, the free version of RedHat. Getting the initial install done wasn’t very hard at all. In fact, there were RPMs available, so all I had to do was use RedHat’s package manager to get the base install loaded on the machine.

After the initial software load, I mainly followed the Quick Install instructions that they link to on the first page. Then, since I was mainly monitoring Windows servers and workstations, I found the cleverly titled help page, “Monitoring Windows Machines“, and followed that. This page ran me through the basics of installing the NSClient++ on a Windows machine and configuring Nagios to connect to and monitor that client. One thing that I had to find out the hard way was that the entries for the monitored systems have to be duplicated for each host. In other words, there is no way to just list all the Windows systems you want to monitor. You have to created entries describing each host individually. That’s not a big deal, honestly, since you can open the configuration files in a text editor and just copy, paste and edit the required entries.
I did have a few false starts here, until I figured out the correct syntax and the fact that every host has to be part of a previously defined group. But, other than that little glitch, configuration was fairly simple.

It took a little more digging, but I later found instructions for passively monitoring services running on servers without a client. I now use my private installation of Nagios to monitor our company webserver, both POP3 and SMTP on our hosted e-mail server, as well as my two Windows 2003 servers. I can even check on the Microsoft SQL database, thanks to information I got from this post on the OSdir mailarchive. And, did I mention that all this software was free? Yeah, the documentation wasn’t the best and it took me a little while to figure out the install and config, but it was far easier than the other monitoring software I played with and I can let anyone who has the username and password check these stats from their own workstation via a web browser. How cool is that? Oh, and did I mention that this can be used to monitor Linux/Unix systems, Windows systems and even Netware systems? Nagios pretty well covers it all!
(Oh, and as a side note, if you’re messing around with the configuration and want to reset the statistics, just stop the service and delete /usr/local/nagios/var/status.dat, then restart the service. All your counts will zero and all the checks will start fresh.)
In short, if you’re looking for a low-cost but versatile monitoring system and aren’t afraid to read the documentation, I highly recommend investigating Nagios.

Two great tastes that taste great together.

It’s that magic time of year again, when I think about career paths and long-term goals and what I need to do to meet them. For IT geeks like me, that often means training and certification. They’re not the same thing, incidentally. Sometimes, I think IT staff forget that. I’ve taken far more training courses than I’m certified in! But, since getting the right certifications can help get you past the gatekeepers in HR, they are important. And, even more important is getting the right one. So, here are the Top Ten Hottest Certifications for 2008, according to TechRepublic:

1. MCP (Microsoft Certified Professional)
2. CCNA (Cisco Certified Network Associate)
3. MCPD (Microsoft Certified Professional Developer)
4. SCJP (SUN Certified Java Programmer)
5. CISSP (Certified Information Systems Security Professional)
6. Comptia A+
7. Comptia Network +
8. MCTS SQL Server 2005 (The Microsoft Certified Technology Specialist)
9. RHCE (Red Hat Certified Engineer)
10. Comptia Security+

I have to admit, I was pleasantly surprised to see so many CompTIA certifications in that list. Why? Well, in part because I have one already, the CompTIA Linux+, but also because I’d been planning on doing another one which is on the list, CompTIA Security+. The other reason I really like the CompTIA certs is because once you certify, you never have to take the test again to maintain your cert. Trust me, that’s a big, big deal to someone with a bunch of certifications!

The other thing that I was looking at the other day was the Dice.com Third Quarter IT Local Market Reports. These look at the hiring and general employment trends that DICE has seen over the financial quarter. You can probably find your major metropolitan area in there, or one close. I’m not sure how the whole country is doing, but, I’m pretty pleased with how things look in Houston. Always nice to know that there are jobs out there, just in case.

Anyway, I hope this helps some of my fellow geeks plan out their personal and professional goals for the next year. And, folks, if you haven’t been planning, why not?

This is old news.

So, lately, there’s been a bit of buzz about Windows Home Server. The press has gone on at length about how this was such a brilliant idea who’s “time has finally come” and patted Microsoft on the back for thinking of it.
Well, this is really old news. As I was going through some old magazines recently, before throwing them out, I saw a short article on the Memora Servio Personal Server. A Linux-based home server that did everything from share files to filter e-mail to act as a firewall for home users. The device was auto-configuring and sat between your home network and your broadband connection and even could be ordered with wireless built in. The magazine was from 2001.

Sadly, the company doesn’t seem to be around any more, though you can see the old Memora About page, thanks to Archive.org. Again, this company was doing this six years ago and, from what I can tell, only seemed to have closed up shop in the past year or two. I wonder how well this product sold? What’s more, I wonder if anyone has the distro around, with the configuration programs on it? I know, I’d love to get my hands on that!

So, some of my readers are geeks, too. Ever heard of this product? Or, maybe, something like it?

(And, if you haven’t looked at my pictures yet, scroll down to untill you see them, then vote on the sidebar!)

I do things on the cheap.

I’m so used to working with a minimal budget, or a non-existant one, that I can pretty well come up with software or IT resources for any project for nothing or almost nothing. Granted, it may take some time, but I still manage to do it. Well, project planning and management are no different.
I’ve been trying to get reorganized since getting out of the hospital and stabilizing my health. This is no small task, especially at work. So, I’ve been thinking of ways to organize my thoughts, goals and projects, both at work and at home. That led me to search for free project management templates of various kinds to move me closer to that goal. You, my faithful readers, reap the benefit of my efforts.

First, I found a place called BusinessBalls.net. Not sure where they got that name from, to be honest, but they’ve got a great collection of free templates you can use to layout both business and personal projects.
Next, I found Matt H. Evans’ collection of free Excel templates. Though he didn’t create them all himself, he’s got quite a collection of financial, budgeting and analysis spreadsheets there that should help with all kinds of project management issues.
Finally, there’s the Free Project Decision Templates from RFP-Templates.com. Again, a fairly good selection of decision making templates to make project management a “kinder, gentler” process. A word of warning about this site, though. It seems to be more geared toward advertising their Request for Proposal “package”, for which they charge. Still, some of their stuff is free, so they can’t be all bad.

Oh, and if you need a free office suite to do all this with, why not try OpenOffice? It’s free and compatible with Microsoft Office, so there’s nothing to lose but the download time!

Now, I’m off to plan and implement Operation Wacky Weasel!
(No, I don’t know what that is, but the name sounded so, so good, I couldn’t pass it up.)

Microsoft has a new advertising campaign.

“People drive business” is their theme and they’re trying to get bloggers to include specific text in their blogs that include that “people ready business” message, along with links to the Microsoft marketing website, of course. Here’s the text they seem to have wanted people to include:

People drive business success. Human imagination creates the ideas that move business forward. Human conversations and human effort shape those ideas into products and services for the market. The unique ability of people to listen, respond, persuade, and think for themselves enables companies to sell effectively, serve their customers, and work together with their business partners in rich, satisfying ways that create lasting, high-value relationships.In an era where some see technology as a force that promises to make people subservient to highly structured or automated processes, Microsoft sees a better way to unlock the potential of every person. Systems can only create efficiency: It is people who create value. And the more people can do in their roles, the more value they can create. When Microsoft looks ahead, we see a world where organizations succeed by empowering people to harness information, expertise and the possibilities of complex networks with tools that give them insight, reach and opportunities.

Naturally, I’ve included all that just to screw with the search engines that will be spidering my website this week. Why? Well, I figure it’s got to make things worse for Microsoft and might actually boost my own rankings with all those highly-priced keywords that the marketing drones are no doubt shelling out for over in Redmond. I could be wrong, but, even if I am, it’s probably not going to do any damage to my Googlerank or my blog.

Not quite as exciting as gun-wielding maniacs…

But, this is still a big deal to Novell and Linux worshipers.   First, over the weekend, there was a story run by Reuter’s saying, in essence, that the Free Software Foundation might somehow ban Novell from selling or packaging Linux in the future.  Naturally, this sent a lot of people into quite a tizzy.  That would be a terrible blow to Novell, who’s really staked their future on the success of Linux and their products on Linux.  I would imagine their stock took quite a hit today.

Thankfully, the folks over at Linux Magazine have a clearer picture of what’s going on.  First,  the FSF doesn’t control Linux or Linux distribution rights.  Secondly, what they’re actually talking about is moving certain key utilities and chucks of code from the current license, the GPLv2, to a new license, GPLv3, which might, somehow, restrict who could redistribute the code.  Linus himself has said that he will NOT move the Linux kernel, which is the heart of Linux, to the newer, more restrictive GPLv3.  So, in short, what we have is a Linux community that’s panicked over the deal Novell made with Microsoft and is spreading a little, old-fashioned FUD.  Interestingly enough, that’s a technique that Microsoft used to fight Linux.  Oh, how the worm turns.

So, in short, while this all made for great pseudo news, it’s not much more than smoke and mirrors.  Of course, it’s smoke and mirrors that will no doubt effect Novell’s stock price, but, still…