computoman

#1 Admin hint for the day. Keep a list of mac addresses for the network interfaces., Reason I say this is that people will invariably want to use their own equipment on your network i .e. using your bandwidth among other things. Usually if you only use a standard type of network interface, you can go to the dhcp server and see the nonstandard nic mac address stick out like a sore thumb allowing you to pursue the matter further. If there are no oddball mac addresses, you can also compare all network connects against the existing database. If a nic mac address does not match, your off to investigate. You could exclude the non-standard interfaces, but on a public network that is not always practical. If something nefarious was definitely going on, we would shut down the port at the switch. But then they would know you are on to them. Takes judgment. #2 #Microsoft #Windows   Have seen several articles about ow MSAdmins are balking about hav...

One thing that you home router provides is internet protocol addresses to every machine on the network with out you having to manually assign the ipaddresses (aka computer telephone numbers) to all the systems that request an address. It also associates hostnames for system connected to it like a telephone book.  If for some reason your router fails, you can use an existing system to replace those services. You just need to install a software package known as Dnsmasq. In fact. that is the exact software most routers use to be a localize domain name services. You will want to use an extra nic so that later you can turn the system into a router. From the Debian wiki. Dnsmasq is a lightweight, easy to configure, DNS forwarder and DHCP server. It is designed to provide DNS and optionally, DHCP, to a small network. It can serve the names of local machines which are not in the global DNS. The DHCP server integrates with the DNS server and allows machines with DHCP-...

Sharks Cove board with Intel Atom CPU targeted at Windows developers. One really thinks this is aimed at the Raspberry Pi/Arduino market. But at $300 dollars, who is really going to choose it. Microsoft  has a tradition of not supporting speciality products for any period of time. Zune and etc etc etc. Even if it was worth it I would shy away from it. Ironically you can take a pico motherboard and dc-dc power supply and in effect have the same thing for a fraction of the cost. Now if you really want to get inane on this, I will take my old 486 laptop and add all kinds of breakout cables to do quite a bit. Parallel, serial,  vga, and etc. The 486 laptop was free. Cables did have some cost to them, but no where near $300. If you know anything about electronics, a "1" is plus five volts and a "0" is near zero volts. That is true for the Raspberry Pi, Arduino, personal computers, and a zillion developer boards. Not all interfaces will be using digital, but you ge...