Blogs

I'm sure many of us have at some time or other utilized a software-based disk imaging/cloning solution. Norton Ghost was one of the first I ever used and it was awesome. Heck, I'm even going to assume that a few of us have used hardware-based disk imaging equipment. My firm dropped a few grand on an ImageMASSter unit, it was slick but was limited to cloning as many drives as you bought expansion units for. Then, I was bitten by the Open Source Software bug and I never looked back. The attached article introduces you to Clonezilla (both the Live version and Clonezilla SE, or Server Edition). I've used this software now for close to 8 years and I'm amazed ...

So, I was perusing some of the usual junk mail I receive and I came across a great article about the top 10 Open Source IDS tools (you can, and should, read it here ) and it prompted this quick blog post. IDS can be a fickle b&$%*. There are many great tools available, some free, some inexpensive and some prohibitively expensive, particularly to small firms. Being at a small firm myself, I tend to look for the free or inexpensive tools. Unfortunately, some of these have a steep learning curve but with a little reading you can make them work. The article also discusses a pre-rolled Linux distribution that contains all of the tools described in the ...

On July 14th, the Raspberry Pi Foundation's founder, Eben Upton, announced that a new version of the Raspberry Pi "B" model, dubbed the model "B +". Get this... It still ONLY COSTS $35! The Raspberry Pi is a computer that is roughly the size of a credit card and can be connected to a TV (via HDMI) and a keyboard and you're off and running (after loading an OS on the SD card :). I'm using Raspbian which is a Pi-specific version of Debian Wheezy. These little computers can be used for hundreds of applications since they are inexpensive and very small. I use one in my reception area to display information, using Open Office, on the LCD TV that we had ...

The latest version of pfSense (2.1.3) is now available. This release follows closely after 2.1.2 and is primarily a security release that addresses a TCP and openssl issue (not Heartbleed, that was corrected in 2.1.2). The upgrade is quick and easy but be aware that it will require a restart of your pfSense box. You can find the details on the pfSense blog: https://blog.pfsense.org/?p=1272. If you are new to pfSense, I highly recommend "pfSense: The Definitive Guide" by Chris Buechler (the author of pfSense) and is an excellent guide. It's available on Amazon in paperback and kindle . Enjoy! Dale #FutureandEmergingTechnologies #ServerOperationsandSecurity ...

The following commands/utilities are installed by default on most Linux systems. If you do not have one of the commands, use your distributions package installer to add them in. I would guess that most of the time the things I care about the most on my Linux systems is performance. If things seem to be lagging a bit I’d like to know what resources are available and if a process seems to be hogging the system. Here are a few that I use frequently. The “top” command is typically used to quickly see the processor and memory usage on a system but will also show you the uptime, number of users on the system along with the number and state of the processing ...

For those of you running pfSense as your firewall, IPS, IDS (yes, it does all of those things), a new release is on the horizon. WOOT WOOT!!! Chris Buechler, co-founder of pfSense has announced that the 2.1.1-PRERELEASE is available at snapshots.pfsense.org and the list of changes since the 2.1-RELEASE can be found HERE . For those of you that do NOT use pfSense, I encourage you to give it a look-see. This is an enterprise-class firewall that is completely scalable to any size environment. #LawSchool #Large(251-500) #CorpLegalDepartment #Small(under151) #Firm #Government #ServerOperationsandSecurity #Judicial #OpenSourceSoftware ...