A Little History on PC Boot MethodsMicrosoft Windows has never played nicely with other operating systems but there seemed to be a new peace beginning with Windows 10. Back in the early days of PCs (1983), IBM PC-DOS 2.0 introduced the Master Boot Record (MBR) disk partitioning scheme. Microsoft licensed PC-DOS to IBM and then […]
How to Set up the Latest MediaWiki with Lighttpd on Ubuntu 14.04
Introduction MediaWiki is a popular open source wiki platform that can be used for public or internal collaborative content publishing. Originally designed in 2002 to render Wikipedia, MediaWiki is a proven, efficient, and powerful wiki platform. In this guide, we will be setting up the latest version of MediaWiki on an Ubuntu 14.04 server. We […]
How to set up L2TP/IPsec VPN on Linux (using NetworkManager & strongSwan)
Although the L2TP/IPsec VPN protocols were primarily developed by Microsoft and Cisco, there are open source alternatives that work well in Linux. L2TP/IPsec is an older VPN protocol but it is still quite popular despite the Snowden revelations that the NSA may have deliberately weakened the protocol. It supports various encryption ciphers and is built-in […]
How to Set up L2TP/IPsec VPN on Windows 10
L2TP/IPsec is a popular VPN protocol built-in to most modern platforms including Microsoft Windows 10. Using a built-in protocol can be a good choice as you do not have to install any extra applications or worry if they are written securely and bug free. Depending on your provider’s software they can be a little trickier […]
How to Set up an OpenVPN Client on Tomato Based Routers
In this tutorial I will be using an Advanced Tomato router to demonstrate how to set up an OpenVPN client that will encrypt all outgoing Internet traffic on your LAN. Many VPN providers limit the number of simultaneous clients you can have connected to their service. This can be frustrating in a household where you […]
VPN.AC VPN Provider Review
VPN.AC is owned by Netsec Interactive Solutions – a computer security company founded in Bucharest, Romania in 2009. Netsec Interactive solutions is a company whose employees are experts in computer security and cryptography. It is the only VPN provider, I am aware of, who is both ISO 27001 and ISO 9001 certified. VPN.AC is on […]
How to Set up Smart DNS on Mac OS X
The following guide will show you how to setup Smart DNS on Mac OS X. This how-to was setup on OS X Yosemite 10.10.5 using the PureVPN Smart DNS service but other versions of OS X and providers will be similar. What is Smart DNS? Smart DNS is a service used primarily to unblock geo-restricted […]
How to Flash AdvancedTomato Firmware on an Asus RT-AC68U Router
The following article is a detailed how-to on flashing an Asus RT-AC68U router with the AdvancedTomato web interface using the Tomato by Shibby firmware. When my venerable Linksys WRT54GL Wi-Fi Wireless-G Broadband Router finally died, after many years of faithful service, I began searching for a new router. I finally settled on an ASUS (RT-AC68U) […]
How to Set up OpenVPN on Linux (with detailed Linux Mint tutorial)
OpenVPN is a popular open source cross platform VPN protocol. Of all the platforms Linux probably has the most possible methods of installing and running an OpenVPN client or server. There are a great many flavors of Linux out there (e.g. Mint, Ubuntu, Debian, Fedora, CentOS, Arch) just to name a few of the more […]
How to Set up L2TP/IPSec VPN on Mac OS X
L2TP/IPSec is a popular and widely supported VPN protocol. It is built-in to most modern platforms and Mac OS X is no exception. There are some issues with this protocol and I encourage the reader to check out our VPN protocol comparison article. Read on to see how easy it is to setup a L2TP/IPSec […]