Gladiateduke

The projector is very impressive. I'd love one!

I want an ssd for those amazing boot times! Everyone should have an ssd for their boot drive.

I'd love a kova. My current mouse's sensor is dying and keeps skipping around. Its driving me crazy.

I have been wanting to get my dad a ups for a while. He works from home and when we lose power he loses any work he forgot to save. I'm also worried about not having his nas hooked up to a ups as that is where most of our family photos and other important things are. We do some backups to the cloud but we don't have enough space so it only ends up being the most important photos and documents. Here is the link

What version of windows are you using? You can do a lot more with win 7 professional, win 8,8.1 and 10 pro than you can with windows home premium and home respectively. I'm not sure why it would be unreliable. Maybe if you provided a few more details I could help you out some more. On your phone, you can use es file explorer. That's what I use for my share at home and it works great. You can google a guide to connecting to a network share with es file explorer. In terms of alternatives to windows you could look into freenas but you would need dedicated hardware as previous posts have mentioned. I haven't gone into too much detail but feel free to reply to my post or pm if you want more details on windows network shares. When configured correctly they can be very useful.

No problem. Feel free to pm me if you need any help with setting anything up or configuring the audits on the server. Good luck!

Hey Architect, I don't have any experience with PFsense so I'm not sure if this is possible but you could try restricting the IPs that have access to you server/an open port. To access your server's desktop you would connect to your home network with openVPN, then use something like RDP (remote desktop protocol) to access your server. You could also use team viewer but I try to keep my servers as clean as possible. This is assuming you are running windows on the remote computer. There is also an RDP app for android devices. As for the auditing, you should be fine with event viewer auditing. I can't help you right now because I'm at work (on my lunch break ) but I will update you when I get home. Regarding your question about if the person is using a vpn, if you see any IPs that you are not familiar with trying to connect to your server then you can block it. The problem with blocking an entire county is you will also be blocking any legit traffic coming from there. For example, you are trying to access a website hosted in china, well, you wont be able to because the ip is blocked. Hope this helped

Do you have any auditing set up on your server? You can make custom views in the event viewer to filter only certain event IDs. You could make one that filters all audit failures, rdp sessions and much more. It really isn't that hard you just have to find the event id. If you would like I could connect to one of our servers and see a few event IDs that we filtered. You can see when a remote connection is being made what the source ip/port is. You could then go into your router and blacklist that ip. It is strange that the other ip you saw connected was 10.x.x.x. This range of class A IPs is reserved to be used as private ip's. try to see what public ip they are using. You could then blacklist that ip. I also agree with what Kyle said. You should use a vpn to connect to your home network and then from there connect to the required services. The openvpn config in your router should be fine as I don't think you will be accessing any sensitive documents remotely. Feel free to pm with any questions or just reply to my post. Edit: regarding your question about where to buy a pre-built pfsense box. You can get them off their website. I think they start around $300 buts its been a while since I looked into it so I could be wrong.

As people have mentioned, you can accomplish this in your router. The only down side it that you will not be able to block https or any other encrypted data. Another option (if you are willing to take the time) is to modify the host file in windows. The down side of this is you will have to do it on each computer so it will take some time. You will easily be able to find a guide online if you want to go this route. The advantage is you will be able to block any websites that use HTTPS or any other encrypted protocols.

What you could try is a program called deepfreez. This will essentially load a fresh image everytime you reboot the computer. If the computer has not been rebooted in a while, you can set it to manually restart either through a gpo (if its attached to a DC), a local group policy or a simple script that will run when all users are logged off. This way, no matter what is done on that computer, when rebooted a fresh image will be loaded and all changes made will be reset. Now there are a few issues with this. First, if a user saves to the c: drive, they will lose all of their work so you will have to have a file server set up for all users to save their work to. Second, you will have to update your anti-virus on the default image and then deploy it to the hosts manually. This means you can just let your anti-virus do the updates automatically and not worry about it. If you do not want to go the deepfreez route, you can look into VMware VMI. This way, all users will have virtual session on a server. When they boot up the computer and log into their account, a virtual session will be made on a server that will run from a default image. This is more resource intensive than deepfreez but might be less of a hassle in the long run. Sorry if this wasn't what you where looking for but they are suitable alternative to what you had in mind. If you have any questions feel free to pm me or just reply to my post. Good luck!

Ok, I appreciate your help. Thank you.

Thanks. I will look into these. Of the three, what service do you like the most?

Ok, cool. I'll try it out now. what server do you use. I was planning on just using the google dns but I was wondering of you knew of a better one.

I'm not quite sure I understand what you mean by usgin a dns. If I where to use a different dns server that would just change the server that resolves the netflix.com name to 74.101.139.66. Would the request not still be made using my assigned ip?

I quickly looked into strongvpn. I'm not a fan of the limited amount of times you can switch servers. For Netflix I would want to connect to an american server where as I would connect to one in Canada for most other web services. I would definitely switch servers more than 25 times a month.