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Why have Hardwood floors in my home over other flooring choices?

“They feel so much warmer to the feet than ceramic tile”, stated one customer. Many enjoy not only the feel of hardwood over tile, but find many other benefits as well. We will discuss some of the pro’s and con’s of hardwood over other flooring choices.
The natural beauty of wood has long attracted people to this type of floor. Besides the different types of wood choices, from oak, cherry, maple and so on, wood floors can be stained to suit your decorating needs. As your decorating taste changes, so can your floors. A lighter floor can open up small spaces, but when you remodel and take out that wall that has always bothered you, you can sand and stain your wood floors to a darker richer color that often looks great in more open areas. Having this versatility can be a great feature that beats carpet or tile.
Also, many give considerable thought to their return on what they invest in their home. “I only plan on being in this house another 5 years. I know wood floors are a great selling feature, so I figured, why not enjoy the wood floors now and then get more of a return when I sell my home”, one customer reasoned. Realtors often highlight ‘wood floors throughout this beautiful home’ when listing their houses. Often homeowners make improvements to their homes, after realizing at time of listing that their improvements were futile. With hardwoods you can’t go wrong!
Though hardwood costs more than many carpet choices, many choose the previous not only for the reasons listed above, but also for the cleaning and wear factor. Yes, no matter how many times you vacuum or clean those carpets, they don’t seem to clean up well. And how about all those particles trapped in the carpet that never get vacuumed up. Ask someone that rips out carpet and they can tell some good stories of what they find. It is no surprise that many who suffer from allergies, find blissful sleep when they have hardwood in their bedroom. Keeping hardwood clean is quite simple. A quick dry mop or vacuum will do the trick. If more cleaning is necessary at times a spray cleaner for hardwood floors is quick and easy to use.
In lieu of all discussed, why not talk to a hardwood flooring specialist who can recommend great suggestions for your home. The investment is one you won’t regret. Floors are an integral part of your home, why not make them beautiful, easy to maintain and increase the value of your home. Choose wood; the choice is good!

By Mike Maron owner of Brilliant Finishes
Hardwood Floor Installation and Refinishing

Protecting Your Passwords From Hacking

You can have the best security software and hardware deployed in your home and office, but if someone can easily guess your passwords, you’ve left the worst possible hole open to hackers.

Strong passwords should be the norm. Too many people do not take password selection to heart and leave themselves open to the easiest method that hackers use to compromise your data. You may laugh when you read that numerous people use the word password, as their account password. If you are one of those people that do use “password”, I’m sorry, but keep reading. Another common one used is the series of numbers: 123456. A lot of sites that don’t require strong passwords will at least require six characters, so that’s the reason for some to lazily pick the six number sequences.

Systems are broken into by hackers that easily guess some passwords and for others, they will run password cracking software. A password cracking program will run through a dictionary, common password phrases, and birth date combinations. Once a password is cracked, you are vulnerable to loss of privacy, identity and financial theft. Your computer could be used by the hacker to victimize other computers.

Here are some tips for better password use.

1. The longer the password the better. You may worry about remembering a longer password but there is a trick that you can use. Try to create phrase that you will easily remember and use the first letter from the phrase. If you throw in some numbers, or characters, you will really have boosted the strength. Here’s one example of that technique. Say you love your mom’s cooking and who doesn’t? “I love my mom’s cooking no matter what she makes!” Ilmmcnmwsm! If you capitalize the letter I, followed by lower case letters and throw an exclamation on the end, you’ve built a pretty hard to crack password.

2. Do not use text found in the dictionary. A password cracker program can run through millions of words in seconds. I have seen them work, as part of my computer forensics training. Some password cracking programs are freely available on the internet and others are sold, that can crack specific programs.

3. I know you may not want to, but change your passwords on a regular basis. Some recommend that you do so every two to three months. Set a reminder on your calendar program.

4. If a hacker gets sent to a password reset link, then they will guess the answers to your security phrases. If you pick simple ones, then you have just made the hackers task a little easier. It was reported that the Vice President nominee, Sarah Palin’s email was hacked, because the hacker had done some research on her. The report said that he knew her zip code, birthday, and where she met her husband.

There are some software tools and hardware devices that can help you secure you passwords. I will write about some of those in a future article. For now, use the best passwords you can and make them strong.

Greg Doig is owner of StratusClick Consulting. Visit him at http://stratusclick.com

Article Source: http://EzineArticles.com/?expert=Greg_Doig
http://EzineArticles.com/?Protecting-Your-Passwords-From-Hacking&id=4243427

Factors for evaluating online backup service providers

Author: Intechnology

Before choosing an online data backup service provider, weigh the following technology and cost considerations and do not be shy about asking the tough questions. If they are to be your trusted partner, you need to be sure of their capabilities and cost structure. What to look for: • Automated and unattended backups with the ability to backup open files and open databases • Ability to centrally manage the backup and restore process from one or more locations • Control of files and directories to be backed up, with file-filtering capabilities • Secure Tier-3 or 4 facility • Spontaneous file restores 24/7/365 via end user or central administrator control • No special hardware requirements or changes to your network • Ability to restore data either over the network or via a dedicated storage device • Customisable data retention schedules • Data encryption while data is stored on the storage array and during transmission over private or public networks • Automatic restart and resume capabilities for handling a variety of network conditions • Automatic notification of exceptions and problems encountered • Detailed usage reporting capabilities
Be PreparedIn order to bid for your business, vendors will want to know:• Your recovery point objectives and backup window• Detailed information on server hardware and operating system: compile a list of servers to be backed up, including brand name, model number, specification, and estimated amount of data storage• Existing communication facilities connecting your locations: Internet, Frame Relay, ATM, etc• Firewall management: how are special ports on your firewall opened to allow backup data to travel across your network?• Your corporate data retention schedule• How many people will be administering the backup/restore process and where they are located• The location of an alternate processing facility in the event of a disaster

Article Source: http://www.articlesbase.com/data-recovery-articles/factors-for-evaluating-online-backup-service-providers-2802205.html

About the AuthorInTechnology’s Managed Online Data Backup Service, an automated backup and restore service, offers secure online data backup and instant restoration, completely eliminating the severe limitations of traditional tape-based data backup.
Visit www.intechnology.co.uk for more information on the Data Backup Service

How to Build a High Performance and Secured Wireless Network?

Author: Ki Grinsing

If you would like to build a wireless network from the scratch, it is recommended to use the best wireless network based devices, using the current wireless technologies available at the marketplace today.The best wireless network should consist of wireless devices and wireless standards which can provide the best technologies in three main areas. Firstly, the wireless devices and standards should provide the fastest wireless network. Secondly, wireless devices and technology used should provide the farthest network coverage. Thirdly, the wireless security standard should provide the most secured network to protect the private network against any types of network threats.
The Best Wireless Network in Speed
The fastest and the best wireless network available at the market today is 2.0 802.11n standards. This is the latest industrial standards today – the future technology, it was just ratified by the IEEE last Sep 2009. Mostly all the wireless manufacturers ship their lines of wireless products based on this draft and final standards. The recent manufacturers ship their products and claimed that the wireless network can provide the speed up to 300 Mbps. However, this is all theoretical, in a sense, due to the fact that routers never achieve the maximum throughput they’re rated at (802.11b at 11 Mbps and 802.11g at 54 Mbps).
Many wireless devices were shipped based on the draft version of 802.11n standards. But this draft version is assured to be backward compatibility with the current industrial standards 802.11b and wireless 802.11g wireless devices, and can be used to fill in the gaps of your wireless network today. Besides, draft 802.11n has been ratified officially as the fastest wireless industrial standards, there will be no hardware changes. The only thing you need to upgrade is the firmware that will be freely downloaded from the official vendor’s websites. Even some vendors design their products with the capability of download the recent firmware automatically when it connects to the internet. Now, the final version of the 802.11n has been adopted by many new wireless devices today.
The Best Wireless Network in Network Coverage
Selecting the best wireless network should provide the technology with the farthest network coverage. A current technology widely adopted by the manufacturers to provide the farther wireless network coverage is the combination of wireless –N and Multiple-in-multiple-out (MIMO) antenna technology. MIMO uses multiple transmitter and receiver antennas to improve the system performance. MIMO technology relies on multipath signals. Multipath signals are the reflected signals arriving at the receiver some time after the line of sight (LOS) signal transmission has been received. MIMO technology combined with the wireless –N creates robust signals for maximum range and speed with reduced dead spots.
Some manufacturers embedded their product with their own competitive technology for better network coverage. For example D-Link introduces Extreme –N technology to provide the speed up to 14x faster and provide 6x the range farther when compared to 802.11g wireless devices.
The Best Wireless Network in Security
Selecting the best wireless network, you should think about the best security the network can protect against any threats. As a general rule, you should employ a level of security that corresponds to the sensitivity of the data on your network. Unlike wired systems, which can be physically secured, wireless networks are not confined to the inside of buildings. They can be picked up as far as 1,000 feet outside of the premises with a laptop and a gain antenna. This makes WLANs inherently vulnerable to interception.
The latest industrial wireless security standard is WPA2. WPA stands for Wi-Fi Protected Access which is a certification program created by the Wi-Fi Alliance to indicate compliance with the security protocol created by the Wi-Fi Alliance to secure wireless computer networks. This protocol was created in response to several serious weaknesses researchers had found in the previous system, Wired Equivalent Privacy (WEP).
The other features you should consider in selecting the wireless devices for the best wireless network is the Quality of Services (QoS) feature which capable of providing the prioritization of the data stream.With wireless routers (without the QoS feature), all wired and wireless traffic, including VoIP, Video Streaming, Online Gaming, and Web browsing are mixed together into a single data stream. By handling data this way, applications like video streaming could pause or delay. With Intelligent QoS Technology, wired and wireless traffic is analyzed and separated into multiple data streams. These streams are then categorized by sensitivity to delay, so applications like VoIP, Video Streaming, and Online Gaming are given priority over Web browsing. This enables multiple applications to stream smoothly to your TV or PC.
D-Link introduces Gamer Lounge DGL-4500 with intelligent QoS technology which is designed specifically for gamers in mind.
The last but not the least for the best wireless network you can also consider the dual-band feature of the wireless access point and also the wireless clients. With the dual band technology, the wireless devices support 2.4GHz & 5GHz wireless signals at the same time. This allows you to check e-mail and browse the Internet using the 2.4GHz band while simultaneously streaming High-Definition (HD) movies and other media on the 5GHz band.
With the best wireless network, it is not perfect if you do not deploy the antivirus software for each of the computers on the network.
By Ki Grinsing

Article Source: http://www.articlesbase.com/networks-articles/how-to-build-a-high-performance-and-secured-wireless-network-2867095.html

About the AuthorKi Grinsing actively manages blogs which relates to computer networking. Graduated from a university with MCSE, CCNA certifications, he has long years of experiences in IT. Read more detail about the best wireless networking and DSL Wireless modem

Is Your Router One of the Six Million Vulnerable Devices on the Internet?

I last spoke about the benefits of using a NAT Router for your home and office when connecting to the Internet. As discussed this provides added security because it hides or masks the computers on the LAN or internal private side of the router from unwanted inbound traffic originating from Internet scanning, worms and hackers.

For your router to provide its full security benefits it has to be configured correctly. By leaving the manufacturer’s default passwords and allowing the administrative interface to be accessible from the Internet has left many a device vulnerable. How big a problem is this?

A report by Wired showed that 21,000 devices were open to remote attack because they failed to change the manufacturer’s default password and their administrative interface was viewable from anywhere on the Internet. Wired also reports that the researchers, extrapolating from the numbers they gathered were able to estimate that 6 million devices connected to the Internet are likely vulnerable.

So don’t become a victim. One of the first things you need to do is change the manufacturer’s default password on your router. You should also disable remote administrative access on the Internet facing interface . You can administer the router from the private wired LAN side of the router. There should be no need to administer the router from the Internet. If this is something that you must do and if your router supports it, then configure your router to accept VPN client connections. This way you will be able to connect to your router from the Internet through a secure IPSEC tunnel. Once connected you can administer your router just as if you were home or in the office connected to the private LAN side. This method is secure and doesn’t expose you to brute-force password-cracking attacks which you may be vulnerable to if you have remote administration enabled.

Some additional router configuration options to think about. Universal Plug and Play should be disabled. This feature allows Windows to configure your router on the fly opening a potential whole through your router. Almost all NAT routers also double as an SPI (Stateful Packet Inspection) firewall. Make sure you have this feature enabled. Also unless you or your business need to provide some kind of service for Internet users such as web, ftp, or mail services, you should have port forwarding disabled as well as the DMZ option disabled. These options allow you to give access from the Internet to your computers on the private LAN side of the router. Giving access to your internal network and computers can expose you to all the dangers the Internet has to offer.

Next time I will discuss how you can provide services to Internet users on your home or office network securely.

Dave Carvalho
Davco Computer Services

Why Use a NAT Router?

Every computer connected to the Internet is exposed to dangers.   For myself and many others the benefits of using the Internet far exceed the possible dangers.  We can minimize the dangers if we follow some basic security principles both for our home and office computers.

Let’s start with how we connect to the Internet using a wired connection.  Many home users and small businesses connect to the Internet through a Cable/DSL modem.  This type of connection is an always on connection.  As long as our computers are powered on we are connected to the Internet and exposed to dangers.  We increase the danger if we connect our PC directly to the Cable/DSL modem.  Computers connected in this way will receive a DHCP public IP address from their Internet Service Provider.  What this means is that our PC is both visible and accessible directly from the Internet.  This exposes us to Internet scanning, worms, and hackers.  If we don’t have a software firewall installed then our PC can be easily compromised and our data stolen.

Even though a software firewall can lessen the dangers we are exposed to when we connect in this way, I don’t recommend this method.  A better solution would be to use a Cable/DSL NAT router.  The NAT router would connect directly to the Cable/DSL modem and then our computer or computers would connect to the NAT router.  Why is this safer?

One of the key benefits of NAT (Network Address Translation) routers is that the router hides the internal IP address of your computer or computers.  The Internet sees you as a single machine with a single IP address.  This effectively masks the fact that one or many computers on the LAN side of the router may be sharing that one IP address.  This not only provides security benefits but also financial ones.  NAT enables you to have more than one computer on your home or office network while you only have to pay for one public IP address from your ISP.

How does NAT work?  When you turn on your computer you will receive an RFC1918 private IP address from your router.  Usually with most Cable/DSL routers this will be on an 192.168.x.x subnet.   This internal private IP will have to be changed or NATTED to a public address in order for you to be able to access the Internet.  Since all computers on the LAN side of the router will share the same single IP address, the router keeps track of these outbound connections through PAT (Port Address Translation).   Here is what happens.  When you make an outbound call to Google, the NAT router receives this request and changes your private IP of (192.168.1.20 for example) to a public IP address say (12.46.115.225) and a port number of 2500 making it (12.46.115.225:2500).   A second computer on the same LAN with an IP of (192.168.1.21) also makes an outbound request at the same time.  This computer will be assigned the same public IP but a different port number say 2501 making it (12.46.115.225:2501).  The NAT router keeps track of these connections in a table.  It uses this table to match return connections to the correct computer on the private LAN side of the router.

This is the really good part and why the router provides added security.  All traffic arriving at the NAT router that does not exactly match the traffic in the router’s table is discarded as unwanted traffic.  This basically stops all unwanted inbound traffic originating from Internet scanning, worms, and hackers, protecting our computers on the private LAN side of the router from unwanted traffic from the Internet.  So if you don’t already have a NAT router why not get one.  The added security benefits are certainly worth the added expense.

Of course for a NAT router to provide its full benefits it has to be configured correctly.  I will discuss this as well as the following subjects in future articles:
how to secure wireless networks, how to make a server available to Internet users through port forwarding safely, what is a DMZ and what are its benefits,
and how can adding a second NAT router provide even greater security. Please feel free to contact me with any questions or comments.

Dave Carvalho
Davco Computer Services