Also known as, the best little firewall in … well, anywhere! I have been using SmoothWall (the free, open source version) for years. I have used it with modems for dial-up access, as well as with cable and DSL connections. It’s a great product that is robust, feature rich, easy to manage and above all, very secure.

Not familiar with SmoothWall? Read more at http://www.smoothwall.org

I used to run an ISP and the majority of our customer base were dial-up customers. Even now, there are a majority of dial-up users out there still. SmoothWall is a great tool for dial-up users because it is essentially a hardened Linux distribution built solely to be a firewall/router. The IP stack in Linux is more efficient and much faster than Windows, so even on dial-up, you will get a performance boost running SmoothWall, plus the added security of a top notch firewall.

For all of the broadband users out there, you will get a tremendous performance boost when comparing it to the White Box store Linksys products. I am not knocking Linksys or anything like that, but in my own tests, I got almost double the throughput from my SmoothWall box versus my Linksys router. Plus, the SmoothWall box has loads more features and version 3 has even more piled on.

With built in features like this:

• Bandwidth usage graphs
• Transparent caching proxy server
• VPN support
• Anti-virus scanning of incoming pop3 email
• Dynamic and static DNS support
• QoS and more

There are really tons more features than I can list here, the ones listed above are just some highlights. Best of all, this wonderful product is free. Yep, that’s right, free. They do have commercial versions if you have a need for that, but they still maintain the open source GPL release that is absolutely free. So, all you have to invest is the cost of an old low powered pc that has been laying around the house anyway! I very highly recommend you check it out if you have a need for a good firewall product.

I wanted to write up something about the latest WordPress release, version 2.5. I have updated all of the WordPress powered sites that I manage which is more than ten and the upgrade went flawlessly on all sites. Each upgrade was the same, no variances. Why do I mention this part of the process? Well, because I have seen many instances (*cough*Win*cough*dows*cough*) where the same upgrade went very differently (and sometimes even failed) on different computers, even though they had been built or imaged or the application installed off of the same baseline. So, when I can install all of the WordPress upgrades and every one of them not only works, but operates as expected, that’s a big deal to me. This has been the norm in the past as well, not just in this last upgrade. Read the rest of this entry »

I am always thinking about ways that I can not only improve the site here, but also ways that I can provide something useful to visitors. Along those lines, I decided to put some network tools online fo visitors to use. You never know when you might need to ping or trace something from an outside source when troubleshooting a problem. There is also a Whois option, and even one to show the IP address that we see you coming from. That’s useful when trying to configure IP based access somewhere. I’ll be refining the tools and working to add more and improve the existing tools as time moves on. Let me know what you think, if you have any problems with them or suggestions, hit the contact link and drop me a line. Now, go check ‘em out!

This article from Slashdot ought to get you thinking! Read this:

“National Intelligence Director Mike McConnell is currently helping to draft a new Cyber-Security Policy that could make the debate over warrantless wiretaps seem like a petty squabble. The new policy would allow the government to access to the content of any email, file transfer, or web search.”

Dang. Don’t that just sound like a whole lot of fun?

In an article on Slashdot, we find that Network Solutions (NSI) has been caught registering every domain name that users check for availability from their whois service.  So, if you check to see if foo.com is available, and it is but you don’t register it immediately, they register it out from under you.  Nice job there NSI, way to provide a good service to the customer.  I have long suspected that someone was doing this, but I didn’t think the registrar was.  Wow.  Just goes to show that my aversion to dealing with this low life company was not incorrect.

Read more here …

It seems that the folks at GraffitiCMS, who make a competitor to WordPress, are aligning with Presidential hopefuls and slinging mud to promote their product even though it isn’t out of beta yet. I found the article here, I am not going to give them the satisfaction of linking to the original. Let’s take a walk though their arguments, shall we?

Read the rest of this entry »