ISSUE 23.18 • 2026-05-04 HARDWARE By Will Fastie Somewhere in the AskWoody archives, you’ll find an article stating my ultimate goal — to reduce the number of PCs on my desk from four to one. Hah. That didn’t happen. I did manage to cut it down to two, though. Then I bought a Mac mini. […]

HARDWARE By Will Fastie Physically putting the NAS together is easy. Setup takes some time. You’d think somewhere along the line I’d have deployed network-attached storage for someone, client or friend. This is the first time. It’s different from putting together a RAID solution for a business’s server or creating a mirror for my own […]

HARDWARE By Will Fastie With the NAS now up and running with an accessible storage volume, it’s time to make it useful. What’s useful? As stated in the previous articles, I want the contents of my D: drive out of my daily driver, Obsidian. But I still want all that data to be easily accessible. […]

Just the other day, the United States Federal Communications Commission (FCC) updated its list of products that can’t be sold in the US to include all consumer routers made in foreign countries. It’s a big — but potentially disruptive — move to limit supply-chain security risks to US networks. Now mind you, while I can […]

BEN’S WORKSHOP By Ben Myers Make sure your Windows PC is tuned up so that it is 100% reliable this year. The year 2025 has been a year of significant change and trends in the industry, so I am compelled to address these trends and how they might affect your computing future while still guiding […]

PUBLIC DEFENDER By Brian Livingston There are about 21 billion Wi-Fi–enabled devices in the world, according to an IMARC Group estimate. That’s more than 2½ per person alive today. In the US, households with Internet access now have an average of 18 connected devices: Wi-Fi routers, smart TVs, remote-controlled cameras, even refrigerators that report when […]

ISSUE 22.48 • 2025-12-01 BEN’S WORKSHOP By Ben Myers The General Store, at the very center of Harvard, Massachusetts, is a one-of-a-kind place to meet and greet friends and colleagues. It offers excellent food and some occasional live performances, all in a rustic building constructed in 1850. The computer equipment used by the store is […]

What do you go online and use? According to a recent survey, it’s most often YouTube. Years ago, I remember being at a business group dinner meeting, During the chitchat watercooler talk about which television show was the rage at the time, I remember someone saying that they never watched television. I thought, “Wow! How […]

tl;dr  Implement this ACL using whatever network gear, cloud ACL config, or uncomplicated firewall you use to protect your networks. Our IOT devices are on 10.99.99.0/24 for this example. Also, […]

The post The Simplest and Last Internet-Only ACL You’ll Ever Need  appeared first on Black Hills Information Security, Inc..

The internet is a product of a global group effort to build an interoperable network connecting billions of devices, regardless of country, region, or manufacturer. That effort yielded hundreds of […]

The post Unpacking the Packet: Demystifying the Internet Protocol appeared first on Black Hills Information Security, Inc..

Kent Ickler & Jordan Drysdale // Preface We had a sysadmin and security professional “AA” meeting on November 8, 2018. We met and discussed things that seem to be painfully […]

The post WEBCAST: Blue Team-Apalooza appeared first on Black Hills Information Security, Inc..

Ethan Robish // In this series of posts, I’ll discuss how I segmented my home network using VLANs and how I moved away from using a risky consumer-grade router at […]

The post Home Network Design – Part 1 appeared first on Black Hills Information Security, Inc..