Whaley's Place

Home Firewalls and Network Security

Bill — Mon, 19 Sep 2011 01:13:46 +0000

Network Security you say???? The average home user that has one or two computers for basic internet use, typically uses a consumer grade router (Cisco/Linksys, Buffalo, D-Link, etc.) with a machine or two on the wired LAN ports and some flavor of wireless. Is there anything wrong with this configuration? The answer it absolutely not so long as the router appliance is configured correctly and not just connected right out of the box without setting up security. They are making it easier to set the security up, but some people don’t bother. This is something that you absolutely can not ignore, especially if using wireless. I’ll do another post later about wireless security, but of this one, I really wanted to focus on the router used in the home. Again, I’m not abdicating getting rid of your current appliance, just wanting to pose another option if you really like to have TOTAL control of your network and the in/outs.

Enter pfSense. pfSense is an open source firewall/router combination that will run on most any PC platform. I like the fact that it gives complete control of traffic in and out of my home network while at the same time, also giving me the Enterprise level functionality that won’t cost me an arm and a leg (OpenVPN. IPSec, rules, DHCP, DNS, Captive Portal). Add Snort to the package for no charge, and you have a pretty robust firewall and IPS.

Click the image for a larger view.

I’m running it on a 3.2 Ghz Pentium 4 with 2 GB Ram… As you can see by the attachment above, the machine doesn’t have to work hard to get the job done. Give it a try…I am sure you will not be unhappy.

Take care and stay secure! – Bill

Reworking site

Bill — Fri, 02 Sep 2011 01:21:09 +0000

Haven’t had a ton of time to do much with the website or my blog for one simple reason… work. I found some new energy about a week or so ago and am working on re-working the site and such. Hope to have it up soon.

Take care and God Bless!

Adobe Acrobat 9.0 Updater – Error 1625

Bill — Tue, 21 Dec 2010 15:17:02 +0000

As with most programs today, they automatically check for updates, download them and then install them right? I ran across an issue today where I was unable to update Adobe Acrobat 9.0 Professional on my Windows 7 (64-Bit Professional). Acrobat would check for and find the update, but when it installed it, I got the following error:

The error message itself is VERY misleading. You’d think that it was a system policy issue, but my machine is not part of a Windows domain and is basically an out of the box configuration. It appears that the application won’t prompt for a privilege escalation even if you are logged into machine using an account with Administrator privileges.

Here is how I was able to get around it:

Open a command prompt with Administrator Privileges by Start | All Programs | Accessories. Right click the Command Prompt shortcut and select “Run as administrator”.
Type the following command and press Return: “C:\Program Files (x86)\Common Files\Adobe\ARM\1.0\AdobeARM.exe” /PRODUCT:Acrobat /VERSION:9.0 /MODE:1
The update will run and install normally.

Hope this helps save you some time in troubleshooting this particular issue with Adobe Acrobat Updates.

Mac Resource Monitoring

Bill — Thu, 10 Dec 2009 02:06:32 +0000

All of us geeky folks like to see what our machines are doing, right? Well for those with a Mac, I think I’ve got a winner for you. iStat Menus. This set of utilities will allow you to monitor your machine realtime from the Mac menu bar. Not sure how it does with older Macs, but for Intel Based Macs it is a keeper! You’ll have to install the Intel drivers for your Mac to enable iStat to get fan speeds, temps and such. No worry in finding them though. You are prompted on install of the application to download and install them.

They’ve got a widget also with the same functionality, but I like being able to see the information right at the top of the screen.

Happy Monitoring!

Network Throttling in Windows

Bill — Thu, 10 Dec 2009 01:39:29 +0000

With a little more reading, I ran across this in Microsoft’s Knowledgebase: The article is for Windows Vista, but it applies to Windows 7 as well. Basically, Microsoft throttles network trafffic to give better network performance to Multimedia apps…i.e. streaming video, etc. Read the article and then make the twek as you see fit. I set mine to 70 with no issues. Very noticable network performance changes. No reboot needed, but with Windows, it never hurts!

Before:

After:

Network Settings in Windows

Bill — Thu, 10 Dec 2009 01:23:20 +0000

Was doing some huge file transfers here on my home network (Windows 7 / Windows 2003 Server) and noticed that things were not as fast as I’d expect. When I installed Windows 7 on my wife’s Dell XPS 410, I didn’t do much tweaking with it. Well, in looking at what kind of throughput I was getting(Network Performance Monitor / DuMeter), it was what I’d expect on a 100MB Network. Being that I have Gigabit throughout the house I figured I’d do some looking. Moral of the story here…don’t settle with allowing your network adapter to Auto Negotiate! You’d think it would figure things out, but in this case it didn’t. See below to get a visual of what I’m talking about. Happy Networking!

Windows 7 and the Mac

Bill — Sun, 22 Nov 2009 00:12:33 +0000

Well, with the release of Windows 7, I really wanted to see how it would perform running in BootCamp 3.0 on my Mac Pro. I had already been running the release candidate in a VM and it ran fine…I guess the geek in me wants to see it stand alone.

As I figured, it screamed on the hardware with 12 GB RAM and Dual 2.66 Ghz Xeon processors. I’m still going to run in it a VM though… It is just too much of a pain to reboot into one operating system and then into another.

Good FREE Defrag for Windows

Bill — Tue, 29 Sep 2009 01:34:19 +0000

Ran across this and it is a great find. It is an updated version of JkDefrag. Take a look at it here. The price is right!

Snow Leopard

admin — Tue, 15 Sep 2009 00:27:38 +0000

OSX 10.6

Apple OS X - Snow Leopard

Well, I bit the bullet and bought Snow Leopard about a week ago and am pleased to say that I have had minimal issues. The only issue that really wasn’t was 1Passwd not supporting the 64-bit version of Safari. Other than that though, it saved me about 7 GB of disk space and performance does seem to be a little better. I’ve noticed some quirkiness with VNC and VMware Fusion, but both are still operable. Looking at things on their websites show that updated releases are forth coming.

Will post updates here as I experiment with it some. Take care and have a good night!

–Bill

Reindexing Spotlight

Bill — Sun, 12 Apr 2009 03:21:34 +0000

First off, as far as OS search tools go…Apple did get Spotlight right this time around in Leopard. Well, I ended up corrupting some of the permissions on my drive and in the course of things broke Spotllight. After fixing the permission issues on my machine, I still had an incomplete index…. Here is how to rebuild the indexes…

Open System Preferences
Open Spotlight Prefs
Click the Privacy Tab
Click the + and add your drive to re-index
Wait about 30 seconds and then delete it from the Privacy list. This will force Spotlight to reindex the target drive again.

Spotlight index