IT Legends - Tech in Connecticut

OK, so I thought all of my Wireless Hell days were over with the installation of my Intel Wireless Adapter. Then I decided to see what it would be like to use my Verizon HTC XV6800 as a USB modem for my laptop. I give VZW a call, they offer to let me use the feature for free for a month, charging at $15 per month after that. How generous of them :) So I download the latest drivers for the phone to work as a modem, download the latest VZAccess Manager software and was able to follow the instructions on their website just fine for my model phone. Everything appeared to be working properly. I even got a display from the VZAccess Manager screen that showed me how strong of a signal I could get from the phone. I was pretty happy… then I clicked Connect.

Yeah, and Connect and connect and connect again. ARR! I kept getting errors that the computer could not establish a connection. So yesterday while I had some downtime at my Red Cross Golf Fundraiser (more…)

At Nutmeg Consulting corporate headquarters (haha, that makes me laugh - I don’t know entirely why), when we hooked ourselves up to Comcast Internet service for business, we decided we wanted to manage our own firewall and routing services. So we disabled all of the features on the modem Comcast provided for us and installed a Sonicwall TZ170W. When we decided we wanted a VPN, we upgraded to the Enhanced OS for the Sonicwall so that we could use L2TP/IPSec tunnels for our VPN on Windows desktops without having to install the Sonicwall Global VPN Client. Well the Sonicwall has been restarting itself multiple times a day. We have called Sonicwall tech support and we have our support incident elevated all the way to level 3. However, 3 months later, the damn thing still reboots itself all the time and its “still at level 3 tech support”. I’m not happy with the level of service here. (more…)

I bought a new bicycle on Saturday. I haven’t owned a bike in about 14 years. The last one I owned was stolen from the campus at University of Wisconsin in Milwaukee. I lived there for a brief period of time and didn’t lock up my bike when I went into the college to borrow a computer. A friend allowed me to use her login to use the computers in the lab, and the university allowed anyone to walk in and use the lab 24 hours a day - no monitoring. Security issue there aside, I should have locked the bike but I’d lost my lock chain somewhere in my travels. (more…)

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GParted did the job! I was able to resize my partition. At first I was a bit nervous booting into GParted (I used the automatic boot, worked fine) because I saw a lot of command-line text as it was booting. And then I saw a Linux bash prompt. I cringed, thinking “Oy, I’m going to have to learn some esoteric command line stuff in order to resize this partition…” and just a couple seconds after that I saw a GUI interface come up. Hmm, quite nice. I clicked on my drive, found my partition and was able to actually just use the mouse to resize my partition with a click on the edge of the partition and then dragged it larger. Very nice! I was able to use some finer controls below the graphic interface with some numbers in it (representing the size of the partition) to leave myself 8 GB of space at the end of the drive (that’s 8192 MB). I decided I would put the virtual memory here in a 4GB virtual memory file, leaving 4 GB of space left on that partition as well. Following the prompts on the screen I was able to do what I needed to resize the partition! I was very happy as I’ve been searching for a free partition manager for years. I’m glad the folks at Clonezilla led me to GParted. (more…)

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Well, my nifty 120 GB drive arrived! I was very happy with it. Now, how to get my operating system from the old 30GB onto the new 160GB? Clonezilla! I tried the Clonezilla Live CD, and this did a good job of a device-to-device partition transfer. It’s not quite as polished of an imaging product (but its free!) as something like, say, Acronis or Ghost, but if you know just a little Linux then you can get your way through it. The one thing I didn’t like was that Clonezilla did not auto-resize the destination partition. So I have my new 120 GB drive running in my system with a nice, small 30 GB partition and 90GB of unpartitioned space! Now I have to decide if I’m going to partition that space into a new volume or try to resize the partition. (more…)