It's a feature!

This satirical Mac Mini review has an hilarious final paragraph. [via Macintouch]:

"So is the mini a maxi value? For me, clearly, no. When I consider that a good deal of my time is spent running applications like Disk Defragmenter, Scandisk, Norton AV, Windows Update and Ad-Aware--none of which are available for the Mac platform--it doesn't make sense for me to "switch" to a Mac at this time"

That pretty much sums up my reasons to get a Mac, you spend all your time using it and not fixing it.

DLink Stinks - Beware the DWL-G650X which has no 802.1X

Just a word of warning about the DLink DWL-G560X wireless card, DLink sells this card exclusively for Macs, and claims numerous times on their web site (and in the PDF data sheet and in the specifications) that it will work with 802.1X: Except that there isn't actually any 802.1X support!!!!!!!!!

I had a student bring it in with her Lombard today, and there's nothing in the utility to configure 802.1X. I called their Tech Support, and I slowly repeated myself about three times, they confirmed that the web site is wrong. The card only supports WPA-PSK and WEP, which are consumer-grade encryption at best.

Considering the student's father specifically bought this card for 802.1X support, I hope they're able to return it, but I just didn't want anyone else to fall victim to the same trap. D-Link claimed that they'd change the web site, but since this is how "Ejaz Mahfuz" wrote up my call, I doubt it's going to happen soon:

In the product manual there is no option to setup the utiliyt with the security 802.1x.

Neither it says in the local websit.

But the product description on the site is not right about the security about the 802.1x.

Savages

I'm getting Trackback spammed the last couple of days. It'd be nice if the spammer would get a clue, as I have the rel=nofollow plugin installed, and I'm deleting his trackbacks and banning IPs within an hour of him spamming me, so it's really not doing him any good...

Mark your calendars

I'm going to be presenting at the Iowa Association for Communication Technology annual conference on April 1 in Cedar Rapids. It's a joint conference with the Iowa Distance Learning Association. My co-worker Aaron Howard and I will be covering the evolution of our campus wireless network over the last 5 years, as well as the security and usability implications of various wireless security methods in the chaotic campus network environment.

"Network path not found" when attempting to join a machine to a domain

I'm feeding this into Google, in case anyone else ever runs into this problem that I helped someone fix with their domain this week: If you have taken down one domain controller for maintenance, and then you attempt to add it back into your domain after a rebuild, and you encounter the error "Network path not found", you have a problem. This error usually means that you have some sort of DNS problem, but if you double-check all your TCP/IP settings, and find that's not the case, there's one more thing to check.

Check to make sure someone hasn't disabled File and Printer sharing on your "backup" domain controller. Without that enabled, Active Directory will NOT function properly. Go into the Network control panel, re-enable that protocol, and you're in business.

I know, this is a pretty obscure problem, and most people wouldn't accidentally disable file and print sharing on a domain controller, but it's possible (and baffling at first) so that's why I'm sharing.