Checksums play an important role in various fields, from data integrity verification to cyber security. They are essential tools for ensuring the accuracy and security of data transmission and storage. While exploring what a checksum is, you will discover its significant role in cyber security, how to use checksums effectively, and best practices for their implementation.

Managed Service Providers (MSPs) are the backbone for many businesses, ensuring that IT systems run smoothly and efficiently. They offer a cost-effective alternative to building an in-house tech team, often allowing companies to leverage cutting edge expertise without the significant expense and responsibility associated with expanding headcount.

Workflow management lets IT departments streamline processes, enhance efficiency, and reduce errors. By automating repetitive IT tasks, your IT team can focus on more strategic activities, ultimately driving innovation and improving service delivery. Here’s how to get started.

Understanding Alternate Data Streams (ADS) within file systems, particularly within the NTFS framework on Windows operating systems, is crucial for IT security professionals, software developers, digital forensic analysts, and anyone interested in data security. This article aims to provide a comprehensive overview of ADS, exploring their technical aspects, legitimate uses, and security implications.

Maintaining strong relationships with your customers is essential. As an MSP, your customers rely on you for their IT solutions, cybersecurity, and overall technological support. But beyond providing these services, creating a sense of appreciation and gratitude can enhance customer satisfaction, add value to the relationship, and boost loyalty. While grand gestures may seem appealing, sometimes it’s the small, thoughtful actions that can make the biggest impact.

Link aggregation is a way of bundling a bunch of individual (Ethernet) links together so they act as a single logical link. A fundamental for effective switch management, if you have a switch with a whole lot of Gigabit Ethernet ports, you can connect all of them to another device that also has a bunch of ports and balance the traffic among these links to improve performance.

If you’ve ever been in charge of IP address assignment, you’ve come across the terms classful and classless addressing. If you haven’t, the main difference between classful and classless addressing is in the subnet length: classful addressing uses fixed-length subnet masks, but classless uses variable length subnet masks (VLSM).

The TCP/IP protocol sometimes shows its age. It was invented in an era when networks were very slow and packet loss was high. So one of the main considerations in early protocol design was reliability. The Transmission Control Protocol (TCP) has built-in mechanisms for reliability that include validating a checksum on every packet, as well as detection and retransmission of dropped or out-of-order packets.

Is that a bird’s nest or is it spaghetti? Have you ever asked that question when looking into a IT wiring closet? At some point in your tenure as a network manager, you’ve likely been asked to inventory a network and create a network topology diagram.