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How To Recover From A Hard Drive Crash

August 20, 2010 by Daniel Ihonvbere

So, what if you came into the office one morning and heard some clicking sound coming from your server? That clicking sound could be a near heart-stopper for some or another minor irritation to others depending on how well they have planned for such a situation. It is the tell-tale sign that a hard drive … Read more

Astaro Releases Free Edition for Small Businesses

January 28, 2010 by Daniel Ihonvbere

Astaro Corporation, a leading network security vendor, recently announced the launch of the Essential Firewall edition of its flagship security solution Astaro Security Gateway (ASG), available for free to all organizations worldwide. The Essential Firewall edition is claimed to include all the necessary functionality that all organizations need to secure their networks and operate a successful business, but we found some limitations.

KDE 4.3.1 Released

September 7, 2009 by Daniel Ihonvbere

The KDE team has released KDE 4.3.1. This is a bugfix release of KDE 4.3 with a few new improvements. So, users of KDE 4.3 or older versions may want to upgrade it to the new release. From the changelog, a few significant bugs were fixed: More than 25 bugs fixed in KMail, KDE’s default … Read more

How to repair a corrupt MBR in Windows Vista

June 14, 2009 by Daniel Ihonvbere

I tinker with Linux a lot and in many cases, have computers that dual-boot with Windows XP, Vista, Server 2003, and Server 2008. What always happens is that sometimes I remove the hard drive containing the Linux partition and the GRUB boot loader. This inevitably leads to the error 5 message – “boot loader not … Read more

Device Manufacturers and the fleecing of consumers

June 13, 2009 by Daniel Ihonvbere

I’ve recently had cause to wonder if device manufacturers purposely make sure their devices are of limited use to people who buy their products. A few examples:

I recently bought a couple of NAS devices and each one of them failed woefully to do what was advertised.

First is what I actually started calling the Great White Turd. It is the Netgear sc101T. I have come across ridiculous devices before, but this one takes the cake for its total uselessness as a NAS device. What is the point of hard coding a “NAS” to use DHCP and no option of setting a static IP address. What part of “network” was missing during the development of the product? The SC101T forces you to install a client software on all computers that may need access to the device. The software cannot be installed on a server class Operating System like Windows Server 2003 or 2008. You have to mount the drive and share it to be accessible but since it is assigned a DHCP IP address, anytime you restart the computer, the drive mappings are shot to hell and you have to do it all over. For a product that retails for $180, I am almost tempted to start a class action lawsuit so we can recover some lost revenue due to emotional distress caused by this piece of crap.

What Can Astaro Linux Do For You?

May 5, 2009 by Daniel Ihonvbere

I had a client who was just getting killed by spammers. Every morning their inbox was loaded with junk mail and they had as much as five thousand (5,000) emails in their spam filter box when they came in. I decided to help them out with the free version of Astaro Security Gateway. We threw the software version (v7) on an old AMD box they had lying around – 2GHz processor, 20GB IDE drive, 512 RAM, two NICS. What a difference spam filtering at the perimeter of the network makes! The first week was like “wow”. Astaro actually generates a daily report and for email filtering we had 36,930 processed. Get this, out of that number, 36,832 was categorized as “Spam emails blocked”. And the live log was right there for us to see. Emails the system was not sure about were placed in quarantine and you have the option of having an admin view, release or delete those emails, or have a report sent to the affected user. The report even had a “Top 10 Spam Sender” entry with the IP addresses and countries of origin (little flags) of the bad guys. There was also a “Top 5 Spam Countries” entry on the report.