Tech From the Trenches

Pete’s last blog entry reminded me of another handy tip that every mail administrator should know.  Postfix allows you to enable an alternate port for outgoing mail traffic.  This is especially convenient when you have users that have problems sending mail through their home internet provider.  Most ISP’s will block port 25 to anywhere but [...]

I have experienced this problem on several occations, in different senarios.  Windows XP will at times create a new local profile for a user and they don’t have access to their old files or settings.  This can happen when a user is re-added to a Windows domain and the user id is changed.  The problem [...]

For those running IPCop to filter your home internet.  Here is a little tip to change the port to access the admin panel.  By default it is port 445.  However, many ISP’s block this port from outside the network, so we often change it to port 8080. To do this you need to get access [...]

Last week a family member came to me in a panic.  My drive is not working, no backup, panic mode has set in. Fortunatly the drive is visible in Disk Utility in OSX, but would mount sometimes and not others.  Problem was all my great tools for digging into the contents of a drive were [...]

For about two years we have been using IPCOp a free Firewall solution in our Learning Centers to provide Internet Filtering and Monitoring.  It is a simple easy to use solution.  For about 4 months now, I have run the same filtering in my home.  I took and old machine I just had floating around. [...]

I overheard something in the office, a second hand telling of a comment by a fellow Nerd Jerry Butler.  I am paraphrasing but it was something to the effect of I wish it was cool to be a Nerd when I was in school. This really got me thinking.  When did we stop using the [...]

The concept of a Bookmarklet (BMLet) or for you IE users a Favlet, has been around for years.  What it amounts to is embedding javascript code in the location field of a Bookmark.  Ok, short of using them to simplify the very addicting Facebook game Mafia Wars.  I will try to show a very practical [...]

Ok, so blogging is not my strong suit.  I do however have some tricks I have found through the years.  I will be posting some here as time allows. The first tip is clearing out temp files in Terminal on MAC OSX. sudo periodic daily weekly monthly Pretty Easy… I will add more later on [...]