Some Internet Service Providers (ISPs) provide their users with free news service. Some ISPs even subcontract their free news service through one of the premium news services such as Easynews.

Often, these ISP provided news services don’t require a login. Instead, the ISP uses the source IP address to allow or disallow access to the news service. So, as long as you’re on the ISP’s lines (at home), you can access the news service without question. However, if you aren’t at home, you can’t access the news service.

You might be away from home and need to access your ISP provided news service. Normally, you can only access the news service from home. However, yProxy allows you to share your connection from home.

In local mode, yProxy only accepts connections from the same physical computer where yProxy is running. This is for security. However, if you turn this mode off, yProxy will accept connections from anywhere.

Simply leave yProxy running on your home computer, you connect to yProxy remotely, and yProxy connectes to the news server over the ISP’s own lines. As far as the ISP knows, you’re sitting at home on your computer accessing the news server.

To setup yProxy and your computer for remote news service access, simply follow these steps, in order:

1. Configure your home computer’s firewall to allow remote connections to local port 119 from the IP address that you will be connecting from. If you do not use the firewall to restrict access, the entire Internet may be able to connect to yProxy and share your news connection. In addition, if your firewall is enabled and you don’t specifically allow this type of connection, your firewall will probably block it by default. In other words, don’t skip this step.
2. If you have a Internet router or Local Area Network at home, you will also need to configure your router or gateway, enabling port forwarding for port 119 and directing it to the address of the computer where yProxy is running. This is so you can reach the computer on your home Local Area Network from the Internet.
3. On your home computer, run yProxy, but turn off the “Run locally only” Server option.
4. Now, you just need to know the public IP address of your home computer. An easy way to get your home computer’s public IP address is to visit IPChicken from your home computer. Your home computer’s public IP address is the address that you will connect to remotely from your work or vacation. In your remote computer’s news reader settings, simply set the news server name to your home computer’s public IP address. This allows your news reader to connect to yProxy remotely on your home computer. yProxy will then connect to your free news service via your ISP.

Caveats

In case it isn’t obvious, you’ll need an always-on Internet connection at home. Most highspeed cable and DSL plans automatically provide this type of service. You will also need to leave your home computer on.

If your news service provider requires a login, you will need to configure your remote news reader with the required username and password.

Benefits of using yProxy yEnc Decoder as a remote news proxy:

• Access your free or premium news service from anywhere
• Share your news service with friends, family, and coworkers
• yProxy still decodes yEnc messages for you, remotely

Disclaimer

Please note that some ISPs who provide news service restrict this type of use in their terms of agreement or other legal agreements which you may have signed. It is your responsibility to ensure that you are not violating the terms with your ISP, or be willing to face the consequences.

If you are paying a premium news service provider, they probably won’t care if you share their service because you are paying for the bandwidth usage, just as long as you don’t resell the service. Read your agreements or ask them if you’re unsure.

The computer that I was attempting to view the movie on has one Pentium 4 3.20 GHz CPU with hyperthreading, and 2 GB of RAM.

Hyperthreading separates the processor into two logical processors.  They do share some of the pipe, so it’s not quite as good as two actual logical processors.  The thing about hyperthreading though, is instead of one 3.20 GHz processor, I effectively get two 1.70 GHz processors.

Well, a 1.70 GHz processor isn’t enough to decompress the file in real time.  So, I had to turn off hyperthreading in the computer’s setup menu to get a single logical CPU that runs at 3.20 GHz, providing all of the CPU power to the movie player process.

Unfortunately, even that wasn’t quite fast enough, but it was close.  I haven’t noticed any decrease in performance since I’ve turned off hyperthreading, and I’d like to keep the CPU power on hand for the next time I need it.  So, I’m leaving hyperthreading off.

In my normal use, I’d rather have one process get finished very quickly, than have two processes take longer and finish at the same time.  I usually just have one process that I’m waiting on.

Recently, we hit the file quota limit on our Brawny Lads site.  There are two quotas in place for our web hosting account:

• Disk usage
• Number of files

Our quota limits us to 100,000 files, which seems like it should be enough.  However, we hit the limit, which prevented me from receiving emails or even checking my mail via the web mail system.

I searched for new files and found that there were many new files in our old forum’s folder.  We used to run Ikonboard for our forum, but we retired that forum when we moved to phpBB.  Ikonboard doesn’t use a database, so each new post creates one or more new files.

When our webmaster made the switch, he changed all of the links on our site from the Ikonboard forum to the new forum.  Basically, he hid the old forum by removing all links to it.

So, how were we still receiving new posts, all of which were spam? 

Ikonboard was installed in the default Ikonboard folder, which is /cgi-bin/ikonboard.  Apparently, some spam bots were accessing that folder directly rather than spidering through our website to find the forum, or they found the old forum by following an outdated link from another website.

Dangers of simply removing links

So, when you retire old software or web pages from your website, it’s not enough to simply remove the links for the following reasons.

• You may miss a link
• Other websites may be linked to it
• Once a spider visits and archives your site, that link may always be remembered
• Default locations are well known

Proper removal of web pages or software

When it’s time to retire an old web page or software, it’s best to do one or more of the following:

• Delete it completely
• Rename the folder or file to a new, unguessable, name
• Change the permissions so it can’t be viewed or run

Software that you leave laying around, thinking that you’ve properly retired it, may be a serious vulnerability, especially if you no longer keep it updated.

Many users are enslaved when their ISP raises their rates.  The users don’t want to leave and find another provider because they’ll have to change their email address.

If I need to change ISP to chase better prices or better service, I don’t want to worry about my friends, family, and professional contacts not being able to contact me.  Of course, many ISPs are strictly local (people move away), ISPs go out of business, and ISPs gets bought out.  For all of the above reasons, ISP provided email accounts should be considered temporary.

Previously, free email providers didn’t offer services as favorable as a typical ISP’s service.  However, today, most of the free email providers have grown the size of their mailboxes to compete with Google’s gmail (started at 1 Gigabyte and is now at approximately 6 GB).  Many free email providers also provide decent antispam software, yet still allow you to check your junkmail folder for legitimate emails that my have been mistaken as spam.

It’s time for merchants to stop declaring free email accounts as hot spots for thievery and refusing orders or sign-ups using free email accounts.  Free email accounts are perfectly legitimate.  Despite this, an order from kisses244@hotmail.com is definitely more deserving of scrutiny than an order from MarcusAdams@comcast.net.  However, an order from marcus.adams@hotmail.com still looks pretty good.

When you register yProxy, please remember that if you use your ISP provided email address such as myname@comcast.net, what happens when you change ISPs down the road and you need me to resend your registration information?  I can send your registration information right to the email address that you used on the order form because I know that your email address is password protected, and only you should have access to it.

If you want me to send your registration information to a new email address, that new email address could belong to anybody.  You’ll need to prove your identity to me by providing a preponderance of data that I can verify.  That’s not fun for you or for me.

You will have similar problems with many other online sites.  If you need to retrieve your password via email later, and you’ve switched ISPs, you may be out of luck if you used your ISP’s email services.

When I was in college, people asked me for two addresses.  There was my address and my permanent address.  My address was the apartment or other location I was staying at the time, most definitely temporary.  Then there was my parent’s house, my permanent address, where mail would always find me.

Everyone should have a permanent email address.  Either use a free email provider that’s going to be around for awhile, like Yahoo, Hotmail, or Gmail, or get your own domain and have an email address like mail@marcusadams.org.  It’s the 21st century–everyone should own at least one domain name.

Apparently, when they emailed me a complaint the same day, to which I replied with their information the same day, they never received that either.

Then, about a month later, the customer did a charge back and at the same time emailed me a long lecture about customer service, complaining that they never received a response.  Interestingly, they did receive my response to the lecture, which briefly explained that the fault probably laid with their anti-spam product, but also thanked them for the feedback.

So, it’s interesting that the customer received my second email, but not the first, and didn’t receive an email from Plimus, the company that processes my yProxy orders for me.

Let me point out that neither I, nor Plimus, has ever spammed anybody.  So, why did our emails get blocked?

This can probably be blamed on an inaccurate anti-spam product.  Either the customer’s ISP, network administrator, or the customer is responsible for the failure.

Inaccurate anti-spam products cause you to lose valuable information and valuable time.  I know that my emails were delivered and accepted because I did not receive an SMTP rejection or a bounce back.  This means that the failure was between the customer’s mail server and the delivery of the mail to the customer’s inbox.  I must assume that the emails were delivered in absence of a message to the contrary.

It’s like me sending someone a letter, the postal carrier puts the letter in your mailbox, but you either overlook the message because you’re so used to getting junk mail and you think it’s just more junk mail.  Or, your mom throws away the letter because she thinks it’s junk mail.

Sending an email is, of course, actually more reliable than the above analogy.  It’s more like me personally handing the letter to your mom because you told me to.

Here’s the thing.  If you’re having to check your junk mail folder, then you may as well just read your mail in the inbox and forgo the anti-spam software.  If your mom is throwing away your mail, then it’s time to fire your mom.

It’s better to have false negatives, where some spam is delivered, than false positives, which marks some emails spam that aren’t.  If your anti-spam product commonly marks legitimate emails as spam, then you must always check your junk mail folder.  This, of course, costs you time.

There is only one antispam product that blocks 99.95% of spam, and is 99.999% accurate when delivering legitimate emails (blocks only 1 in 100,000 legitimate emails).

Get Greenview Data’s SpamStopsHere.  It’s what I use.  You should too.  Otherwise you’ll think people are ignoring you, and you’ll be frustrated, and you’ll spend entirely too much time emailing people misplaced lectures on customer courtesy.

Requirements

Before we proceed, here is what you’ll require:

1. Another working Windows XP system that supports the same type of hard drive interface, such as EIDE or SATA, and has a spare connection
2. Sufficient disk space on the spare system’s hard drive, or an external hard drive, to hold your recovered files
3. A backup device on the spare system, such as a DVD burner
4. Data recovery software if you’ve deleted the files, deleted the partition, or formatted the drive

Removing the failed drive

Power down the failed computer system, and then unhook the failed drive.

Preparing the spare system for recovering deleted data

Before you hook up the failed drive to the spare system, there are some steps that you must take to prepare the spare system.  This will ensure that when you hook up the failed drive, it will not get written to, which could cause data loss if you are recovering deleted files or partitions.  Here are the steps to perform on the spare system if you are recovering deleted data:

1. Disable System Restore
2. Disable the indexing service
3. Permanently disable all antivirus programs
4. Turn off all scheduled maintenance, such as scheduled defrags, scheduled virus scans, and scheduled backups

Preparing the spare system for recovering data from a crashing or unbootable operating system

These steps ensure that you will be able to access the required parts of the drive.

1. Turn on show hidden files
2. Disable hide protected operating system files
3. Disable “Use simple file sharing”

Hookup the failed drive to the spare system

Power down the spare system and install the failed drive.

Ensure that you set master/slave settings properly for IDE or EIDE drives.  If you set things up properly, your failed drive will appear as one or more new drive letters in Windows when you boot up the spare system.

Restoring data from a crashing or unbootable Windows system drive

If the problem was simply that the operating system wouldn’t boot or was crashing, all of your files should be there for the grabbing.

If you’ve used encrypted folders, ensure that you log into the spare system using the same username and password.  Create an account if it doesn’t already exist.

Otherwise, log into the spare system as administrator and take control of all of the files on the drive.  To do this, simply:

1. Assuming you’ve already disabled the Simple File Sharing mode, right click on the failed drive and click Properties from the pop-up menu
2. On the security tab, click the Advanced button
3. On the Owner tab, select your login ID, fill in the checkbox for “Replace owner on subcontainers and objects” and click Ok
4. You should now have full access to all of the files on the failed drive

To find a user’s Desktop, My Documents, and Internet Explorer Favorites folder, look in:

\Documents and Settings\username\

To find your Outlook Express database files, look in:

\Documents and Settings\username\Local Settings\Application Data\Identities\{GUID}\Microsoft\Outlook Express\

Restoring deleted data

If you did a low level format, your files are gone.

Restoring other deleted data requires specialized software.

I’ve had recent experience using Stellar’s Phoenix Recovery Software.  The NTFS Data Recovery Software package is sufficient for restoring your deleted files, including files from a deleted partition or even a quick formatted partition.

Stellar’s software worked, but the user interface was outdated and just plain not friendly.  For example, I only wanted to recover JPEGs over 1 MB, so I sorted the lost file list by size, but then I had to select each JPEG manually.  I couldn’t select a range.  Also, why I can’t I scan the whole drive for lost folders without scanning raw files at the same time?  In order to do that, I had to uncheck all of the file types.  Where are the FLV file types?  The file types list needs an upgrade.  Also, every time I wanted to change the selected file types, I had to start over from scratch because each time I went into the dialog to pick my file types, it automatically selected them all for me.  This was even a bigger pain because in order to add file types, I had to leave the dialog, add the file type, then come back.  The pros, of course, were that it worked.

When restoring deleted files, always restore the data to your spare computer’s drive and never to the failed drive.   Any time you write to the failed drive, you may be overwriting other data, which will then be gone forever.

Backing up and archiving your data

Now that your data is successfully recovered to your spare system’s drive, it is time to archive all of your important files.  The preferred backup method is DVD.  DVDs are more resiliant than magenetic or flash based media.  Use the verification mode on your DVD burning software to verify that the files were correctly burned.  If you don’t have this feature, you’ll need to test the backups before you archive them.

You can cheaply make multiple backups on DVD.  Store one copy in your home safe, if you have one.  If they’re not in a safe,  thieves may inadvertently grab them or your spouse may accidentally pitch them.

Store another copy in a safety deposit box.  This protects you in the case of fire or anything else that might happen to your home.  An alternative to a safety deposit box is a locked drawer at your office, or a local family member’s safe.

Label every DVD with the contents, such as “Photos”, “Home movies”, “Artwork”, or “Important Documents”, and a date.  Don’t start throwing away the old backups unless your safety deposit box and safe are out of room.  It’s best to have two or more generations of backups around.

Keep all of your photos and other masterpieces backed up on an external drive.  You can quickly grab them if you need them, and you’ll be protected in case of another system crash.  However, a backup on an extenal drive is not the same as archiving the data.  The external drive will burn in a fire and it will be the first thing the thieves grab.  The external drive is for convenience, not peace of mind.

Archive all of your data on DVDs in your home safe and a safety deposit box or other secure site away from your home.  Then, sleep well at night.

Don’t panic.  An operating system crash is often unrelated to a hard drive crash.  In fact a lot can go wrong with an operating system or even the file system to prevent your system from booting, but as long as the drive is still spinning, odds are it’s a “soft crash”, as opposed to a “hard crash”.

With a hard (or “physical”) crash, it means that something in your hard drive has mechanically failed.  Perhaps the spindle motor that spins the drive has failed.  Dropping or kicking a hard drive while it’s spinning can cause a drive head to come into contact with the platter, causing another type of hard crash, which may cause data loss.

A soft (or “logical”) crash means that the hard drive has not had a mechanical failure.  Instead, it has become corrupted in some way.  It could be the file system itself that is corrupted, such as a bad master boot record, or an accidentally deleted partition.  Sometimes, the file system is intact, but something has happened to the operating system, preventing your system from booting or causing it to crash.

Hard crashes are easily detected.  Your BIOS will usually report a bad hard disk, or the drive will not show up at all when you boot your computer.  Hint: hard crashes are often simply a loose connection.

A soft crash is just about anything else.  So if you want to keep your data after a soft crash, stop!  If you can get to the Windows boot screen, you can try to revert to your last known hardware configuration if you’ve just installed or updated a driver.

Sometimes you can fix other Windows problems, but if you haven’t made a recovery disk, or you don’t know where it is, you may be out of luck.

But wait!  If you don’t know the difference between running a recovery disk, restoring Windows, and formatting a drive, then don’t try it!

If you put in the recovery disk that your manufacturer has provided you, or boot off of your Windows CD or DVD to restore Windows, do you really know how far you can go before wiping out your current install?  If not, then don’t do it!  This is probably the biggest mistake made by home users, causing their files to be irretrievably lost.

With a soft crash, your prized files are probably all still there and intact.  Your hard drive can be hooked up to another computer, and your files can be retrieved.  The other computer boots off of its own hard drive, so it doesn’t matter if there’s an operating system at all, let alone a working one on your old hard drive.  Corrupted file systems are a bit more difficult, but with the proper software, your files can still be retrieved.

 In case I didn’t say it enough times, if you don’t know the difference between running a recovery disk, doing a Windows restore, reinstalling, or reformatting, don’t do it, or you may lose your data forever.

Take your computer to a specialist, preferably one that you’ve been referred to.  Taking your computer to someone who is not qualified to do data recovery is probably the second biggest mistake by home users.

In my next article, I will provide some basic tips for doing data recovery after your hard drive suffers a soft crash.