Dalamar : Tip

Secure Passwords

Jason — Tue, 27 Mar 2007 16:36:57 GMT

Think your password is secure? Well lets find out, I found a few links that have some great infomation on passwords, how long it takes to crack them, and how to make good passwords. It all started with this article.

Hacking Weak Passwords

From there I learned a few of thier tricks, like something called Rainbow Tables

How Rainbow Tables work

Now that is for people that really understand math and advance computer crap, I got the jist of it, but some of it went over my head.

Latly, be sure to check out just how good your password is, Microsoft has a website that does just that... So how does your password stack up?

Password checker

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Gadget's Galore!

Jason — Tue, 20 Feb 2007 22:06:26 GMT

Since I have been using vista on my everyday PC, I have been playing around a lot with gadgets. Gadgets are nice little mini app's that run on your system. They can run anywhere on the desktop or on the side of one of your monitors (Sidebar).

Right now I have tried 30 or so of these little things. Most don't stay longer then a few seconds, but a few have just blown me away. So far the 2 I use the most would be the Live writer (lets me blog quicker) and remote desktop. I think that might change as today I downloaded Google search (which just rocks so far) and one for MSN Messenger that finely does what I expect.

So what gadgets do I have going right now? Well there is the 24 theme clock, Weather, CPU/MEM meter, Network Meter, Calendar, MSN Msg, Google Search, Remote desktop, Live Writer and Live Traffic. Some of these are new, so will do a follow up on which ones I really like and use and will provide some download links at that time.

Any gadgets you just love? Let me know! I'm also thinking of gadgets that work with accounting systems, VOIP, and other services that are more business related.

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Google Reader

Jason — Tue, 06 Feb 2007 17:55:16 GMT

Ok, After about 2 mins, I made the switch to google reader. I was using feedreader, but now that I work of 3 different computers, I wanted something that could "follow me" better. So I gave google reader a try. Now I'm hooked, why diddnt I switch sooner? really now this is a great reader. I then spent about 20mins looking at add-ons and other infomation about it. So far only the Google Reader Notifier am I using (it was a must have since I try and stay on top of my news and my emails).

Since I have now made the change, I will try to support some of googles other features, Shared items and "add to google reader" being the 2 I will start off with.

Hmm, might be a good time to write up how to use Blogs, readers, etc for my family, get them on the Web 2.0 Bandwagon!

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How much should I spend on IT?

Jason — Thu, 25 Jan 2007 13:19:17 GMT

A few weeks ago I was talking to some Big enterprise IT people. We where just comparing some of the problems everyone has no matter how big or small you are. The question came up about IT budgets. How much should we spend on IT?

The answer? Well they told me that they tell their clients to spend about 3% of their annual sales. So, one of my customers has sales near 80 million, so that would be $240,000. Do they spend that much? No, but lets be fair, this includes all IT related services. Phone, Cell phones, Internet access, Personal, and anything else that deal with IT and communication. Add up what they spend (rough numbers) and I get about $192,000. That also doesn't include any hardware, which you would really need to look at over a few years to account for servers and upgrades. I can say though, they don't spend $50,000 in hardware, but they do come close to the 3%. In fact, there are a few things I didn't count for, webhosting, E-com, some of the accountant's pay (since she does some of the IT work).

I challenge everyone, Take 3% of your sales and look at using that for IT. Add up what you are currently spending, are you underspending or overspending? In fact, if you are a Solar Customer, call us and we will help you add up your IT spending and help come up with a budget for the future!

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Another Spell Checker

Jason — Tue, 21 Nov 2006 22:25:29 GMT

Really now, Everything has it's own spellchecker, or if it doesn't, you can get one as a plug-in. Just look at IE, there is IESpell and now Spellingcow which I learned about from Life Hacker. This one looks sort of neat, so I might try it out, IE Spell "works" but I dont like how it suggest words, Guess I dont spell good enough for it to have any kind of clue. This goes back to the spell check in word, It's got a clue!

Oh well, life goes on...

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Shopping Tips!

Jason — Mon, 20 Nov 2006 20:11:27 GMT

Here are some shopping tips for the big shopping day coming up. First to give some credit. I got both of these tips from www.lifehacker.com. It's an ok website, I get about 1-2 good tips from them each week. The problem is I get about 15-20 things from them each day. Makes it somewhat like SPAM in my inbox, I get the same effect in my RSS reader. Oh well, the few tips I Get from them seem to be good enough that I havnt deleted them out of my reader, no yet anyway.

Ok, enough here are the tips!

http://www.frucall.com/ - This is a great idea, something I knew was coming. You basicly just call a 1-800 # when you are shopping, then enter in the UPS Code of the product you are thinking of buying. They will tell you if it is cheaper to get that online. If you have an account with them you can even buy it from the phone or save it to a bookmark so you can view it later. Really cool all the way around.

http://bfads.net/ - This is just a list of a lot of the sales going on this weekend. You can use it to compare some price and to get an idea of what store you want to go campout at all night.

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Sunbelt Blog Gibberish SPAM

Jason — Tue, 14 Nov 2006 22:27:00 GMT

Ok, if you are not reading sunbelt and you are worried about Security you really should start reading them. http://sunbeltblog.blogspot.com/

From the Sunbelt Blog:

Why are you getting all this gibberish-filled email?
QUESTION: Recently I've been getting a lot of weird email messages. They aren't exactly spam - at least they aren't trying to sell anything that I can see and they don't contain any links for me to click. They're just full of gibberish, what appears to be random words and phrases. Who in the world is sending these things and why? -- Genie L.

ANSWER: You're right: they aren't spam, but they are sent by spammers. The point isn't to get you to buy anything, but to get you to mark the unwanted messages as spam in order to confuse your Bayesian spam filters. Most anti-spam programs now use some form of Bayesian filtering - this is a way of using statistical methods to classify messages as spam (or not). The software "learns" to recognize what you consider to be spam based on the messages that you mark as spam. It's a great idea and works well - except when the filters are "poisoned" by lots of messages that contain large amounts of random words and phrases that's likely to appear in legitimate messages.
Bayesian poisoning messages sometimes consist of random words and sometimes a block of text from a literary work or the like. In either case, the goal is to confuse the filters and render them useless.
It's also possible that even though they don't contain links, some of the gibberish messages may contain web beacons. These are tiny, transparent (and thus invisible) graphics files placed in HTML email messages. When you open the message, your email client downloads the graphic from the sender's server. This lets the spammer know that the email address is a "live" one.

Something else I pulled from them, This is what Microsoft had in mind for Vista, though a lot of what you see never made it, it does give you an idea of what they were aiming for.

[youtube]http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=b9ifQvQCO7Y[/youtube]

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Reboot at Noon = Bad idea

Jason — Thu, 19 Oct 2006 17:16:22 GMT

Ok, today I rebooted one of our servers, we did that at Noon. Since this server didn't handle anything people would "miss" we didn't think much about trying to let everyone know.

Now this server was the SBS server, so it did bring exchange and ISA down. We also share the network printers off of this box, so those came down as well.

Really though, Internet is limited to just a few users, Outlook lets you work offline and reconnects on it's own. Printers was the only thing we thought might be a problem, but most people would retry their print jobs on their own.

Well, something went wrong this time. Not with the server, it rebooted just as it should, but the timing was bad. It caught 3 users logging out, trapping them on the "Running logout scripts". 2 people where trying to print, and for some reason 4 people lost access to file share, and 1 person excel locked up.

The question is why? All the files are stored on a NAS apart from the SBS box, We have a 2nd DNS/AD server setup, so finding the nas shouldn't be a problem. I understand the logoff scripts (they are on the SBS box) and the printers I understand.

Rebooting at Noon might be good for some people. The thing to know is your users. Understand your users, and the impact you have on them when doing updates, Patches, upgrades, ect. I don't belive everything has to be done after hours. You do need good planning, understanding of the network, and understanding of the users and their habits.

Lesson Learned.

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