Friday, March 9, 2012

Dual NIC Traffic Prioritization

Scenario:  You have two network cards installed on your computer that's running Windows 7.  One is connected to a High Speed Internet Connection.  The other is connected to your corporate LAN.  You want all Internet traffic to go through the high speed Internet connection.  You want corporate email, business applications and access to corporate file servers to use the corporate LAN connection.

The best way to accomplish this is by configuring metrics on the network cards.  In a nutshell the operating system sends all traffic out through the network card that has the lowest metric setting.  Since I want my computer to use the Wireless Connection for High Speed Internet browsing, I'm going to configure this NIC with the lowest Metric.  Then I'll set the other LAN NIC to have a metric setting that is higher than the Wireless NIC.  See Screen shots below...

Screen 1 - Select Internet Protocol Version 4 then click properties

Screen 2 - Click on Advanced button


Screen 3 - Uncheck the Automatic metric box then enter your metric setting



Perform the above action on both NIC cards; setting the metric for the highest priority NIC with the lowest metric number.  Windows routing will take care to route your corporate LAN traffic based on the IP Address and Default Gateway Settings.

Enjoy...

Friday, February 24, 2012

Encrypted Storage Devices

A federal court has ruled that a man under investigation isn't required to unlock his computer hard drives for the federal government, because it would violate his right against self-incrimination.

In this case a man had encrypted his hard drive and would not turn over the encryption key to authorities so that they could decrypt the hard drive.

Do you know how to encrypt your hard drive?  And more importantly, do you know how to decrypt it?  If not,  open a service request here http://gadweb.gadgroup.com/scripts/ttx.cgi?cmd=newticket&sid=&style= and we'll show you how.