Network Garage Engineers

Wireless Network Manager Is Going Back To Beta

Fri, 05 May 2006 15:09:08 +0000

We had to make a hard decision today at Network Magic that will affect many of our customers. We decided to remove our "Wireless Network Manager" feature from our latest release and put it back into Beta for more testing. Read on and I'll give you some more insight into why we made this decision and when you can expect to get your feature back!

Free Network Backup

Thu, 27 Apr 2006 09:07:15 +0000

Have you ever lost sleep at night worrying about the funny scraping noise your hard drive was starting to make and trying to remember if you backed up any of your photos or files in the last year?

I have the cure for your insomnia. Read on and I'll show you how to cobble together a Network Backup system with Network Magic and Microsoft SyncToy.

Just how secure is our Wireless Protection feature?

Fri, 14 Apr 2006 22:25:37 +0000

For Network Magic 3.0 we implemented the ability to lock a wireless network. We call this feature "Wireless Protection".

There are three common ways to secure a wireless network using the most common infrastructure available today. Deciding which one to base our initial security approach on met a lot of debate here at Network Magic. There are usually two camps in the debate – the security purists and the user advocates.

I’m more in the latter camp. I care about security as much as it :

a) provides reasonable defense against my most likely threat and
b) is easy for me to implement.

We’ve all heard the "IT policy" horror-stories. Where the IT department decided to crack down on strong passwords:

"Your password must be 10 digits or longer, contain a mix of upper and lowercase, contain several numbers and at least one punctuation character. Oh – and you have to change it once a month, and you can’t pick from the last 9 passwords that you’ve used."

Bomb proof. Secure, right? Not really, it’s so unusable from a user-point of view that people have to write their passwords down on sticky notes in front of their workstation to remember them all. Great technical solution, flawed execution.

So let's look at each of the 3 main ways and hear the debate… then I’ll tell you what we did and why we did it.

WEP-Open more secure than WEP-Shared? Who knew?

Sun, 09 Apr 2006 04:01:15 +0000

If you have ever setup security on a wireless network, then you have probably heard the term "WEP" before. While WEP has weaknesses that make it easily crackable by a sophisticated hacker, I did learn something new this weekend from my IM with Matthew our Development Manager .

When configuring a WEP-key in your router, there are two options you can choose: “Shared” or “Open”. At first glance, without knowing anything about the nuances of the technology one might think that “Shared” sounds better than “Open”. Open suggests that it’s not especially secure and anyone can get in. “Shared” sounds safer - like you tell everyone what your key is ahead of time. Naturally I assumed that Shared was more secure.

How wrong I was! Read on and I'll tell you why...

Cancel your GoToMyPC subscription!

Wed, 05 Apr 2006 10:00:04 +0000

I'm always amazed that people actually pay twenty bucks a month for GoToMyPC or even $200 for PC Anywhere.

If you have Windows XP Professional at home then you already have this feature! It's called "Remote Desktop".

Read on, and I'll give you step-by-step instructions on how to enable it for your home network.

I love My Job(s)

Tue, 04 Apr 2006 04:26:36 +0000

I love my jobs(s). All three of them. My first job is as CTO of Network Magic where I help set the vision and technical direction. My second job is the backend-systems guy/accountant/handyman for my wifes Art Schools in Seattle. And my third, but no less important job, is as Technical Head of Household for my home and many of my friends and relatives.

One essential enabler for each of my jobs that I always take for granted is the ability to use networks. It’s a powerful thing that has affected my life in many ways, yet it does so with ease and somewhat transparently.

Let me walk you a few hours of my life this weekend, and touch on how much I rely on “networks” to perform my jobs and stay in touch.

What is Dogfood?

Tue, 04 Apr 2006 02:34:05 +0000

At Network Magic we use the term 'dogfooding' to refer to the act of running our own software in early pre-release form on our home computers. It's a term that we inherited from a previous life at Microsoft.

Generally speaking, a "dogfood build" has been lightly tested and is hot off the press of the nightly build machine. They contain many bugs, but usually the latest and greatest features.

They're somewhat edible, but not fit for broad human consumption :)

It's a requirement of working at Network Magic to eat your own dogfood!