The Chris Gonyea Project

Please help out those victims of the South Asia earthquake and tsunamis on December 26th. This horrific tragedy is not over and they need every cent they can get. Here is a direct link to Amazon.com’s donation page, which sends 100% of what you donate to the Red Cross. You can donate as little as $5.00 or as much as you wish.

Thank you.

Another thing I did while at home was secure my family’s wireless router, a D-Link DI-514. Before Sunday, it was wide open and anyone could use it. While I checked the (limited) logs on the router to see if anyone outside the house was using it and didn’t find anyone, I was still getting paranoid about it (especially with the amount of online shopping on Amazon and eBay that my parents do on their laptop).

So I changed that. Upgraded to the latest router firmware.I changed the default router password, enabled MAC filtering (interestingly, unlike other wireless routers it enables this for wired LAN connections as well, found out the hard way), and enabled 128-bit WEP encryption (with a WEP key generated by this cool site). With the massive improvements in wireless networking with Windows XP SP2, I was able to get the network up and fully functional again very quickly and painlessly.

After the firmware upgrade, I even noticed a slight boost in the range and stability of the wireless router. I hated this DI-514 router when my parents first bought it, but it is working pretty well now.

While I know both WEP encryption and MAC filtering are not that great when it comes to security, used together they eliminate 99.9% of any protential problems as few people actually bother to try and hack into a wireless network in a 2,500 person town. I can also sleep at night not worrying about my wireless network (using WPA encryption on a Linksys router) or their’s.

My grandparent’s house is probably next on the list to get it’s wireless security improved.

Over the Christmas weekend, I accomplished something I had been wanting to do for awhile: switching my entire family over to Mozilla Firefox or at least the latest version of it.

My parents had been using the Mozilla suite the past few months after very ravaged by spyware and adware using Internet Explorer. I didn’t dare switch them to Firefox at the time because it wasn’t as polished as I would have liked (it was fine for me and my brothers, but not parents).

Over this past Christmas weekend, I finally upgraded them from Mozilla 1.7.3 to Firefox 1.0. The main push for this, outside of me wanting to get them on the latest and greatest was my Dad saying “Chris, is there a way this computer can remember what you type in like the computer upstairs?” This was my Dad’s way of saying that he loved the Firefox feature where it would remember (most of the time) what you would type into forms and suggest it in the future (say when a form asks for an e-mail address, you start typing one in and it’ll suggest one you used previously).

So I upgraded them to Firefox. No problems so far and my Mom even said that she used Firefox at work on her computer instead of Mozilla because Mozilla had been acting up, so she went to mozilla.org and saw Firefox. Talk about taking some initative, although my Mom is very computer literate (she got me into this stuff to begin with).

While I was at it, I upgraded the den computer (the upstairs one as my Dad says) to Firefox 1.0 (it had been running 0.9.3). I also made sure all the computers had the latest security updates and plugins (for the most part they did, my brother Danny did a good job keeping stuff up to date).

Next, I am thinking about moving my grandparents from Netscape 7.2 (yuck!) to a combination of Firefox/Thunderbird. Not sure if I am going to do it right away, as my grandparents hate change (they notice things like icon differences really quick) and are a loyal Netscape user (if there even can be one of those anymore). At least they use a Gecko-based browser. That’s a project for another day.

Lots of things going on in the next few weeks. I am really starting to get going on this Cisco studying, trying to see if I can move closer to choosing a possible test date for my CCNA exam. I am doing a combination of re-reading my CCNA books and a watching Flash-based instruction site that my work signed me up for.

The studying is going well I think, but I really am going to work hard the next month or so and try to nail this stuff down. The hardest part I have found is trying to figure out how to apply this book knowledge I have been sucking up into my head to the real world, as I have touched few pieces of Cisco equipment on my job (yet).

Either way, this is actually fun in a weird way.

Merry Christmas to everyone and have a safe holiday.