M.A.S. Electronics' Blog

E-mail headers, as a topic for Internet security, aren’t as exciting as an exploit or the latest Internet worm. But learning how to quickly determine the authenticity of e-mail is important—especially if someone is abusing an open SMTP relay on your network. I remember when forging e-mail was unthinkable. Now, I get so many forged e-mails that I hardly consider any subject to be valid unless I know the sender personally—with the exception of forged e-mails that claim to have…

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There’s DVD+R, DVD+RW, DVD-R, DVD-RW, and even DVD-ROM! So what’s the difference between all of these different names, aren’t all DVDs the same? Well, it’s not quite that simple. Let’s first start with the most obvious difference: some have R and some have RW. The “R” stands for recordable, while the “W” stands for rewritable. The main difference between DVD-R and DVD-RW, or DVD+R and DVD+RW is that the R disc formats can only be written to once, and then…

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One of Microsoft’s big selling points for Windows XP was that it loads applications much faster than its predecessors. To accomplish this feat, Windows XP uses what is called the “Prefetch technique,” in which the operating system gathers information about each program that you launch and stores that information in the \Windows\Prefetch folder. Then on subsequent restarts, Windows XP uses the information in the Prefetch folder to essentially preload parts of those programs at boot time. Thus, when you launch…

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Here’s something I came across that will really speed Firefox up: 1.Type “about:config” into the address bar and hit return. Scroll down and look for the following entries: network.http.pipelining network.http.proxy.pipelining network.http.pipelining.maxrequests Normally the browser will make one request to a web page at a time. When you enable pipelining it will make several at once, which really speeds up page loading. 2. Alter the entries as follows: Set “network.http.pipelining” to “true” Set “network.http.proxy.pipelining” to “true” Set “network.http.pipelining.maxrequests” to some number…

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If you manage a Windows XP peer-to-peer network, you regularly need to be able to find out who is remotely using files on a particular system. This task probably makes you wish that Windows XP contained an updated version of Net Watcher-that’s the neat utility in Windows 98 that showed you what files were open and who was using them. Unfortunately, Net Watcher never made it to the newer versions of the Windows operating system. However, Windows XP does come…

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On the Advanced tab of the Power Options dialog box, Windows XP provides you with several built-in shortcuts for putting your computer in Suspend mode-either Standby or Hibernation. These shortcuts allow you to reconfigure the operation performed when pressing either the Power or Sleep buttons. (If you’ve enabled the Hibernation feature, using these shortcuts will put your computer into hibernation mode. If you haven’t, using these shortcuts will put your computer into standby mode.) However, if you wish to expand…

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Most Windows XP admins start their troubleshooting process by launching Windows Task Manager and selecting the Processes tab in order to gather information about the programs and processes that are currently running on a system. While some of the running processes are easy to identify (especially if they directly represent an application), other processes can be puzzling to identify (especially if they represent services). For instance, when you look at the list of processes displayed in the panel, you’ll probably…

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Opinions vary on how to preserve data on digital storage media, such as optical CDs and DVDs. Kurt Gerecke, a physicist and storage expert at IBM Deutschland, has his own view: If you want to avoid having to burn new CDs every few years, use magnetic tapes to store all your pictures, videos and songs for a lifetime. “Unlike pressed original CDs, burned CDs have a relatively short life span of between two to five years, depending on the quality…

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If you’re the only person who uses a particular computer running Windows XP, you may want to remove the Files Stored on This Computer group. This tip explains how you can delete the group in three simple steps. When you open My Computer in its default configuration on a Windows XP machine, you’ll find a group titled Files Stored on This Computer. This group contains the Shared Documents link, as well as links to folders for all user accounts created…

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Takeaway: If a lookup fails for a host because the target domain’s DNS server is down, then subsequent attempts to look up the host will also fail because the failed results are cached. Learn two ways to overcome this problem. DNS enables fully qualified host names like www.maselectronics.com to be resolved to their target IP addresses. Every time you visit a Web site, the DNS client software built into Windows 2000 Professional performs a DNS lookup of the specified host…

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