IT Legends – Tech in Connecticut

In a previous post about not runing anti virus, I mentioned that you shouldn’t go to shady, possibly suspect sites.  Well, how do you determine one?  I am by no means the guru on this, a lot of it is gut feel.  Recently I had to get a replacement battery for a laptop for a friend of mine.  I was trying to locate one at a decent price and I turned up with a page that was not looking very professional.  The page was supposedly for a local shop somewhere in USA that also sold its stuff online, so it looked like an in-house web job by a programmer that doesn’t know much about Web Interfaces.  That’s okay, the site worked alright and I was able to find what I thought I needed.  But I was suspect that it just might have been a phishing or identifty-theft site.  So, operating under the assumption that scam sites are usually short-lived and don’t have any history to them, I looked it up.  There’s an archiving project for the Internet called the Way Back Machine by the folks at The Internet Archive (which I learned about from listening to The Tech Guy – not for this purpose but because they were talking about some changes coming in copyright laws.).  I checked what the site looked like a few years ago, and I figured if it were truly a phishing/scam site it would not have existing then, or if it did it would have been very different.  Anyhow, the site I was looking at had a long history of promoting the exact same thing.  Also a quick Google search on the site address with “scam” turned up nothing.  Just in case, I also put in the company’s name.  It all appeared to be legit.

This isn’t the end-all guide to checking the credibility of a website, but give it a shot if you come into something you question.

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…)