Tuesday, March 24, 2009

Port Numbers

Valuable and detailed information on computer ports.
http://www.iana.org/assignments/port-numbers

Tip of the day: move your communication channels of the normal ports up to higher port numbers.
This will make it more difficult for the average hacker's low number port scan to detect your port communication.

Monday, March 16, 2009

project: Server

Problem 1: Monitor will not detect motherboard.
Problem 2: DVD drive will turn on only if the IDE cable is not plugged in.

Possible solutions:
1a. The four pin power cord is not drawing sufficient power for the required eight pin.
2a. The drive isn't labeled as slave.

Research: After talking with a couple of other technicians I found that my proposed solutions were inocrrect and that the issue probably dealed with my power supply in form or another. After attempting to to get the mother board to boot up with just one stick of ram and just the processor plugged plugged in, the power would have been easily been sufficient, but the it still didn't boot.

Power supplies have an option on running on 115 Volts or 230 Volts. The standard for U.S. appliances is 115V.

Result: I flipped the switch to 115 Volts and the computer booted up just right.
I have a server with three 500GB SATA HDDs, an AMD x5200 Athalon processor, two 2GB sticks of DDR2 RAM, one 40GB IDE HDD, and one DVD drive.

My next step is to install Microsoft Server 2003 as the OS on the 40GB IDE HDD.

Reflecting: A simple check as to the U.S. voltage standard and my power supply's state as to whether the switch needed to flipped or not , would have saved much time.

Thursday, March 12, 2009

Setting up Raid-5

I am building a Server. I am using three 500GB SATA HDDs.

After I constructed the server and plugged everything together, I wanted to make sure I wasn't missing anything.

I consulted Microsft's Help and Support for more inofrmation on setting up Raid-5. http://support.microsoft.com/kb/323434

My one worry a becomes the note that the system files and boot files cannot be on the same disk.

I am going to Install Windows Server 2003 as the OS.

Tuesday, March 3, 2009

Computer Repair-Business Thoughts

I have thought about doing part-time work as a Computer Technician and I have also wondered what all is necessary to start a computer repair business and what to avoid.

Some of these forums will give a good insight into preparation and what to expect.
http://www.dslreports.com/forum/r21686763-ATT-ConnecTech-Jobs
http://www.techexams.net/forums/jobs-degrees/40343-starting-computer-repair-business.html

There was talk of OnForce. Apparently they are the company that AT&T's ConnecTech uses. This is the OnForce link for their Service Pro Help Topics.
http://help.onforce.com/pros/

This is an opinionatetd article against working with OnForce. http://www.ripoffreport.com/reports/0/232/RipOff0232335.htm