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admin on Monday, December 14th, 2009 |
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Few people will really care about the path that your packet takes when sending a message, but if you’re one of those high tech egg heads then this article may be of great interest to you. It can become very addictive so proceed with caution.
If you’re using a Microsoft Windows based operation system, then it’s very easy to trace the route that your message has taken. Not only that, you can see exactly how many routers it took to get your message from point A to point B. You can do this by using a program that is on your computer called Traceroute. That is exactly what the program does. It traces the route a message takes to get to its final destination.
To run the program you have to go to a DOS prompt. After doing this, go to the C:windows directory and type tracert followed by the URL of the Internet site you’re connected to at the time. It will give you a rather technical spec sheet of every IP address it stopped at along the way until it got to its final destination.
The first number on the spec sheet tells you how many routers it went through to get to its final destination. Then each individual router listed on the page is numbered from 1 down to the last one which is actually the final destination. The next 3 numbers on each line for each router shows how long the packet took… Read the rest
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admin on Wednesday, December 9th, 2009 |
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There are more and more individuals opting to work from home than ever before. The advantages to this are many including avoiding the morning and evening rush hours, being able to spend time with your kids and significant other, and doing everything on your own time. Though the pitfalls are many, the one that I will be focusing on in this article is that of setting up a secure wireless network for your home based business. Right now somewhere out there, there is someone with a receiver waiting to pick up on an unsuspecting person’s wireless local area network. Their hope is to garner some sensitive information that may lead to identity theft, and stolen proprietary business information.
Most businesses owners are not technically inclined, though they may be power users, in general security settings is not one of the first things they want to mess around with in their day to day operations. This makes most wireless LANs a great target for information predators.
Here are some general guidelines to follow in setting up your wireless network. Though it may vary from vendor to vendor, the gist is more or less the same:
1. Setup the wireless access/router point via a wired client.
2. Always change the factory setting password to something difficult for someone to guess.
3. Enable 128-bit Wired Equivalency Privacy (WEP) encryption on both your access point and network card. From time to time change the WEP key entries. If your hardware does… Read the rest
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admin on Wednesday, December 9th, 2009 |
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Cabling your home for computer network – still a requirement?
With proliferation of wireless networking and communication equipment it is oh-so-tempting to cut the cord and save a significant sum of money in the process. But is everything that a regular computer networking user needs can be done using just wireless network? Let’s take a look at some pros and contras:
1. One important advantage of having a cabled network is the available bandwidth or simply speed. At the present point in time the speed of connection via a simple and inexpensive CAT5E cable can be 1000Mbit/sec, whereas the best that IEEE802.11g (one of the many flavors of Wi-Fi) can offer is only 54Mbit/sec. It may not seem so significant if you think you are only browsing Internet, and the DSL speed available to you is 1.5Mbit/sec. However, if you need to print via your network connection on a remote printer, you should realize that the print jobs, depending on the amount of graphic data in them, can easily reach dozens and even hundreds megabytes. Since 1Byte=8bit one 100MByte print job will take 15 seconds (and in reality this time can be much longer) to transmit via a Wi-Fi wireless connection, and this time shrinks to mere 1 sec or less on wired 1000MBit/s Ethernet connection. Same principal applies to transferring files, backing up files on other computers in the network etc.
2. It is not possible today and with all probability will not be possible in the future… Read the rest