I wanted to share something that I observed recently on my own PC.  I am running Vista Home Premium, it came on my Alienware box.  I had some directories shared so I could hit them from some of my other PC’s, and the share names had underscores (_) in them.  Well, I recently installed Vista’s SP1 and afterwards, I noticed that my network shares were not working.  Hmm, that’s strange.  Skip ahead and what I found out was that after the SP1 install, my share names were renamed to the same thing, only without the underscore.  Well now, how about that?  So I had something like share_name, and then it became sharename without me changing it.  Not that big of a deal, but I thought I would share just in case anyone else was having the same troubles.

It appears that if you are running Windows XP Service Pack 3 and using ZoneAlarm firewall software, when you install patch KB951748 (MS08-037) that came out yesterday’s “patch Tuesday” bunch, it breaks ZoneAlarm. You cannot access the Internet until you either uninstall the patch or turn off ZoneAlarm. This patch is related to the DNS poisoning exploit that came out recently, so it should be applied. What to do? Well, one suggested workaround (other than the two mentioned above) was to lower the security settings to medium in ZoneAlarm. At least then you don’t have to disable it entirely. Another suggested fix has been to leave ZoneAlarm at High and set the Internet Security Zone to Custom and add the following rule “Allow outgoing TCP Ports:80,443″. I cannot verify that these fixes work, I don’t use ZoneAlarm myself, but others hit by this problem have had success with them.

Here is the Microsoft link with information about the patch:

http://www.microsoft.com/ … /ms08-037.mspx

Here is the official link from ZoneAlarm about the problem:

http://download.zonealarm.com/ … /LossOfInternetAccessIssue.html

Let me start this post by saying that I am a game addict, and not just video games either. Yep, years ago I was a pen and paper RPG nerd, and still am although I don’t really play much anymore. I love the books though, I love the stories, and therefore I have gravitated to computer games. What does this have to do with this site? Well, when I find something really cool, especially if it has to do with computers and/or related technology, I want to share it.

I played both Diablo and Diablo 2, including the expansions, and I don’t think anyone can argue that the Diablo series set the bar for many other games. How often have you seen games out there that were pretty much blatant Diablo rip-offs? From the GUI to the gameplay, they were trying to ride that same wave and catch some of the masters glory. Never seemed to work, did it? Just like World Of Warcraft is setting the bar for MMO’s with plenty of copy cats to follow, Diablo did the same thing years ago.

Well, now it’s doing it again. I got a chance to watch the HD gameplay trailer for Diablo 3 today and I was blown away. It looks like Blizzard is redefining this type of game all over again. The trailer was graphically awesome to be sure, but the gameplay and new features were insane. I wanted to play this game so bad I could taste it. Trust me, it will be a very long wait for this title to come out. Let me say too, I don’t see this is hype or vapor, this trailer is simply the game, and someone playing it narrating what is going on. Very cool.

Here, I have a link to the trailer that you can download in chunks. The whole trailer is almost 600MB and you can get it at FilePlanet [Link], but for those that don’t want to bite off all that at once, you can get it here in 12MB pieces. There are lots of places on the net to get bits and pieces of the trailer, but I can tell you that the entire HD trailer is an awesome thing, I highly recommend grabbing it. Then you can sit back, fire it up and just get lost in this magnificent game.  Grab the smaller chunks here.

Hi folks, it’s been a bit since I put anything new up here, life has been real busy lately.  To that end though, I have been working on stuff for the site, and I just posted something that I think is very useful.  It took awhile to put it all together, but nothing is too good for my visitors.

I have been working with Veritas Volume Manager, now called Veritas Storage Foundation lately.  I have worked with it in the past, but not as in depth as I have in recent weeks.  I decided to make a reference for myself, since I seem to get into it for a bit and then don’t touch it for awhile because it just runs.  Then I figured I would make it as comprehensive as I could, plus easy to read, pretty, etc, and then post it here for anyone and everyone that might find it useful.

I have it on the site in HTML format here, and I also have it up in the downloads section as a PDF if you wan to download a copy.  Check it out and let me know if you see anything I missed, I hope you find it useful!

In this post, I’d like to do two things.  First off, I want to plug a really cool site called PortableApps.com that has some really cool software in the form of … well, portable apps.  What these are, are common widely used applications that have been transformed in such a way that they can run right off of your thumb drive, no install necessary, hence the term portable.  They have lots of cool stuff that you can download, absolutely free, and use right off your thumb drive, or hard drive, or anywhere really.  It’s nice being able to have firefox and open office (and much more) with you, no matter where you go, even with all of your own settings and customizations.  That’s hard to beat!  Go check it out, you won’t be disappointed I am sure. Read the rest of this entry »

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.