If there is one thing I hate doing the most is walking people through IP address setup’s. In my company all of our machines are given static IP’s right out of the box. It helps us with tracking and auditing. A lot of users take their laptops home to use on their home networks in the evenings.

End users being what they are - They delete the IP information we have assigned them to revert to obtain an IP address automatically. What these users don’t know is that they will be unable to put the settings back (unless of course they wrote them down - YEAH RIGHT!).

What is your nastiest experience with viruses and/or other malware? The other day just before presentations my friend came to me with his laptop and showed me the havoc that had reigned on it! He had burnt some discs for others, using data from their USB drive and in the process got infected. Now he was unable to run Powerpoint, nor was he able to scan with the anti-virus as it won’t start a scan due to the infections (see the irony). Just the splash screens and boom - nothing seemed to run.

Hey MUO Readers have I got a sweet suite of free tools for you network admins and regular end users. Being in the networking world for so long I have loads of tools in my admin tool box (My USB Stick). But recently a fellow tech blogger Paul Bauer introduced me to a nifty program that has more than 175 applications and features.

Did I stutter?

There are so many applications in here that I can not even begin to list all of them here. It puts A LOT of tools at my fingertips in its < 25mb install The program is aptly named Net Tools 2008 and it was written by Mohammad Ahmadi Bidakhvidi.