software

How to Protect your Computer for Free

Saturday, April 11th, 2009
by W8JKC

I always hear the same question from my friends and family, \”How do I protect my computer from viruses and spyware…?\” or it\’s variant \”What is the best virus scanner or spyware program…?\”

While I can\’t tell you exactly which is the best software to suit your needs, I can recommend the software that I use on a daily basis with My Windows Vista /Ubuntu 8.10 (dual booted) laptop.

On the Windows side, I have installed and use 2 programs to protect from viruses and spyware. The first one which protects from all sort of attacks and malicous software is called AVG Free. This program is developed by a company called AVG Technlogies (formerly Grisoft). To download see here or skip directly to the Windows download here.
I have used AVG on all my computers for the last 3 years with no problems since I installed it. Before AVG I had used either McAfee or Norton depending on which computer I was on and after installing it, I found that the previous program failed to detect some spyware and even a couple viruses on 2 occasions.

The second program I use is a firewall to block all malicous connections to and from my computer. This program is called Comodo Internet Security and it is developed by a company called Comodo Security Solutions. While the benefits of using this program are numerous, the down side is that after you install it, most if not all of your normal everyday programs have to be \”trained\” into Comodo so that it does not block them from accessing the internet or your files. This is fairly easy to do, as it will pop up on your screen, but it may get annoying for the first 2 weeks of using Comodo. During the setup of Comodo you have 3 options to choose from. The first is install the firewall only, the second is install the AntiVirus only, and the third is to install both. I chose firewall only, but feel free to choose any of them but keep in mind that it may give you errors and conflicts with AVG. See the Comodo site here or skip directly to the Windows download here.

When in Ubuntu I also use AVG, they have a version for linux and other operating systems.

To protect my whole network, my DSL modem is directly connected to a Smoothwall Linux Firewall/Router box. This helps protect the whole network with IDS, ICMP blocking, and many other features, It even allows URL, MAC, IP, and many other blocking options for outgoing connections.

If you have any questions or comments, please feel free to submit them below, or you can email me justin@helin_w8jkc.com.
I would love to hear what programs you use, and why you use them.

Server Upgrade

Thursday, December 4th, 2008
by W8JKC

This past thanksgiving weekend I upgraded my primary server.

I backed up about 19 GB of data, including websites, configurations, and other important data. That took about 7 hours. After that was complete I DBAN\’ed the hardrives and proceeded to boot from a CentOS 5 netinstall disk. This took about 1 hour to download and install all the packages and format the harddrives.

Here are the details of this server:

RAM: 380 MB, soon to be upgrade to about 1GB.
CPU: Intel Pentium 3 (667Mhz)
Graphics Card: ATI Rage 3 128 RF/SG AGP

Main HD: 10GB Fujitsu MPF3102AT
Second HD: 80GB Western Digital WD800BB-55JKC0
Network Card: 10/100 MBPS Intel Corporation 82557/8/9/0/1 Ethernet Pro 100

Mount Points:
/boot EXT3 /dev/hda1 122 MB
/        EXT3 /dev/hda2 6.2GB
/tmp  EXT3 /dev/hda5 1GB
/var    EXT3 /dev/hdb1 72GB

Note: You can view this systems details at any time by visiting http://wcatserver2.wcatnews.com

I attempted to install an Hosting Control Panel package, but it didn\’t work. Maybe later I can install a package such as ISPConfig (http://www.ispconfig.org)

This server is better with page load times, and speed than the old one. On average it took 30 secs or more to load this blog from the local network. Now it loads in under 10 seconds. Ideally after the RAM is upgraded it should load in under 5 seconds.

If you want more information on this box , please leave a comment or email me.

I am setting up a Mail, Mailing List, and Web Server on this machine, along with the Stark Scanner feed for http://scanamerica.us
You will notice on the right menu bar below the iTunes Video of the Week, a new Web Player of this feed.
For now I set that to plat Chicago FD, due to the fact that the software to broadcast the audio is not setup yet.
Server1 (http://wcatserver1.wcatnews.com) will host backup Web, IRC, and other software.

Both servers support SSL, PHP, and MySQL.