AGAboutMe

I recently had an opportunity to do a little repair work on a laptop owned by a relative of mine. The laptop in question is an HP Pavillion x360 Convertable PC, Model# m3-u001dx. My relative stated that the screen on the laptop would turn on, but nothing would be displayed.  Troubleshooting To start troubleshooting the problem, I made sure that the laptop had power and was connected to the power adapter.  Afterwards, I rebooted the computer by doing a forced shutdown using the power button. After turning the computer back on, the screen lit up but nothing was displayed. I again rebooted but this time attempted to boot into safe mode. I did this by pressing the Windows + B buttons while pressing the power button and releasing them all at the same time. Still nothing. Finally, I connected the laptop to my TV using and HDMI cable.   Using the HDMI cable, I was able to see the screen and access the desktop. From there, I conducted a virus scan and updated windows as we...

It's been a few days since I last posted about setting up a pi-hole.  I wanted to talk a little bit more about how a pi-hole works, and about how to set up Whitelists and Blacklists.  So, lets get started. In my last post I spoke briefly about how a pi-hole works, and then went over an in depth view of the install. I want to get a little more in depth about how a pi-hole actually works.  I mentioned in my previous post that a pi-hole acts like a sink hole for ads.  A pi-hole sits on the edge of your network and acts as a DNS filter.  It will scan incoming and outgoing DNS requests for known malicious or ad domains and block them before they reach your network.   How does it do this?  It makes use of a few programs.  One program is FTLDNS which is a modified version of dnsmasq.  This provides DNS caching and also allows the pi-hole to act as a DHCP server.  This program allows the pi-hole to cache Domain Names, allowing it to...

To start things off, I want to talk about some of the projects I have been working on. I currently have a very humble home lab. It consists of a Raspberry Pi 3, a one terabyte hard drive, a windows laptop, and a Linux laptop. I plan on upgrading in the future as required by various projects. I eventually want to have a NAS on my network as well as do some web hosting and maybe a few other things as they come up.    One of my very first projects was to set up a Pi Hole on my LAN to act as a DNS sink hole for ads.  Pictured below is the admin screen for my Pi Hole. I am going to give you a play-by-play with a few explanations of what certain functions are, and how they work as I understand them. I kinda wish I had an easy to follow guide when I first did this. I was a brand new linux user and had no idea what I was doing at first. This is the product of many failed attempts and lots of googling. Installing Pi Hole was fairly straight forward. I had previously...