Joe Poniatowski

Jerry Pournelle, legendary technology columnist and fiction author, sent out a security advisory regarding the compromise of personal data on major online job boards.

My home server, which acts as a development web server as well as a file and print server for the numerous PCs around my household, was running on SUSE Linux 10.0. This version of SUSE was the only one of its kind, before Novel re-branded the free version of the OS as OpenSUSE. […]

How to find out what’s running on your PC, and why this is important.

SpyGuarder and Vista AntiVirus 2008 are two very nasty fake malware programs that try to extort money from you, and compromise the security of your system and data.

Anyone who’s used a personal computer for more than a week or two has undoubtedly noticed a gradual decrease in performance. There can be a number of causes for this, and a number of steps you can take to recover this lost performance. There are also a few preventative measures that can help […]

Adware and Spyware can slow your system down and compromise its security. Here is a discussion of some of the tools and utilities that can help you deal with them.

The benefits of a paid-for registry optimization tool.

This article was originally published by Triond on their web site ComputerSight. I thought it was time to reprint it here, so it appears below in its entirety.

Configuration Management (’CM’ hereafter) means a lot of different things to different people. Weighty tomes have been written describing the goals, policies, procedures, benefits, pitfalls, and a […]

Two cases in the news in the past few weeks, one dealing with the RIAA’s computer forensic investigators not having the correct licenses in several states, and the other with the 5th Amendment protections of passwords and encryption keys.

I first wrote this article as a submission to Helium’s Marketplace. It was not chosen, so my loss is your gain, as I’m posting it here in it’s entirety. Note that I received no compensation for this article, but since I was hoping WinRAR would choose to publish it, I can’t say it […]

How to recover a failing external hard drive

As a Configuration Manager, I’m always looking for ways to improve the automation of the builds and deployments of my company’s applications. We use scripts to compile the apps, replace certain token strings with environment-specific values, and copy the new executable code out to the production servers. Ideally, we should not have to […]

Helium has a great feature for writers wanting to compete for some extra money. It’s called their Marketplace. Outside publishers ask for specific articles, and offer specific amounts of money for each one. Anyone can write and submit their best article for each requested title. Once the deadline has passed, the […]

Use Secure Shell (SSH) to establish safe, encrypted internet connections through a firewall. With this method, you don’t have to open additional ports through your firewall in order to access external email accounts, access usenet newsgroup servers, and multimedia streams, which leaves your internal network more secure. This means you don’t have to worry about […]

I recently wrote an article on Helium, trying for a Marketplace sale. The topic was on the benefit of static landing pages for marketing web sites. I have my doubts about getting the sale, as my article is only rated 5th out of 7 right now, but you never know. In any […]

Well, I still haven’t solved the earlier problems (see other posts in this category), but now I’m having a new problem. One of the Windows servers we’ve had OpenSSH running on for quite some time suddenly seems have issues. It will stop accepting connections. The message in the sshd.log is always some […]

I recently ran a training session teaching some Configuration Management (CM) personnel some of the basic UNIX/linux shell commands, along with some of the common ways Secure Shell (SSH) utilities can be used to move application code around during deployments. I created an outline for the class, which is reproduced below. In no […]

The “Could not create an instance of the CmdLib object. Please register the Microsoft.CmdLib component.” error message was because of certain web server extensions that weren’t installed. I think the SQL Server Reporting Server needed to be installed. In any case, we’re past that now.
Current problem: we’re running the […]

Recently it was decided at the large State government facility where I work that Secure Shell (SSH) would be used to facilitate the deployment of application software to the servers. This approach has a number of advantages. All data transfers are encrypted. Key pairs can be used to automate the authentication, so […]

While waiting for Associated Content to publish the Charity Music article (something they’ve now agreed to do), I wrote a quick little overview of SSH and published it on Helium, where it’s now rated #1 of 2. What is SSH? The nice thing about Helium is that your submissions are published more or less […]