Enter the All Ways On Wireless at the Ronald Reagan International Trade Center in Washington, DC.  Its a pay-for public WiFi, I’m not against paying for it.  Its actually running quite nicely and the regular, non-VPN enabled all-day pass works just fine with my VPN (another reason I like OpenVPN).  However, when I went to purchase my day of access, it led me to a non-encrypted web page to type in my credit card details.  Seeing as the radio frequency traffic between my laptop and the wireless access point is not encrypted and completely open to anyone that knows how to look, I essentially broadcast my credit card details out for that potential someone to steal.

Be wary of public wifi access spots that make you enter credit card details without leading you to a secure web page (that’s when you see https:// in the address bar, or that little padlock in the status bar of your browser).  I don’t think my details are now in the hands of some nefarious identity theif, but its a lot more possible now that I’ve given them out over unencrypted radio transfer.  Someone taking this information wouldn’t even be recorded as a data breach in the All Ways On Wireless financial system – since essentially they didn’t hack into their database they just listened to the freely broadcast, unencrypted traffic.

When will companies start taking security of information more seriously?  I tried to go to their website (www.allwayson.net) but strangely enough, you can’t even get to their website from their own public wifi gateway.  I wonder if its even up anymore, or if it changed and noone set up any forwarding address.

As I’ve said, I’m so far unimpressed. Windows Media Player will, for no reason I can tell, not remember my place in the podcasts I listen to. It will not resume playback consistently. Sometimes it just skips to the next track or reqwinds itself. And yes, it does this even when the phone is supposedly locked.

The ActiveSync is another bit of a problem. This is the software that synchronizes the phone with our company email server – Exchange. During synchronization, I get a couple errors a year about a malformed contact that breaks synchronization. That I can deal with. What hurts me the most is the way ActiveSync will lose its synchronization frequency settings. I usually like to have it set to always be connected and receive all items as they arrive to the server during business hours. After hours, I have it check once every 4 hours. For some reason I have not been able to work out, ActiveSync will lose all of its synchronization settings and revert back to manual sync – meaning it will only sync when I engage the sync function.The touch screen leaves much to be desired. To use it effectively, you need to use a stylus. Not because the screen isn’t sensitive enough, but because the icons and things you need to click on are so small. It took me about a month to get used to how to click with my thumb so I didn’t hit the wrong item – and I still hit the wrong item about 10% of the time. Pulling out the stylus is inconvenient (and I lost mine anyway).

On the recommendation of a colleague, I bought a piece of software that does help me out a little bit in this department. It skins itself over Windows Mobile – its fairly customizable and makes the phone easier to use without a stylus. The software is called SPB Mobile Shell, and it came bundled with a decent (not fantastic) RSS reader, another SPB Phone Suite utility, and a nfity utility I don’t need to use (because of my plan) that measures your data activity so that if you have a limited plan you can know when to stop using features like data, texting, or air minutes before you sky rocket your bill.

I hear there’s an update to Windows Mobil 6 – moving up to version 6.1. Its not available today, but I hope it resolved some of the problems I’m having with the phone. Like locking up on me (or at least appearing to have locked up), managing memory better so I don’t have to soft reset the device (which SPB Mobile Shell makes very easy, so I do it weekly at least).

I don’t mind the slide-out keyboard, but I prefer the Treo 650 and the Blackberries for their “in-your-face” keyboard. The Treo gets my overall bid, but I hear that Palm isn’t doing as well as they have in the past and I’d be worried about their Operating System becoming something obsolete and un-developed.

I dislike Blackberries, but only because in order to get them to work with an Exchange server, you have to purchase licenses for software and it becomes another maintenance issue if something goes wrong. Before Virtualization was at its current state, that usually meant purchasing not only software, but also hardware (I should offer vmware appliance services to RIM for Blackberries – hmmm… I wonder if I can offer hosted blackberry server services to people including Exchange… not a bad gig). Other than that, they are good phones and have a lot of custom software avilable to them.

I also just used the connection to sign up for Adobe Photoshop Express online. Yeah, I know! Photoshop via a website!? Sweet! Sign up now, get a free account. I’ve been pretty hooked on Picasa 2 (now by Google), but its a program that only runs on your hard drive. The Adobe Photoshop Express runs off the website. I like this better because then I can have access to all the pictures I want to edit no matter where I might be. I’ll let you know if I like the experience. I know a little bit about Photoshop so I should be able to tool around and do a nifty thing or two. I’ll link my album when I get something up there.

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, I call VZW tech support and they have me go through the hoops. It was a bit tricky since I called them on my
cell phone – I ended up having to borrow someone else’s so I could talk while troubleshooting the connection. We even tried making a manual connection to the VZW BroadbandAccess network. No go! so the very kind tech lets me know that I’ll receive a text message with the issue number in it and it will be looked at by the techs when it comes up in their queue.

About 30 minutes later I get a phone call from the same tech that helped me out indicating that someone else told her I needed to check the Microsoft site for “Error 720″ and will have to uninstall/reinstall the TCP/IP protocol. Well, I’m not daunted by this, but frankly I thought their brains were full of marshmallow. So I try to use the phone on my desktop first, just to see if I really needed to look at Dial-Up issues on my laptop. I’m all fired up now… tell ME to reinstall TCP/IP on my laptop will you? I will show you! As if I don’t know what I’m doing!? How dare you! I install everything on the desktop, click connect and… well it worked! What the hell? They were right? Actually, yeah… they were because I took the stock installatoin of Windows XP straight from the IBM image that came with Service Pack 1. I didn’t install it myself from scratch. *sigh*

I look on Microsoft’s site for the Error 720, but the only one I can find is one for Windows 2000 Professional. This particular KB article says to remove TCP/IP as part of the troubleshooting process. Well, you can’t do that in XP. I dig a little deeper and find a resolution on Lenovo’s (Lenovo is the Chinese company that bought the ThinkPad line from IBM) Support Forums. Here’s what I had to go through that worked for me.

So, thank you, VZ Tech! I really appreciate you calling me back on that because I was about to turn off the feature and rant on Verizon Wireless!

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.

So what about the actual whole drive encryption? Well, this is currently only available to do in Windows. Since I’m using XP, I was okay with this. I installed TrueCrypt version 5.1a and started going through the prompts to encrypt the whole drive. OK, before you try this on your own, you’re going to need the ability to burn a recovery CD. The program will not allow you to finish whole drive encryption until it can verify that you’ve created a TRD (TrueCrypt Recovery Disk). So if your laptop won’t burn CDs (like my refurbished one here doesn’t) then you’ll need a USB key or some other means (I used a mapped network drive) to move the .ISO file to another computer to be able to burn the TRD. You’ll also be asked to choose a passphrase of 20 or more characters! Ouch… well, I decided to use 3 of my strong passwords strung together. You can get by with less, but I don’t recommend it. Just DON’T FORGET YOUR PASSPHRASE, or you will lose access to all data on the drive. Important data should be backed up somewhere, maybe an offsite file backup like MozyPro.

One of the things I was worried about was the data. The whole idea of whole drive encryption is to make sure the data on the hard drive is encrypted and not readable. But when you write data to a drive, there is a possibility of data still being read off the drive, even if it has been overwritten (see this article for a little more information on this). I don’t have much information on my laptop that I’m worried about, so in essence I’m not overly concerned with the data on my own drive. However, I am concerned with the data on my customers’ drives. Many of them are bound by HIPAA and have access to an abundance of sensitive data. Laptops get stolen. So, not encrypting your data is not quite like leaving your car door unlocked in the Bronx, it’s more like leaving the car door locked (because you try to be careful with your laptop), but having built the car so you don’t need a key to start it – just a big red button that says ‘Start’.

Luckily, TrueCrypt offers 3 methods of wiping the drive as it encrypts the drive. I was pretty happy to see this as an option. I was trying to figure out how to use Darik’s Boot and Nuke system to wipe the data on the drive, then encrypt it – but that wouldn’t help me because after a wipe I’d have to replace all the data on the drive. Well, TrueCrypt offers a 3-pass, 7-pass and a 35-pass option for wiping the data ‘beneath’ the data the operating systems can use. I was happy to use the 7-pass option. When I started, it said it would take 8 hours to complete! Well, good thing I started the process late at night. After an hour of operation, I went back to check the computer and it said only 7 hours left! It was accurate – and typically I find the time estimations of software to be very inaccurate. So I went to bed, safely secure in the knowledge that my system would be ready when I woke up. And it was!

I didn’t notice any speed enhancement with the TrueCrypt drivers for access to my hard drive (nor do they actively advertise the fact), but I didn’t think they’d be noticable anyway. Maybe with a faster drive, like 7200 RPM or a nice SATA interface you may notice a difference. But I just don’t need my laptop for much more than writing here on IT Legends, so I don’t need that faster hard drive.

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.

Turns out that the developers of Clonezilla already thought of this potential, and have released a Live CD with a dual-boot scenario that will also load GParted – a Linux-based partition utility. So I’m going to give this a shot and let you know how it goes.

Oh, by the way, in order to image the existing data from my laptop onto the new drive, I was able to use a USB adapter to connect my new drive to the laptop so it could be accessed and written to. So yes, Clonezilla supports USB drives. For laptops, I’d recommend:
Nippon Labs EN-25USB External Enclosure

Well, I just purchased a new 120GB hard drive for my refurbished laptop. That brings the total paid for my refurbished laptop to just over $600. I’m wondering if I should have bought a refurbished one now. Anyway, I will be using TrueCrypt to do whole drive encryption on the new hard drive. I could have done this on the old one, but I wanted more space anyway. This includes pre-boot authentication. It also helps protects my drive from being removed from my laptop and put into another computer to be mined (via some sort of USB adapter or something). Steve Gibson of GRC Corporation and the Security Now podcast has done his own testing and reported a throughput increase for data instead of an overhead decrease. I’m totally fascinated by this and it implies that the TrueCrypt drivers for accessing your hard drive are just so much more efficient than the ones that come with Windows. I’ll let you know how it goes after I get the hard drive installed.

Get your own hard drive upgrade from Newegg.com, that’s where I buy most of my stuff.
Western Digital Scorpio 120GB 2.5″ ATA-6 Notebook Hard Drive