If your a network admin, and you’re not using virtualization in your disaster recovery, then you’re probably being negligent. VMware ESXi is free. You can’t do all of the fancy stuff, like VM motion, but it is the same bare-metal hypervisor as ESX. You can register, download, and obtain a free license for ESXi here. ESXi is pickier when it comes to hardware than its pricier counterpart ESX. However, if your hardware works with the drivers it does have, you can add your hardware IDs to the configuration files and use your hardware. If you use a system, motherboard, and/or NIC listed on the community maintained list and download and use the community maintained configthen yo... [More]

Having an Intrusion Detection System isn’t optional for network admins that are audited. An IDS is also very handy to have as it shows you everything that is going on. You don't have to spend a lot of money on this, especially since most of the best tools are free. In my case, I wanted: network intrusion detection, network inventorying, and security scanning. I spent a lot of time messing around with separate packages for getting the functionality I wanted, but it was a pain to manage them all separately. I finally found an all-in-one system which met all of my requirements. OSSIM provides snort, nagios, ntop, and nessus (and various other security tools); this met all of my needs. It ... [More]

Fortunately, my company is enrolled in a 6 year microsoft subscription. This probably sounded appealing when Microsoft partners gave their speech (a year before they had a dedicated IT professional). I admit that it is nice to have a server license with the ability to upgrade to the current version at the time of my choosing. A company definitely saves money over time. Anyheuw, thats what I did. I have a single forrest with one domain. The domain I inherited was originally a windows 2000 domain. This became obvious after examining the selected options and functional levels. Apart from these inconveniences, upgrading from 2003 DCs to 2008 DCs was a snap. Important: You will need to... [More]

If you have a linksys wireless router (usually blue with 2 antennas), chances are it has built in dyndns subscription software. Thats what I have anyway. I'm sure other routers have the same type of functionality. Dyndns will keep track of your ip address and allow you to associate it with a free host name. Afterwards, configure your router to allow port 80 (or port 443 if you are running a secured site) to be passed to a specific machine behind your router. You could purchase a domain name somewhere like GoDaddy.com . they're cheap. You can configure your newly purchased domian name as described in this forum. These instructions are written for MyDomains.com and Dyndns.org, but th... [More]