IT Legends - Tech in Connecticut

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…)

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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…)

Anyone that uses AVG Free should have received some sort of popup to upgrade to version 8. This is definitely recommended, however some users may be confused on how to download just the free software. The pay for software is well-priced, but I personally use other methods (I’ll describe these later and link to them when I do) to protect myself against the other threats. Click here to get directly to AVG’s free version page for downloading this great antivirus product. By the way, I also recommend their professional and network versions to my clients for protecting their networks. I’ve been using the free version for (more…)

So Windows XP Service Pack 3 hasn’t yet been released into the Windows Update or Microsoft Download sites. But I am still able to install it with a direct link download. Where can you get your own copy? Maybe you should try the Do It Yourself Service Pack software from Heise Security. The article was written in December 2006, but on page four it links you to the project download page. I link the article so you can read about what it does and how it does it. I’d like to mention that not only will it do security updates for Windows OSs, it will also perform security updates for MS Office. I love this product. You have blacklist options and you can even add files/KB articles (more…)