30. July 2009 by Myke.

As simple and easy as this task is, we received about 10 emails over the last 2 weeks asking, “I have my users set up to use a mapped drive for their personal data stored on the network.  How can I make that available to them while they are not on the network?”

Easy, open up My Computer and right-click on the mapped drive and select “Make available offline”.  That’s it.  Once the wizard pops up you can detail what you want the offline files to do and once you complete the wizard, it will begin the sync of the files to the local PC.  You are now done.  Cheers.

Posted in Technical Questions, Networking, Microsoft, Desktops, Laptops, Storage | No Comments »

15. June 2009 by Myke.

Ever wondered how many addresses are possible using IPv6?  I wanted to know and thought I would share with you.  IPv6 can have 2^128 IP addresses.  That is a lot and if you are wondering how many that is exactly…2^128 = 340,282,366,920,938,463,463,374,607,431,768,211,456.  Now the question is, can you say that number out loud or even in your head?

Okay, take a deep breath and say after me - “340 undecillion, 282 decillion, 366 nonillion, 920 octillion, 938 septillion, 463 sextillion, 463 quintillion, 374 quadrillion, 607 trillion, 431 billion, 768 million, 211 thousand and 456″

Okay all you network junkies…try filling that address range up.

Posted in Internet, Networking | No Comments »

29. March 2009 by Myke.

There is a ton of buzz all over the media world about this worm and what it will do and how to tell if you have.  As complex as this worm is, it is also very simple to determine if you have it or not.

Step 1 - If you have Automatic Updates turned on, check to see if it is now turned off.  These reason is that this worm actually turns off updates to protect itself.

Step 2 - Manually run Microsoft Updates.  If you can run updates manually on your computer then you are okay.  This worm will actually prevent you from connecting to the update sites.

Now that we know how to check for it, how do you prevent it.  Very simple.  Keep your computer updated and make sure your anti-virus software is running and current.

What do you do if you have this worm?  You will want to contact your anti-virus software vendor and see if they can help you out.  If not and they want to charge you an arm and a leg, give it a go yourself.  There is a couple very easy to use and free tools you can use to remove it but it will take some patience.

• Malwarebytes Anti-Malware - You can grab this GREAT tool from www.malwarebytes.org.
• LavaSoft Ad-Aware - You can grab this great little removal tool from www.lavasoft.com.

Now that you have a couple of removal tools, start running them and cleaning.  A great tip is to update both pieces of this software and then run them from Safe Mode with your computer not on the network/Internet.

Good luck and happy hunting, so to speak.

Posted in Networking, Internet, Registry, Scripting, Security, Technical Questions, Laptops, Desktops, Microsoft, General Hardware, Servers | No Comments »

29. January 2009 by Myke.

The “The remote computer requires Network Level Authentication, which your computer does not support.” error is what you get when you try to connect to computer running Server 2008/Windows Vista with using recently updated Remote Desktop Client.

It looks like Windows XP doesn’t support Network Level Authentication even with the new Remote Desktop Client so you will have to turn NLA off in Server 2008/Windows Vista.

Got to System Properties and select “Allow connections from computer running any version of Remote Desktop (less secure). It’s less secure, but it works.

Posted in Networking, Security, Microsoft, Servers | No Comments »

27. January 2009 by Myke.

IPv4 is the fourth revision in the long development of IP and it is actually the first to be widely deployed.  Combined with IPv6, it is the core of inter-networking methods of the Internet.  IPv4 is to this day the most widely deployed Internet Layer protocol.

IPv4 uses 32-bit (four-byte) addresses, which limits the address space to 4,294,967,296 (2³²) possible unique addresses. However, some are reserved for special purposes such as private networks (~18 million addresses) or multi-cast addresses (~16 million addresses). This reduces the number of addresses that can be allocated as public Internet addresses. As the number of addresses available are consumed, an IPv4 address shortage appears to be inevitable, however network address translation (NAT) has significantly delayed this inevitability.

This limitation has helped stimulate the push towards IPv6, which is currently in the early stages of deployment and is currently the only contender to replace IPv4.

IPv6 is the next generation Internet Layer protocol for inter-networks and the Internet.  In December 2008, despite celebrating its 10-year anniversary as a Standards Track protocol, IPv6 was only in its infancy in terms of general world-wide deployment. A recent study by Google indicates that penetration is still less than one percent of Internet traffic in any country. The leaders are Russia (0.76%), France (0.65%), Ukraine (0.64%), Norway (0.49%), and the United States (0.45%). Although Asia leads in terms of absolute deployment numbers, the relative penetration is smaller (e.g., China: 0.24%). IPv6 is implemented on all major operating systems in use in commercial, business, and home consumer environments. According to the study, Mac OS leads in IPv6 penetration of 2.44%, followed by Linux (0.93%) and Windows Vista (0.32%).

The length of network addresses emphasize a most important change when moving from IPv4 to IPv6. IPv6 addresses are 128 bits long (as defined by RFC 4291), whereas IPv4 addresses are 32 bits; where the IPv4 address space contains roughly 4 billion addresses, IPv6 has enough room for 3.4×10³⁸ unique addresses.

IPv6 addresses are typically composed of two logical parts: a 64-bit (sub-)network prefix, and a 64-bit host part, which is either automatically generated from the interface’s MAC address or assigned sequentially. Because the globally unique MAC addresses offer an opportunity to track user equipment, and so users, across time and IPv6 address changes, RFC 3041 was developed to reduce the prospect of user identity being permanently tied to an IPv6 address, thus restoring some of the possibilities of anonymity existing at IPv4. RFC 3041 specifies a mechanism by which time-varying random bit strings can be used as interface circuit identifiers, replacing unchanging and traceable MAC addresses.

So this brings us to the differences between IPv4 and IPv6:

1. Simplified header format. IPv6 has a fixed length header, which does not include most of the options an IPv4 header can include. Even though the IPv6 header contains two 128 bit addresses (source and destination IP address) the whole header has a fixed length of 40 bytes only. This allows for faster processing.
   Options are dealt with in extension headers, which are only inserted after the IPv6 header if needed. So for instance if a packet needs to be fragmented, the fragmentation header is inserted after the IPv6 header. The basic set of extension headers is defined in RFC 2460.
2. Address extended to 128 bits. This allows for hierarchical structure of the address space and provides enough addresses for almost every ‘grain of sand’ on the earth. Important for security and new services/devices that will need multiple IP addresses and/or permanent connectivity.
3. A lot of the new IPv6 functionality is built into ICMPv6 such as Neighbor Discovery, Autoconfiguration, Multi-cast Listener Discovery, Path MTU Discovery.
4. Enhanced Security and QoS Features.

posted by: Myke Reinhold
credit: Homerun-Networks, Google, Wikipedia

Posted in Internet, Networking, Security | No Comments »

10. September 2008 by Myke.

If you are like us, you have been called in to give an estimate on cleaning up some cabling work.  You walk in and within an instant you decide your company no longer cables.  We are gathering some photos now of some of the worst cabling jobs you have encountered.  We all want a clean and pretty data center, but sometimes you have to know when to say “no”.

And we save the best for last…

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15. August 2008 by Myke.

Comcast is currently testing a new protocol - agnostic traffic management

After coming under fire and finally getting nailed for lying, cheating and playing big brother Comcast is testing a new approach.  Rather than limiting the bandwidth available to all BitTorrent users when network traffic is heavy (all day mind you), the company will target the individuals clogging the pipe.  By measuring aggregate bandwidth consumption, Comcast can identify the heaviest users.  During times of network congestion, the heavy users will notice a delay in their data requests until overall traffic has gone down.

Comcast is currently testing this idea in PA and WA and has been since June.  If the testing goes well, they will start to roll this out by the end of the year.

Okay, my take on this is that they are trying to cover themselves for their failure last year and going into this year.  Comcast users are still complaining and the FCC is still involved.  Thank god for Qwest fiber Internet.

Posted in Internet, Networking | No Comments »

11. August 2008 by Myke.

We have received numerous e-mails in regards to what we did to test our “Old Comcraptic” broadband speeds and what we used to test our new “QWest Sent From the Gods” broadband speeds.  Well this is as easy as pie folks.  You can test any Internet service you are running by using any one of the following sites.

Speedtest.net     Gadget Show     Speakeasy.net     McAfee Speedometer     MySpeed

You can also go for the trusty Google search and go from there.  There are many ways to test this out and all are free.  Always remember this little tip, test your speed from at least 3 different groups to get a more accurate speed average.  Good luck and happy surfing.

posted by: Myke Reinhold

Posted in Networking | No Comments »