Wanderings of a RuinExplorer

There are a number of reasons why someone would want to enable content filtering on their home network. Most don't know where to start or use software that may not exactly address their need. I personally use and recommend OpenDNS FamilyShield. It's free, it's relatively easy to use, and best of all, when installed correctly, it protects all the devices connected to your network. To start, you'll need a little background information: DNS DNS stands for Domain Name System - think of it as a phonebook for the internet. People understand web site addresses or URLs such as www.google.com. Computers understand IP addresses such as 74.125.224.33. DNS translates web site addresses (www.google.com) into IP addresses (74.125.224.33). I won't go into all the detail, but let me brief you on the process: When you type a URL into your browser, www.google.com, your computer sends a request to a DNS server (typically provided by your Internet Service Provider) to transla...

I've actually worked on a number of machines that will not boot to USB. Granted, this article may have a narrow use case by today's standards, but for that poor guy out there dealing with this problem, here you go. At one point, nearly all desktop computers had a bios system by either AMIBIOS (American Megatrends) or Phoenix BIOS (Phoenix Technologies). These two major icons in the field were adopting the ability to boot to USB about the same time motherboard manufacturers started branching out with their own flavors of BIOS. So there is a narrow period of time where it was really common to have USB ports on computers without the ability to boot to them. Plop Boot Manager I stumbled across Plop Boot Manager while dealing with just such a computer. This tool is incredibly small and I will even admit to having loaded it to a 3.5inch floppy in one specific case (chances are that'll never happen again). Most of the time however, I loaded this 544KB iso to a CD and ...

By today's standards, CDs and even DVDs are cumbersome to work with. They have to be handled with care, they are typically write once media (I'm not a fan of the re-writable variety), and I actually work on a number of machines that don't have disc drives. USB flash drives are popular and ever increasing in capacity. Best part is, it's relatively easy to find older ones that aren't big enough for some person's specific taste, but large enough for some powerful recovery and support tools. I have several I keep close at hand around the shop with the following tools in decreasing size: Knoppix Ultimate Boot CD DSL (DamnSmallLinux)  (a measly 50 MB image, fits on a 64MB flash drive!) DBAN (Darik's Boot And Nuke) I'll go over why these specific tools at some point, but I use to keep these tools close at hand on CDs and DVDs (knoppix). I was constantly re-burning them to keep the images up to date and finding myself frustrated on a few machines with...

Let's start with the basics as skills such as this are needed as foundation for many more to come. Many new computers come bundled with a suite of software for burning CDs and DVDs such as Nero Burning Rom or Roxio RecordNow. Frequently these are watered down versions in hopes that the user will pay for a full license down the road. The latest operating systems even have built in features to write to physical media including CDs and DVDs, but its not always the case. I like to emphasis software that is readily available either open source, or otherwise available without cost to users. So depending on if you are burning a CD or DVD image file to disc or if you are creating your own compilation, I recommend ImgBurn or CDBurnerXP. ImgBurn For burning image files such as .iso to disc, I recommend ImgBurn . ImgBurn is geared towards this specific task. Lets say you needed to perform a recovery operation on a computer and downloaded the latest copy of Ultimate Boot CD  (I'll w...