justin fielding

Following up on my previous review of FreeNAS, I have had some time to play around and investigate further. Unfortunately, due to issues with the current release of VMWare Fusion (bridged networking does not work), I was unable to use the downloadable virtual appliance. Instead, I created a clean Parallels virtual machine and installed from …

Badware -> Malware: “software designed to infiltrate or damage a computer system, without the owner’s informed consent.” Stopbadware.org describes itself as ‘a “Neighborhood Watch” campaign aimed at fighting badware’—with support from industry leaders such as Google, Sun and Lenovo stopbadware.org report on software which misrepresents itself or has malicious intent. AOL has suffered a major …

Dell has announced a recall of over 4 million laptop batteries due to the risk of ‘overheating’.  As many who follow news within the IT industry will know, the events which have prompted this recall can be described as a little more serious than ‘overheating’—one example being this laptop which burst in to flames at …

It’s often difficult to decide on a policy for locking down your workstations, especially in a small- to medium-size enterprise. It’s nice to allow users some freedom to personalise their computers–install tickers and screensavers, etc; however, there comes a point where an inordinate amount of time is spent repairing and rebuilding machines due to users …

As I’m sure you would have read in the last two weeks, I have been looking at the security issues caused by the recent explosion in USB storage; not only are the old issues of virus infection / migration brought up, but due to the small size of USB flash keys—data loss and theft are …

There are many areas of system administration which pose a much bigger challenge to Linux sys admins than to our Windows counterparts. One of the biggest areas of difficulty I have personally come across is that of patch management. Every day new vulnerabilities are reported in all kinds of software—be it for Windows, Linux, BSD, …

Firefox 1.5 has been officially released, my older version of Firefox notified me and downloaded the update by itself.  To be honest there isn’t much difference to previous versions in a day to day use, however there are some problems…  Since the update my notebook has inexplicably crashed, and quite often slows down considerably.  It …

In 2004 the IT contractor market grew by an estimated 30% and 2005 was predicted to follow suit with a high demand in financial services, telecoms, and–most notably–in the public sector (government). IT contractors used to have a reputation as loner geeks-for-hire, whose only business value was their ability to keep the complex systems running …

I came across a very useful little set of perl scripts packaged together as ‘Logwatch’ (http://www2.logwatch.org:81/index.html).  This wonderful set of tool will parse your logs and then email a daily report with all of the important statistics and data in one place.  The package is easily configured and can be used to parse archive logs …

There seems to have been quite a lot of debate in the security arena over the past few day on the topic of Windows vs. Linux as a secure platform.  As you can guess it’s a hot topic with many heated opinions on either side. ComupterWeekly state that Linux/Unix bugs outnumbered Windows flaws three-to-one with …

Intrusion detection is a vital part of any firewall, it’s all very well to block traffic, but how do you know what is being blocked and what is going through on your open service ports (SMTP, IMAP, DNS etc)?  Snort is the most popular Intrusion Detection system around.  It’s offered as an open source project, …

An article in Computer Weekly mentioned that Bristol council will be migrating 5500 desktops to Sun’s StarOffice suite.  Even taking in to account the cost of converting existing documents and two half-day courses for users, they stand to make massive savings over Microsoft Office.  StarOffice is developed by Sun, here is their sales description “Enhanced …