Wednesday, I was able to check off another one of those things on the 'To Do at least Once in your IT Career' list by degaussing hard drives. Degaussing a hard drive means using a device that generates a strong electromagnetic field to wipe the data on the drive. This is an important step that I've mentioned before in the 'Before you Recycle/Garbage that Old Computer' article … [Read more...]
GPO Deploying Adobe Reader 9.3.1
Adobe is in rapid-fire for releasing updates lately and with the bugs, crashes, and exploits that keep being discovered, they need to be. A few days over a month after version 9.3 patches were released for Adobe Reader and Adobe Acrobat, 9.3.1 is released to address further concerns From the related Adobe Security Bulletin: A critical vulnerability has been identified in Adobe … [Read more...]
OpenDNS pt. 2 – A Comparison
Following yesterday's article detailing the ins-and-outs of OpenDNS, I have also been working on providing some context about why you should consider utilizing OpenDNS. I'm not affiliated with OpenDNS in any way though I am very impressed with their product, so I tend to come off a bit like I have a sales pitch; as I was telling my wife about it last night, she asked "What do … [Read more...]
OpenDNS pt. 1 – A Solution to Many Problems
OpenDNS offers a service to all Internet users that goes to the core of networking to improve security, privacy, and performance. As a home user, you typically just use the DNS service that your ISP provides. The DNS (Domain Name System) server that your computer connects to has the responsibility to translate URLs that you want to visit into the IP Network Addresses of the … [Read more...]
Best Way to Recover from Hanging Group Policy Deployed Software
Deploying software through group policy is a great way to ensure all computers are up-to-date and running the same version but unfortunately, not everything runs as smoothly as we would like. I ran into a problem last Friday trying to deploy the updated Java RE 6 Update 18 where the antivirus would tie up the installer until the install process timed out. This only happened on … [Read more...]