Free Computer Consultant ………. Daily Insights

Virgin America just began their new innovation in air transportation: Giving the consumer what he/she wants. Comfort and connectivity.

Virgin is offering, for a reasonable price (for how long?), an enjoyable way to travel once one gets past the charade of TSA security. See Bruce Schneier for more on that.

Wide, white leather seats and “mood” lighting that is ascribed to like being inside an iPod. Is that everyone’s dream? No. But for more and more of us, yes. 110 power outlets, USB & Ethernet, WiFi as soon as the FAA approves it. Movies to choose from, games like Doom, much more.

What do the airlines expect everyone to do while waiting for the:

• fog to clear
• clearance to the runway
• airline to find a pilot
• deicing
• weather to improve
• mechanics to apply some duct tape somewhere

Maybe the seat to seat text chatting will even keep the volume down a bit, who knows?

What I do know is that this is a step forward, especially for those who travel often. Even for those of us who don’t, it will be one less reason not to endure the hassle of TSA at the terminal.

If you want to hear the most awful hold music available on the planet, dial up your favorite computer hardware or software vendor, use your apache tracking skills to negotiate the phone maze until you are finally on hold for a live person (you hope!).

Today it was Trend Micro’s turn to get called. Call right when they open, it doesn’t matter, all technicians are already busy helping someone else.

Is the horrible hold music designed to get you to hang up and go away? I finally recognized the raucous cacophony to be a Spanish guitar version of Don McLean’s American Pie.

The other day I forced myself to call Fortinet’s tech support again. They have had the same awful hold music for years. In fact, it isn’t even really music, just computer generated tones, I think.

Of course, all the while your are on hold you are being told:

1. You called at a bad time (your fault); but we won’t tell you when a good time is.
2. Your call is important to us; yep, and the check’s in the mail too.
3. You really should get your answers from our useless knowledge base on our impossible to navigate website, that way the few foreigners employed as “engineers” can do something more important than talking to you - like go pray at the temple.

Well, I would write more, but the tortured ding dong rendition of Billy Joel’s Just the Way You Are is interfering with my normal brainwaves…I think I’m unable to continue…ahhh

I had reader contact me with this question:

I am buying a laptop for the first time and have been looking at the Dell XPS M1330. The only thing is once you start getting the specs up it starts getting quite expensive. I was hoping that maybe you could tell me if this is one of those systems that you can upgrade yourself easily without voiding warranty and for a cheaper price like my friends MacBook.

Here is my response:

You are absolutely correct, adding the good stuff drives the price up.

I can’t think of too many ways to scrimp on price and upgrade later. Upgrading processors in laptops never seems to be economical; RAM is about the only thing you can add later.

If you can live in the Mac world, I have never heard of an unhappy macbook buyer. I live in the PC world because the applications that my clients have always needed are spec’d on PC’s and Windows.

It truly is frustrating to see those cheap prices on Dell ads, but when you actually go to buy the product and make a few changes the price zooms upward.

All I can say is that if you buy right the first time, a laptop can serve you well for 3 - 4 years before you really become unhappy with it. My laptop is going on 3 1/2 years and still going strong.

I can’t say the same for an el cheapo unit that looks better in the glossy ad than it performs in person. I have seen too many of them go by the wayside after little more than a year of frustrating usage.

Please buy accordingly.

Want to digitally sign your emails? A Secure Email Certificate is required if you want to communicate with others via email and know that you know who you are corresponding with.

Most companies charge for the certificate. Comodo, who recently acquired BOClean and now provides it for free, is offering a free secure email certificate for personal users. Naturally they would like to sell some services to your business.

Comodo’s website seems to be changing fast and furious, and as a result I hit a few broken links and even had a hard time finding the free secure email certificate from the link on the home page. But it’s here.

Comodo has some instructions on how to use the certificate (it’s pretty easy) for the most popular email clients including Mozilla Thunderbird.

(Here it is in Outlook 2003)

All you have to give them is a name and email address and they will send you the free certificate. The name is what will be displayed when someone accesses the certificate so you need to give them your real name, or whoever you are known as to those you will be sending the digitally signed emails to.

Signing up for their newsletter is on by default, but optional. Even then, the link I clicked to confirm opt-in came up with a 404 error so I’m not sure I’ll even get the newsletter.

In today’s age of spam and spoofed email, digitally signing your email isn’t a bad idea. And now that it’s free - it’s always been easy - what are you waiting for?

I am a big proponent of Fortinet Fortigate Firewalls, and once in a while a little alliteration. To clarify the term firewall, Linksys, NetGear, etc are really NAT devices that perform some firewall functions - not true firewalls. But that is discussed in greater length here.

Today I had a problem with the firmware on a Fortinet Fortigate FGT-60, which is a great unit. Naturally, (and thankfully), I had done a backup of the configuration; it saved me today. That’s why I am always harping about backup.

The firmware failed to load after reboot and left the firewall hanging. At that point, the only way to communicate with the firewall is with the console cable. The console cable is a serial device and naturally my laptop doesn’t have a serial port. So I have to carry a USB to serial converter cable.

The fix requires connecting with hyperterminal via the console cable, power cycling the firewall and pressing the spacebar when prompted. This will give you an opportunity to reload the firmware from a TFTP server; I use SolarWinds Free TFTP.

Manually set the network adapter on the PC to something like 192.168.1.201 with a subnet mask of 255.255.255.0. Then connect the PC (and nothing else) to one of the internal ports on the Fortinet.

Copy the firmware image to the TFTP server’s root directory. Configure the TFTP server to transmit and receive files.

When prompted, enter the IP address of the TFTP server (your PC), 192.168.1.201. The address for the firewall comes next, the default is usually 192.168.1.188 (which is why I chose the address I did for the PC). Just press enter to accept that.

Next enter the firmware image name and press enter. You will see the MAC address of the TFTP server and then you should see a progress bar made of “#” characters. When finished, it will load the image and start the firewall.

At that point, you are probably back to an address of 192.168.1.99 on the firewall, username “admin” in lowercase and no password. Jump back to your browser and enter

https://192.168.1.99 (the default ip address of the Fortinet internal interface)

enter the username of admin and click Ok.

Now you can restore your backup, if you have one, or set up the box from scratch.

Quick note about trying to obtain gigabit ethernet speeds.

First, make sure your switch and your nic’s are gigabit. Then make sure your cabling, ends, everything, are at least Category 5e, Category 6 is better.

Finally, if you have a network surge protector, or an APC Net8N surge protector or something similar, be advised that you may not get gigabit speed through it unless it is specifically rated for it. The APC PNET1GB is rated for it, but no other network surge protector that I am aware of.

And instead of getting just 100mbps, you may get a very slow (many retries) gigabit or an intermittent failed connection.

I use the APC PNet1GB, but with the addition of a ground wire extension and a plug in to make sure I get a good ground.

I think it no coincidence that some PC’s have been locking up the last couple of days. Here in the Midwest, temperatures are above 90 degrees (F) and humidity is somewhere north of 100%.

Unfortunately, dissimilar machines are exhibiting almost identical behavior. These PC’s, some W2K Pro and some XP Pro, boot to the blue GUI (not the BSOD blue), the mouse is active, but they never display the login prompt.

Naturally, these computers are poorly ventilated in the first place, and filled with dust bunnies in the second place.

One W2K machine responded nicely to an XP Pro upgrade; the XP Pro box, while giving a “Data Error Reading” when I try to select recovery console from the boot menu, seems unwilling to let SpinRite detect and fix the read error.

Frustrating and time consuming. If you have any similar stories, please post a comment with the details.

Windows Home Server is advancing on track and due out sometime this fall.

My prediction: It won’t be just for the home.

I can see this product ending up in small offices where maybe an attorney or two and a secretary or two might finally get serious about sharing files and backing up data.

These offices probably could afford me to come in with Microsoft Small Business Server, it would offer them a lot of advantages. But many of these professionals are just too cheap for that. I’m sorry, stingy; I mean frugal. You get the idea. (They use Yahoo! email accounts, now that’s professiona!)

Where Small Business Server is designed to be easy to manage, Windows Home Server is designed to require practically no management at all.

Will it deliver on this goal? I think it has a good chance. Doesn’t mean they won’t call someone like me every few months to check on it or answer a question, but it will probably run unattended in a closet quite nicely.

It will probably be the first time these offices have had anything close to a proper storage of their data.

We all want WiFi, and we want it everywhere. Even in the sky.

American Airlines is teaming up with AirCell (those of us in aviation are familiar with their service - expensive!) to provide WiFi access on American Airlines flights beginning sometime in 2008.

Read more about it here on Associated Content.

It isn’t a done deal. But WiFi can bring revenue to the airlines, and they need it; so the pressure will be on to do it. It won’t be a lot of money, but every little bit helps.

At some point, WiFi on airlines will be a competitive advantage for those who have it. Then, some time later, it will be offered for free by another airline trying to steal customers. That’s when I’ll use it.

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After 642-901 and 642-812, all those students who are planning for the skies, should go for 70-431 and 640-822 rather than 640-863.