CyberStreams Blog

One of my client’s servers recently experienced a hard drive crash. Luckily, it was part of a RAID-5 array and I was able to replace the hard drive and do a rebuild. Unfortunately, the hard drive crash caused the following error when trying to boot Windows:

STOP: c0000218 {Registry File Failure}
The registry cannot load the hive (file):
\SystemRoot\System32\Config\SOFTWARE
or its log or alternate.
It is corrupt, absent, or not writeable.

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Last week I setup a second partition on my laptop and installed the newly released Windows 7 RC. I had used the previous beta a few times already, and had been following the news on Windows 7 pretty closely as well. At least for me, the positive hype is spot on. I’m really digging it. I think there are numerous resources out there already covering all the great features and changes they’ve made, so instead I wanted to write about some of the oddities I’ve noticed.
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Sometimes in small business a few hundred dollars can mean a lot.  One of the many ways to try and squeeze that out of your IT budget could be eliminating the semi-annual renewal cost of an SSL cert from a globally trusted CA (Certificate Authority).  Let’s be honest, CA’s are making a killing by selling trusted certificates.  You should know that simply because it’s not trusted, it doesn’t mean it’s not secure (Malicious sites have used self-signed certs to exploit, but you are not malicious… right?).  Your self-signed cert is providing the same encryption as many of the basic certificate offerings of all these CA’s and encrypting the data on your site just fine.  However, if you are like 99% of us, your internal servers running the CA service are not globally trusted as “known good” CA’s.  So people who don’t know you may get scared away, thus not a great idea for your secured SSL online shopping cart.  However, for sites and tools  used only by personnel (Outlook Web Access,  SSL-VPN, SharePoint site, Extranet, etc.) it is a viable option.  Although, If you are having external clientele accessing your SSL secured site by using an globally trusted certificate provider would make you look more professional and legitimate (RED stop signs and warnings seem to scare people on the internet).
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