I recently found myself in a situation where some pictures, that to me were priceless, had been deleted from my camera memory card. Unfortunately those pictures had not been moved or copied to any other media. Like most of us I wanted a free method of recovering them. I found a software called Recuva, which is a freeware Windows utility to restore files that have been accidentally deleted. This includes files emptied from the Recycle bin as well as images and other files that have been deleted by user error from digital camera memory cards or MP3 players. It will even bring back files that have been deleted by bugs, crashes and viruses! Read More...

A new Bill, H.R. 6312: Credit Union, Bank, and Thrift Regulatory Relief Act of 2008, was introduced June 19, 2008, and passed by the House on June 24, 2008.  The bill has now been sent to the Senate and awaits a vote. Read More...

Windows Steady State has been around for some time. It used to be called Shared Computer Toolkit for XP.  It saves changes to the system disk in a cached area and then when a user logs off, the system is right back like it was before they logged in.  Microsoft calls this Windows Disk Protection.  An admin can log in and make changes that are retained.  User documents can be redirected to another drive letter and those changes will be retained.  This software will work on XP, Vista, standalone, workgroup, domains – with group policies.  Windows Steady State could be very helpful with computers that are shared by multiple people such as those in a training classroom setting.

I visited with a HP storage engineer at a conference and he told me that the I/O module on a 1510i does NOT have the disk configuration information in it’s memory, but that the disk configuration is written on each disk drive. Therefore, if the I/O module fails, you can replace it with another module and the drive configuration (RAID, LUN’s, etc) will not be effected. He also suggested that if the I/O module fails, then you should move the cache memory from the old to the new I/O controller prior to bringing up the system so that the cache will be flushed to the disks.  I definitely recommend contacting HP support if your I/O controller goes out to verify this, but it made me feel better about the recoverability of our SAN.  If you have a spare I/O module on hand, recovering from an I/O module failure should be easy (in theory).

For you command line guys who think the Google interface is too glitzy, try Goosh. It puts a Unix-style interface in front of Google.  It's not an official product of google, but it returns google search results.  Enjoy!

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The FCC has extended the 'Do-Not-Call' Registry so that numbers will not be automatically be removed.  When it was first set up in 2003, numbers were to be removed after 5 years.  I, personally, have had the experience of numbers being removed after a couple of years, so I still recommend checking from time to time to be sure your numbers are still on there. Read More...

A study by Verizon Business contends nearly 9 out of 10 data breaches could have been prevented with reasonable security measures in place.  The study also indicates the great majority (73%) result from external threats.  However, it is also pointed out that damages are usually greater from internal threats.  A summary of the study can be found at http://www.eweek.com/c/a/Security/Your-Data-Breach-Was-Probably-Avoidable/

When building a terminal server, don’t forget to uninstall IE Enhanced Security BEFORE you install terminal services on a Windows 2003 Server, especially if you plan to sysprep the server and image it. For some reason, if you don’t do this, certain keys are left behind in the registry and in the default profile user hive (ntuser.dat file) that cause issues. IEES is uninstalled, but new user profiles created on that server still have remnants and do not function as expected. Users may get the IEES pop-ups when visiting any site that is not in their trusted sites list and it seems to affect JavaScript execution privileges as well. Here is the Microsoft article that addresses this issue (http://support.microsoft.com/kb/)933991). The workaround if this has happened is to follow Method 4 and then rebuild the affected profiles. If Method 3 is followed, it doesn’t seem be a complete fix from our experience.

There are two SCSI driver standards that are available for most SCSI HBA’s. The older standard (SCSIport) has been replaced by a newer technology (STORport). STORport allows faster I/O, duplexing and other advantages. You should use the STORport drivers for all HBA’s when available. This is especially revelant for FC cards. The details are: Read More...