Ed Hurst is Associate Editor Emeritus of Open for Business. Born in 1956, Ed has spent his entire adult life in the Gospel Ministry. However, that seldom paid the bills, so he took a large variety of secular jobs. Aside from a stint in the US Army Military Police and another in Field Artillery, Ed has worked in the trucking industry, public education, agriculture, and numerous semi-skilled jobs. As a disabled veteran, he is now semi-retired and pursues a ministry offering computer assistance to elderly folks in his area, and leads a house church. Currently residing in Choctaw, OK, he’s been married to Veloyce since 1978 and has two adult children.
What can you, the individual or small business Internet user, do?
Plenty! The first and most obvious step is to choose carefully your
hardware and OS. Since there are tons of articles already addressing
that, and new ones every day, I won't say much more than this: when you
can, avoid Windows as severware. It is on the workstation and desktop
where you are more likely to have required applications that only run
on Windows. Too often each piece of the software matrix has a separate
price tag. If there is an Open Source application or combination that
does the same job, spam fighting tools for example are built in at no
extra cost. When properly configured, they are more resistant to
attacks. My own local ISP has
joined many others in making the switch to Open Source, with Linux
servers now replacing most of their Windows servers simply for reasons
of cost and service.
How did we get in this mess? How have we come to the place where a
relatively small group of rogue Internet users are on the verge of
bringing the whole thing to a grinding halt because of their
short-sighted greed?
I love SPAM. No, really, I do. I buy it in the six pack from a
wholesale club, and in a couple of days can eat a whole can of it by
myself. You know, that pink stuff made by Hormel -- yummy! The other kind of spam nobody wants. Okay, 95% of
Internet users don't want it, according to surveys. That kind of spam
is also referred to as Unsolicited Commercial Email
(UCE) or Unsolicited Bulk Email (UBE).
Ever looking for new ways to bring older hardware to life,
OfB associate editor Ed Hurst now aims his focus at keeping aging laptops alive and kicking with FreeBSD 5.4. Ed not only reports on how to keep that old system alive, but also finds that the latest technology can work fairly well on older generation systems.
Now that we have everything installed and setup the way we like it,
it's important to keep an eye on updating the system. The emphasis is
not so much slavishly chasing the cutting edge of BSD technology.
Instead, our focus will be on security updates and optimization.
How often do you hear it: "There are too many Linux distros!" What
is the count now? Almost 400 and growing daily. Aside from the Linux
kernel, what do they all seem to have in common? The only ones missing
a GUI are the security/server distros. What about the console as the
desktop?
To really take advantage of the best tools in computing requires that
you become quite comfortable with using the
command line
interface (CLI). In general, nearly every task -- aside from
graphical work itself -- can be accomplished from the CLI. Once the user
becomes more adept at CLI work, these non-graphical tasks can be done
more quickly, with more fine-grained control, and with less demand on
computer resources.
By this time, you should have guessed that running KDE takes a large
chunk of machine resources. Really old machines will run this latest
version of KDE quite slowly. I chose it for the FreeBSD beginner
because it's a good safe place to start, with so many built-in tools.
One of the most important ones up to now has been KPPP -- the dialup
tool. In this lesson we are going to learn how to dialup without KPPP.
With that, about the only reason to keep using KDE is simply that you
like it.
In this lesson in the
Clueless Computer User series, Ed Hurst will discuss more about stability issues. A popular buzzword these days is "interface". That's just
a fancy word implying that two or more people are face to face. In
actual practice, it usually means anything
but face to face.
It's a means of interacting with another. You are said to
"interface" by some means. So it is with computers.
The one thing that really fired up the develpment of the Internet as
we know it today was e-mail. The protocols were designed back when the
system itself was highly difficult to access, and security wasn't a
significant issue. Since then, even your average household pet has
heard of Internet security problems.