As prices of last generation servers continue to decrease, internet speeds continue to increase, and NAS systems become much more feature rich, many people are now opting to setup their own home servers or NAS systems.

If you don’t own your own home server or NAS system, here are five top uses for a home server or NAS.

 

Network Storage

The most common use for a home server or NAS is using it as a network storage. After all, the acronym NAS itself stands for Network Attached Storage.

Typically referred to as a “shared drive”, network storage typically employs the NFS (Network File System) or SMB (Server Message Block) [...]

Torrents have gotten a bad rap over the years as a platform for sharing illegal movies, music, TV shows, and software, but they have quite a few legitimate uses as well. For example individual developers, content creators and non-profit organizations can simply set up a Torrent, share it with a couple people and let it self propagate, significantly reducing the cost overhead of purchasing file hosting or content delivery.

However, unlike traditional file delivery methods such as through HTTP/HTTPS or through FTP, in order to download a Torrent file, a Torrent client is needed and of course not all Torrent clients are created equal. As such, today we’ll be [...]

Welcome back to the second installment in our new series of VPN reviews. Last week we reviewed KeepSolid’s VPN Unlimited and this week we’ll be reviewing NordVPN.

NordVPN is a Panama-based VPN service founded back in 2012. The service is extremely well reviewed, has one of the largest selections of servers around the world and is reasonably priced, but should you sign up for the service? Let’s find out!

 

The Basics VPN Service NordVPN Servers 1085 Locations 61 Protocols L2TP, PPTP, OpenVPN TCP, OpenVPN UDP Maximum Devices 6 Auto-Connect Yes Kill-Switch Yes DNS Leak Protection Yes Logging Policy No [...]

For those who use the internet in any way, having a VPN service is essential. VPN services not only help protect your security online, but can also help you get around government censorship, geo-restricted content filters, and ISP traffic shaping.

As a part of a new series of VPN reviews, today we’ll be reviewing VPN Unlimited by KeepSolid. KeepSolid VPN Unlimited is a New York based VPN service with development teams in Ukraine founded back in 2013. The service is well reviewed, offers lots of servers around the globe, and is reasonably priced, but does it live up to its expectations? Let’s find out!

 

The Basics VPN [...]

Own an Skylake or Kaby Lake processor with Hyper-Threading? It may be a good time to update your system UEFI/BIOS and CPU microcode. A critical flaw in Intel’s implementation of Hyper-Threading was recently revealed by the Debian Linux mailing list.

The critical flaw, which exists on all Intel 6th Generation “Skylake” and 7th Generation “Kaby Lake” processors with Hyper-Threading may cause “unpredictable system behavior” under a specific set of circumstances.

According to the Intel’s official documentation:

Errata: SKZ7/SKW144/SKL150/SKX150/SKZ7/KBL095/KBW095 Short Loops Which Use AH/BH/CH/DH Registers May [...]

As with any new hardware, AMD’s Ryzen platform launched earlier this year with plenty of room for improvement.

The latest update AMD has released is an AGESA (AMD Generic Encapsulated System) update which updates the code to v1.0.0.6. For those unfamiliar, AGESA is the base code from AMD which is what motherboard BIOS makers build their BIOSes off of. The new update largely improves memory support and overclocking, but also adds some new virtualization features as well.

The biggest update with AGESA v1.0.0.6 is improved memory support and overclocking. AMD has added 26 new parameters that can be adjusted in the BIOS for memory that doesn’t [...]

Not long after the launch of its 15″ and 17″ Ubuntu mobile workstations, Dell is releasing another offering powered by Ubuntu, this time in the form of the Precision 5720 all-in-one.

The Precision 5720 features a 27″ 4K IPS Screen as well as a high-end sound bar. Users have the option of choosing between touch and non-touch displays.

Under the hood, the Dell Precision 5720 comes with Intel’s Core i5-7600, Core i7-7700, or Xeon E3-1275V6 CPU. Memory can be configured up to 64GB DDR4 ECC RAM clocked at 2,133MHz. The Precision 5720 supports one M.2 PCIe SSD and up to 2.5″ SATA drives in terms of storage. Graphics options [...]

For those having issues with their new AMD Ryzen CPU’s SMT functionality in Linux, the latest kernel version 4.10.3 rectifies the issue which was present in kernel version 4.9 and below.

Older versions of the Linux kernel bundles both the threadID and the APIC ID together when SMT is enabled. This causes the OS to assign a unique CPU Core ID to each thread instead of the same CPU ID to a pair of threads.

The Linux kernel development page describes the error as the following:

our SMT scheduling topology for Fam17h systems is broken, because the ThreadId is included in the ApicId when SMT is enabled. So, without further decoding cpu_core_id is [...]

For network admins and network security professionals, one of the most important tools to learn to use is Wireshark (formerly Ethereal), a free and open source network analyzer/packet sniffer software for Windows, Mac and Linux that will allow network admins to quickly and easily capture frames, packets, segments/datagrams, and above in real time to monitor traffic going in and out of their networks.

Our tutorial today will guide you through some of the basics of using Wireshark to capture packets, filter them, and understand the data being presented. We also want to use this opportunity to educate our readers on why using encryption is so important, even when [...]

Several days ago, we covered where to download a Windows 10, 8.1, or 7 ISO image file, but a common question is what do you do once the image is downloaded? The answer is make a bootable USB drive out of it!

Creating a Windows installation bootable USB drive is incredibly easy thanks to an application called Rufus. Assuming you have your Windows ISO (or Linux/other bootable ISO) ready, the whole process should take no more than 5 minutes.

Here’s how it’s done.

 

Rufus

1. Download Rufus.

2. Plug in a USB drive that’s at least larger than the Windows ISO (or other ISO) file you’re trying make bootable. Keep in [...]