Help Desk Geek – Help Desk Tips For IT Pros

You may hear the terms router, switch and hub used interchangeably. They look alike on the outside, but they’re very different on the inside. Hubs are dumb devices that simply repeat everything they hear. When one computer sends a signal to the hub, the hub sends the identical signal back out to all of the [...]

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Last week I have encountered a server with its http port 80 already taken by another software.  The “culprit” was unsurprisingly another web server software, the IIS.  Because the IIS users are already accustomed to the default port, the Apache installation had no choice but to use a less popular port for http, in this [...]

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If you’re working in IT, there are a few things that you need to know no matter what. They are basically essential skills for any IT person. One of those skills is knowing how to renew and release IP addresses. You’ll need to do this a lot during your IT career and it’s really useful [...]

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There may come a time when you need to write a script or remotely connect to the terminal and run a command to enable or disable the Windows firewall. For most IT environments, using Group Policy is the easiest way to configure the Windows Firewall on client computers. It’s also the easiest way to add [...]

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Encrypting your wireless network accomplishes two things: it helps keep out leeches (i.e your neighbours) who would otherwise use your WiFi for free Internet, and it helps prevent intruders from breaking into your system to snoop around your PC. Of course, most wireless routers have encryption turned off by default, so any choice you make [...]

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Just recently I visited a friend whose ISP used the MAC address of his LAN card to authenticate his connection.  Since we know that the MAC address is an important element of LAN and WAN identification, some ISPs use it for monitoring or authenticating their clients before they can gain access to the Internet.  Unforunately, [...]

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As an IT guy,  I monitor bandwidth usage to make sure network connections are performing at their optimum level.  Sometimes I encounter a rouge software application that eats up a lot of bandwidth.  Malware is notorious for eating bandwidth causing my torrent connections to perform really slow.  This led me to find ways to monitor [...]

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At our IT office, we have mostly Windows administrators, but we also have some people who love their Macs. They use their Macs for everything, including trying to manage a Windows network with them! Though they can’t do much, one thing that is pretty useful for them is remotely connecting to Windows PCs using Apple [...]

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If you noticed on public WIFI hotspots like coffee shops or airports, you can’t easily communicate with someone else’s computer over regular network communiction protocols.  Your shared folders, for example, are not accessible by others. You also wont be able to ping another computer on the network.  All computers are isolated from each other, thus [...]

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Securing a WIFI network could be done using several methods and the most common (i.e. WPA and WEP) methods employ a password type of mechanism.  However, I have found that securing a wireless network with just a password is not enough to defeat the very determined hackers.  However, if only trusted computers can connect to [...]

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