<![CDATA[

State of INFOCOM October 2013

Greeting Marines,
Sorry for the delay in my report for October. I have just recovered from my Halloween candy coma.
Just kidding, but it was a close call. With the holiday season fast approaching, INFOCOM will be delay starting any new projects until after the New Year. Normal maintenance and troubleshooting issues will continue during this time. I will address this in more detail with a list of future projects planned in the November report.

In the last reports I have mentioned a few IT related items about backing up files and passwords. This month I would like to talk about properly destroying your files. I’m not sure if anyone else has heard this saying before, “You only lock your car to keep the honest people out”. Basically this means those who are planning on breaking in will do it anyway, the locked door doesn’t matter to them.
Over the years I have had to recover files deleted by mistake and assisted friends trying to recover files that were lost when their computer hard drive crashed. Yes that is correct, they had no backup. Years ago, I purchased a software suite that can recover files that have been deleted or files from a failing hard drive. The first time I used this software I was very surprised how well it worked. I could read the last 6 writes to the hard drive. You might ask, what does that mean? Let’s say you have a computer hard drive and you format it and reload the operating system 6 different times in a row. This software could see the files in all six of those installs. Has anyone sold an old laptop or given an old computer away? I’m sure before you did that you deleted your files, formatted the hard drive and reloaded the operating system. Unless you did that 7 or more times this software and others like it could recover your files from that computer. Today in my case, I have another program that does a DOD (Department of Defense) level format of a hard drive, it writes to the hard drive more than 10 times making the possibility of recovering the files with this software impossible. If I really don’t want to take a chance the old hammer and hard drive on the side walk trick works as well. The bottom line is, if the person that got your old computer is honest, you should still lock your car door. (Sorry, that might still be the candy talking)
It looks like we have a lot of the email forwarding problems worked out. We are continuing to look into other issues and make corrections when needed. If you encounter problems with the website or email forwarding issues please let me know off list and I’ll try and resolve it.
In closing here are the pingdom stats for October.
October
Uptime: 99.56%
Outages: 7
Downtime: 3hr 25 min
Response time: 523 ms
Thank you,
BGEN Mark “Slayer” Anderson
Commanding Officer, Information Command (COINFOCOM)
STARFLEET Marine Corps]]>