As a CCNA I am asked a lot of times by curious friends or relatives about various precautions they can take to keep their Wi-Fi network safe from hackers or unauthenticated users. So today I thought of compiling some simple steps in a post which I usually recommend to keep the wireless network secure. These settings can be configured/changed in admin page of your Wi-Fi router by putting in the IP address of your router in a browser’s URL toolbar.

Change the default password

Each router has a default username and password, and you should always change these the moment you start configuring the router. If the router’s password is either unchanged common or weak, a hacker might be able to reconfigure the router and wipe out all your other security measures, making them useless. You should try to use a good mix of numbers and characters to be on the safe side.

Disable the DHCP service

DHCP (Dynamic Host Configuration Protocol) enables remote computers connected to the router to obtain an IP address and connect to the network without needing to know the IP and Router address information. Disabling the DHCP services is

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Its been two weeks now since I have been using OS X and I find it an extremely stable and interactive operating system to use.

One of my gripes while using it was that in Finder window, there was no displaying of the path from the root to the current folder or file, something I find useful sometimes.

Turns out, you have to write the following command in Terminal to activate the display of the path in the top of the Finder window:

defaults write com.apple.finder _FXShowPosixPathInTitle -bool YES

Press return after typing the above line, hold down the ‘option’ key and right click on the Finder in Dock and click relaunch. To undo the change just replace the YES with NO in the above line and do the whole procedure again.

X11 for Mac OS X is an implementation of the X Window System that makes it possible to run X11-based applications in Mac OS X, for eg. Open Office or GIMP. If you are not using any of such applications in your Mac then it’s better to uninstall X11 from your Leopard installation so as to save up on the disk space. If ever you feel like installing it again then you can use your Leopard DVD to do so.

But the standard (move to trash) uninstall won’t work here, so we have to uninstall it completely using the terminal in OS X.

Write or copy & paste the following command in your terminal:

sudo rm -rf /Applications/Utilities/X11.app /private/etc/X11 /usr/X11R6 /usr/bin/open-x11 /usr/lib/X11 /Library/Receipts/X11User.pkg

That is one single line. Be very careful as a small typo can cause problems and you may have to reinstall OS X. Therefore do this at your own risk.

It’s been almost two months now that I am using Bluehost’s hosting and I am really satisfied by the services they offer. One of these is the SSL service for the mail accounts they give along with the hosting services. For those of you who don’t know what SSL is, you can read about it here.

After I created a mail account using my domain name, the first thing I did was to configure it using Outlook 2007. I properly configured my mail account to use SSL using the following settings.

• Account Type: IMAP
• Incoming Mail Server: box***.bluehost.com (*** is the server number given by bluehost)
• Outgoing Mail Server: box***.bluehost.com
• Check for the outgoing (SMTP) server to require authentication using the same settings as incoming server. (more…)
  
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In the context of the directories at the server, http://your-domain.com is the root folder. The www part in http://www.your-domain.com is a subdirectory or a subdomain which usually redirects to the root folder. The “www” prefix has no meaning in the way the main Web site is shown. The “www” prefix is simply one choice for a Web site’s host name. It is mostly used because a host name for the web-server is often ‘www’.

If you are using an Apache server to host your site, then the best way to redirect visitors from http://domain.com to http://www.domain.com is by using a .htaccess file.

.htaccess file is the one that has the configuration settings for the particular directory it is placed in. If you are using your hosting provider’s file manager menu then in many cases you may not be able to see the .htaccess file in your root menu. In that case you can download FileZilla, an excellent open-source FTP client. After locating your .htaccess file and downloading it, it is a good idea to make a copy(with original settings) of it first as a backup.

Now to redirect from non-www to www enter the following code in the top of the .htaccess file: (more…)

Hello Everyone

Since last year, whenever I read any informative and enticing blog post, I always asked this question to myself; ‘when am I going to start one?’.

But last month I read a post, ‘Why make Site Prototypes?’ by Greg Wolejko. After reading this post, I thought to myself that not only is this post real educative, but also, it is like a valuable contribution, a fun and cool way of giving the world something that others can benefit from, like Open Source.

Going to WordPress.org and downloading the latest 2.6 build was the only choice I was left with now, for a number of reasons:

• I had to start a blog myself; ‘Ain’t no stopping me now!’.
• I believed myself to be technically sound enough to host my own blog (although WordPress makes the job a piece of cake!).
• WordPress was the obvious reason because of its usability, dynamics and */read text between brackets of point two/* (for the fear of sounding repetitive).
• Hosting is real cheap these days.   (more…)
  
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