M.A.S. Electronics' Blog

Security is tops on most every administrator’s list. And with good reason. Incomplete or poor security can bring down a company’s network and/or computer resources. That equates to lost work, which affects bottom line. Administrators must do all they can to ensure the security of their networks. But for some (especially those without the financial resources), just knowing where to start and what to use is the biggest challenge. With that in mind, here are 10 tools and methods to…

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You know you have to stay on top of those insidious malware threats, but what’s the most effective (and affordable) solution? Here are some solid options. It’s a constant battle, the protection of a PC against malicious software. The second you think you have your machine clean, something else appears — no matter what piece of software you use to combat this plague. Even so, you still need to have some protection installed. So I thought I’d list the five…

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Among the wide array of network and system monitors, you’ll find several that do what the pricier tools do — for free. If you’re a system or network administrator, you need monitoring tools. You have to know, at all times, the status of your systems so you can optimize performance and head off potential problems. Thankfully, plenty of tools are available to help you stay in the know about your systems. Some of these products are costly and do quite…

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It’s inevitable: At some point you’re going to need to recover from a disaster. When this happens, if you happen to have a cloned image, the task will be far easier. But many budgets don’t include the cost of some of the pricier cloning tools, like Acronis Backup and Restore. When you don’t have the budget, what do you do? If you’re lucky, you have access to one of the following free applications, all of which do an admirable job…

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Don’t get caught out in the field without the tools you need. A USB stick equipped with a few essential apps might just save the day. Ah, the USB stick — one of the IT admin’s best friends. It travels with you and helps you rescue machines, work magic, and make end users sigh with relief. Some of these apps you copy to the hard drive and install; others can be run from the stick itself. A few of them…

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Takeaway: Keep your Windows machines optimized and healthy with the help of these five tools. The PC is the single greatest tool for getting your work done. And out of the box, that PC works great. But over time, it can become bogged down and buggy. Fragmentation, hard-disk issues, bad memory, viruses, filled caches, and registry errors can cause computers to act flaky or even stop working all together. This doesn’t have to be the case. With a bit of…

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Takeaway: You don’t have to turn to proprietary software to get your work done. Here are five feature-rich open source alternatives. What do we need to produce our work? Although it has changed over the years — with the browser becoming probably the most important productivity tool we now have — certain constants remain. We must produce documents, we must be able to create/manipulate images, we must manage money, and we must be able to communicate and schedule. These constants…

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Takeaway: Regardless of opinions of IPv6, it’s coming soon and will be part of our lives going forward. June 6, 2012 was a big day in the history of Information Technology. On this day, approximately 1% of Internet traffic will leverage IPv6. We’ve all heard of the end of days for IPv4 and wondered if large auctions of private address spaces would be a new gold rush; but IPv6 is the solution we’ll have for the foreseeable future and that’s…

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The Tor Browser Bundle provides options when you require secure and anonymous surfing. Surfing the web securely via VPN or HTTP web proxy might do the trick for some security-conscious individuals. Yet the thought of either, 1) having to deal with a barrage of advertisements or 2) paying for access to a premium account, are not the only two options one should be limited to. If you’re adventurous and don’t mind piggybacking off of a community run mesh network, there…

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