Have you ever wanted to accept a payment with your web site but didn’t know how to get started? Accepting online payments via real-time credit card authorizations requires an online merchant account, a shopping cart, and payment processor like Authorize.net. And all the monthly fees from these services will substantially increase your overhead before you’ve […]
Recently I found a few old 2.5” laptop hard drives in storage and figured I would try sell them for a few bucks on Ebay but first I wanted to make sure my personal data on them was erased. As an experienced sys admin I am already in the habit of formatting an old PC […]
Speaking from experience having a computer hard drive fail is not when you want to discover your backup software didn’t run overnight and you’ve lost some important data. Laptops or a space a saving All-in-One desktop like my Dell XPS 2720 typically only have one hard drive. Hard drive redundancy aka RAID (Redundant Array of […]
Having a contact form is one of the most important pages a web site can have. It enables you to receive communication for your audience or customers without having to provide a specific email address. Publishing an email address on your site while simple to implement and low-tech makes it easy for the email address […]
As you probably know SSL certificates use the https protocol to encrypt communication between your web browser and the web server hosting the web site you’re visiting. You can always tell when your session has been encrypted because your browser will display a lock icon near the address of the site in the browser’s location […]
IIS Manager Remote Administration is a handy tool for for a web server administrator when you have multiple servers to manage. This feature will save you the trouble of having to Remote Desktop into each server every time you need to touch IIS. With IIS Manager Remote Administration you can login to one server for […]
You may not be familiar with SmarterMail from Smatertools.com but it is an enterprise class Windows based mail server. It has a powerful web based management GUI and the company regularly releases version updates containing bug fixes and new features. However, in my opinion one of the most compelling reasons to try SmarterMail is that […]
According to the IBM Threat Intelligence Index Spam email volume continues to rise every year as does the threat from sophisticated phishing emails or seemingly innocuous messages with malicious attachments. You may never have heard of MX Guarddog but they have been providing “best in class” email security solutions since 2006. In my opinion the […]
If you’ve ever managed a mailing list or sent out an announcement to a distribution group then you have inevitably experienced non-delivery report (NDR) floods. These messages indicate delivery problems for your some of your recipients. In most cases the delivery issues are straight forward such as the mailbox no longer being valid. Investing time […]
Recently I was cleaning up a personal mailbox I’ve kept over the years for use when a 3rd party asks for an email address and I don’t want to provide my primary one. In these situations I prefer to give an address that I don’t frequently use because I know eventually I’ll start getting targeted […]
