Nibbles -n- Bits

Somebody needs a geography lesson...

2011-02-06T15:07:00.000-05:00

I am the first to admit that geography is far from my strongest subject. However, a letter I recently received from Sean Parnell, the Governor of Alaska, makes me wonder if I don't give myself enough credit. While I know that he did not send this out himself, I would hope that he was aware what mailings went out on his behave and cared about what kind of image these mailings portrayed . So you

Good WLAN Tips

2010-10-21T17:29:00.001-04:00

ProtectmyID had a good writeup on WLAN security today. I think this is one of the writeups on this topic which contains the least amount of FUD and you can't go wrong with following its advice. However, I think a couple of improvements could be made.First off I'd say that MAC filters these days are a waste of time as a MAC address can be easily spoofed. The time required to manage a MAC filter

The problem of 2^64 − 1

2010-10-11T13:24:00.001-04:00

I was just looking at the securing coding practices at the CERT website and ran into a topic that has always been a pain point for me and that is the validation of pointers in C. Growing up coding C, I was constantly exposed to the mantra of 'Check for NULL pointers'. Now it is hard to argue that NULL pointers are not bad, but I do think that when to check for them is not that straight forward.

Shocked by NewEgg

2010-08-23T10:26:00.001-04:00

I saw this BT headset advertised through another site and hopped over as soon as I saw it was newegg figuring it would be a reasonable deal.I was so surprised by reviews here. I've been doing business with newegg for years now and have been always satisfied. Even, if I ran into an issue with a product, I could count on newegg to be fair and make things right. From the comments the customers

Microsoft Network Monitor

2010-07-23T13:04:00.000-04:00

I recently received one of Microsoft's periodic download notification emails and one item in particular caught my eye as I had never heard of it before. It was a download of Microsoft's Network Monitor. Now I've been dealing with networking in and out of work for many years and have always used Wireshark and will most likely continue to do so. However, I will definitely be looking into Network

Accessing Network Connections on Windows XP

2010-07-21T04:02:00.001-04:00

If you are dealing with issues with networking on a Windows machine one of the locations you are going to want to look at sooner or later is the Network Connections. How you get there and what you see varies between Windows versions. From XP on it is mostly the same, so I figured a quick look at Network Connections on XP should provide most Windows users with a good starting point if they need

Expanding a Home Network

2010-02-24T14:14:00.002-05:00

I've been working on a few different posts and haven't quite got the finishing touches on them, but I felt I should get this one out there. In the past week, I have been asked to help out with expanding a home network using an old router at least four times. With many ISPs providing routers, people are often finding themselves with an extra router. So its only natural that they look to

Using the Windows Command Window

2010-02-12T08:50:00.002-05:00

In a couple of my previous posts I've covered running various commands from a command window like the one shown to the left. Now while the command window is a simple application, which provides a way to run other applications or Windows commands, how to do some simple things in it is not always clear. For example I have run into many situations where someone does not know how to copy the

Sharing a Keyboard & Mouse

2010-02-11T09:31:00.001-05:00

You've most likely heard of KVM (Keyboard/Video/Mouse) devices that let you share a single keyboard, monitor, and mouse between multiple machines, Synergy is a software KM solution. It allows you to share a keyboard and mouse between multiple computers, but still take advantage of having the display real-estate that multiple monitors offer. Since it runs on Windows, Linux and various Unixes

Setting MTU on Windows

2010-02-08T13:45:00.002-05:00

The first questions that I imagine comes to the mind of many people is what is MTU and why should I care about it. I expect a more or less formal definition is not that useful when it comes to answering these questions. Maximum Transmission Unit [MTU] The largest possible unit of data that can be sent on a particular network implementation The MTU can be thought of the largest amount of

Running Ping from Windows

2010-02-08T03:05:00.001-05:00

The ping command is one of the simplest commands that can be used for diagnosing networking problems, but it is also one I would be hard pressed to do without. The primary use of the command is to send a network message to another system asking that system to respond back. By doing this you can easily verify that the remote system can be reached from your system and get a gauge of the general

Networking Terms

2010-02-06T07:17:00.000-05:00

Over the past couple of years I've been pulling together a list of terms that frequently get tossed about when dealing with networking issues and trying to provide a definition that is easy for most folks to follow. This list is by no means exhaustive and was meant all along to be a living document, growing and being revised as time goes by. You can find this glossary of terms over in the

Using ipconfig & Wntipcfg.exe

2010-02-05T08:29:00.000-05:00

In Windows, ipconfig is used to display basic network related configuration information, such as IP address, DNS servers, and DHCP settings. It is a command line utility and as such it must be run through XP's command window. There are two basic ways to do this: Either, 1) Go to the Start menu and select Run... In the the Run dialog enter cmd /k ipconfig Or 2) Open a command window