This is the third post in a series on networking. If you are joining late, please read the first and second posts before going forward. Today’s post is going to build on the previous two posts, and we are going to discuss the protection of your network. I’d like to start by saying that network [...]

In my last post, I talked about the underpinnings of networking at the lower layers. This post is going to talk about NAT: network address translation. NAT is almost as universal as IPv4 networking, and is used nearly universally on home and small-and-medium-sized business networks—with good reason, too: Having more than one IPv4 address carries [...]

There are a number of things that I did not address in my post yesterday. My only goal in that post was to illustrate a (rather simple) network that had four subnets. I probably should have posted this article first, but I did not really think about that. This post is going to be somewhat long [...]

Someone recently brought to my attention that I’ve offended/hurt someone by the (by now, months old) words on my blog. That is perfectly fine. I’m not here to be a politically correct person. This is my space on the Internet—and I’ll say what I like here. You know how I believe in freedom and its [...]

Well, aside from the fact that it is a language that is awfully convenient for writing Web-based applications, anyway? It is sometimes really annoying. One of those situations where it is really annoying is when trying to do things that ought to be really simple. For example, when writing an accessor function for a boolean [...]

Recently on a mailing list of which I am a member, the following comment was posted: We pay cash at restaurants especially ones of certain nationalities. The context of this quote is a discussion on credit/debit card usage, and this statement came at the tail end of how care must be taken to ensure that [...]

So for the past couple of weeks I have been doing work at a client’s place of business. This client—like many other small and medium-sized businesses—uses Windows on all of their desktop systems. They have a couple of server boxes that are running GNU/Linux servers, but they are not running GNU/Linux on the desktop at [...]

Every now and again, I come back to looking at device drivers and driver-writing, and I wonder why there is not some common interface for device drivers. What would the world be like if we could write a device driver for Linux, and be able to use it on FreeBSD without modification? There was a [...]

So back on this topic again today.  I am going to take a look at a few different statements here in this post, and then I’m going to go over them and explain why these statements are or are not correct.  Should you wish to verify any of my information, you’re more than welcome to [...]

So, this weekend was… interesting. Through something of a comedy of errors, the server suffered some strange software issues that prevented it from working this weekend.  There was a bug in a recent update to the server software (running testing software) and that caused longer downtime than it should have due to various interactions between things [...]