Episode 14

Thanx for the info episodes on security, I am sure you have already talked about this but one good thing for your network is to know all the mac (media access control) addresses of all the nics (network interface cards of all printers, computers, and etc.) and the location of that equipment. Then if you have an issue it is real easy to find that equipment and solve the problem. For example it use to be that network cards could fail. when they did they would spout umpteen packets (known as screaming)  on the network,  That distrupts the normal traffic. if you know exactly where it is, you can get to the system and fix it correctly. of course if you use switches, the port that system uses can be turned off first (immediately and fixed as you have time). On thing i like to do before we had a lot switches was to monitor what type of packets were on the network (especially if the network was slow). A lot of network games used to use novell ipx type packets. I could tell when students were playing network games by seeing those type of packets.  With the mac address of those systems i could identify if it was our machine being used or if someone attached their own system to the network. Mac addresses have the manufacturer's code as part of that address. So if someone had attached their own equipment to the network, People using laptops were the biggest culprit. They could be ferreted out easily.. Eventually that type of game play ceased to exist while I was there. Of course it you inspect ip packets you can do the same thing. In fact if passwords are being passed unencrypted, you can catch those also. I said too much. ciao.