I have a fairly locked down wireless network so I can use my laptop without dragging a network cable around. I have a custom SSID, by SSID doesn’t broadcast, and I run 128bit WEP. The WEP is probably the weakest link, but… Today I noticed somebody else on my network (because my laptop was complaining about a conflict with IP addresses). This seemed kind of odd to me, I was surprised somebody else could be on my network. I don’t know for sure somebody else defiantly got access and if they did, I don’t know what they were looking for or found, but, I pretty quickly turned on MAC address filtering (I’ve been meaning to do that for a while) and locked down my shares considerably tighter. I have been meaning to lock down my shares for a while, but, WinXP now has the sharing option defaulted to “simple” file sharing. I hadn’t before taken the time to figure out WHY WinXP wasn’t allowing me to set the exact permissions on my file shares. So I found this link about it which I found to be helpful. I am now more securely configured. Now I just need to enable something better than WEP.
In the midst of all my network and reinstall problems I went out this week and bought Norton Ghost 10.0 by Symantec. I have been using various versions of ghost since long before Symantec bought the company (from, I think, Ghost Soft, Inc.). The latest version (which I got for like $20 after rebates from CompUSA, and got a free wireless optical travel mouse to boot) comes with Ghost 10.0 and Ghost 2003. I think the reason they give you both Ghost 2003 and Ghost 10.0 is because Ghost 2003 is probably the classic hard drive imaging system and Ghost 10.0 is a re-release of Powerquest Drive Image Pro, which was a great piece of software. With Drive Image Pro (and now Ghost 10.0) you could make an image of a RUNNING system (make an image of your C: drive and store it in a file on your D: drive). From this image you can then restore files or the entire drive at a later time. In some cases you will have to boot from their “Emergency CD” to restore the entire drive, but, it is pretty nice software. My only real complaint is that the emergency CD is REALLY slow to boot — it seems like they could install something on my C: drive to boot faster if the C: drive is still intact, but, I do like the software. At $20 it is a no-brainer (it is normally $70, though… probably still a no brainer).
We are about to start The West Wing Season 3 and have some dinner, so, I am outa here! Sorry, spell checker still not installed 🙂