OpenFiler is a great open source solution for your SAN needs. It's free and does what most high end SAN solutions will provide. One of the things you can leverage OpenFiler for is to provide you with your iSCSI targets. If you are a VMWare related virtualization shop, iSCSI protocol and storage is indispensable. In this article we will show you as to how you can configure OpenFiler to provide you with iSCSI targets. When configured with iSCSI targets, you can connect to these from any Windows or even Linux Unix machines and mount the iSCSI targets such that they appear as local hard drives or volumes. OpenFiler iSCSI implementation provides a great virtual platform to test out ESX or ESXi since iSCSI is the next best thing to fiber channel and is faster than some of the other normal protocols.

Outlook as you all know is the popular email client from Microsoft. Command Line Switches provide enhanced or modified functionality to the default Outlook behavior.

In our earlier article we showed you how to configure the popular Network Area Storage Appliance called FreeNAS. The latest version of FreeNAS, version 8 is significantly different than its predecessors. In this article we will show you how you can configure CIFS so you can connect to a CIFS share from any machine using a username and password. CIFS is Common Internet File System which is also known as SMB or Server Messaging block. In our example our FreeNAS appliance is not configured with ZFS or Zero File System rather Universal File System. If you need any help on how to pre configure the appliance so that you can refer to our previous article on How to configure FreeNAS 8.

In this article we will explain how to change the default remote desktop port on Windows Seven to a custom port. The default port is TCP 3389 but a lot of systems administrators like to change this due to a variety of reasons. The biggest reason is to hide it as a "visible" port for hackers to attack, as hackers normally target to most obvious ports to gain access to a system. Another reason for changing the default RDP (Remote Desktop Protocol) listening port could be that you want to avoid or bypass firewall restrictions, often put in place on outgoing and incoming connections to a remote or local machine.

Windows Updates are an essential part of your operating system that makes it running smooth and secure. If you are in a corporate domain environment, the Windows Updates to your machine are likely being pushed down from a WSUS server, SMS or System Center Configuration Manager. WSUS, SMS and SCCM are great products that let administrator control the patches and security hotfixes that get installed on the machine. However, this centralized administration is possible only when the machine is joined to a Domain, WSUS, SCCM and SMS can not make use of Domain GPOs (Group Policy Objects) to enforce it on machines on a Workgroup. In such a case, you can always use a local group policy on Windows Seven to configure the Windows Update Settings. In this article we will show you how you can use Windows Seven Local Group Policy to configure your Windows Update Settings and its advantages