Network Administration News

It may be useful at times to prevent a particular computer from appearing in such 'My Network Places' or similar groups. Note that it can only be kind of convenience, a privacy option,not a security measure.

Windows Firewall is by default a GUI-driven application; yet in many a situation, especially in cases when unattended changes should be made, or any other kind of automation is expected, command-line solutions could do well.

Changing Windows registry may result in hard to handle errors; in most cases, these setting leave no obvious logs and it's not a trivial task to determine the reason for the possible problem.

Regular backing up ones' data is the only way to guarantee there will be no significant consequences resulting from unexpected data loss.

There's an utility allowing to perform backup of your Vista-powered computer data onto a hard disk drive, or to a shared folder on a remote computer.

Denial of service attacks are popular nowadays. The most dangerous are the so-called distributed denial of service attacks, when network activity aimed at shutting the service down, is launched from a vast number of different locations (IPs). To handle that, in most cases one should have an expensive type of network hardware and software; however, there may be simpler solutions. Atlas Tuesday offers an example in Fighting off a DDOS attack on an Apache web server.

All the fine tuning in Windows is done via registry modification. The question is, what approach to use, to minimize the risk of catastrophic consequences. Any incorrect registry change may render the system damaged.

Content Delivery Networks are the natural response to the effects of Net growth, cyber-attacks and connectivity problems of any kind. Information must be delivered in time, it should circulate freely, this is the main goal of CDNs. It turns out that the so-called 'Cloud Computing', or distributed data processing and delivery can be the adequate basis for this type of service. Tech Republic tells more in Cloud storage objects critical to content delivery networks.

The default settings of most Windows versions is rather relaxed: most actions are allowed to users by default. However, in case users should be rather restricted in their choice of actions, several special actions should be performed. It is especially important in multi-user environment such as schools and computer classes in high schools. SysAdm Blog offers one of the technique to restrict users from arbitrarily running any executable in Disallowing .EXE’s in a WindowsXP/2003 Environment

Finding the manufacturer of a device may be painful and routine work. The variety of peripherals and the fact that but few OS do support drivers for all the devices in regular way, makes it a hard work to identify a device and find its exact characteristics - this is the knowledge required to make it function as expected. In Bored Sysadmin's Blog we can find an example of the mentioned technique: How to identify ANY mysterious “PCI Device”

A simple problem may have rather a complex solution, and vice versa. Most complex situations are when cross-tool compatibility is required in the environment when tools can't be either configured according to the task, or there are other restrictions preventing from applying the necessary configuration. An example of such a situation is described on SysAdmin Adventures, in Forcing browsers to “open with..” or “save” attachments.