Thanks for your support

We're in a time of tremendous change right now. (Please forgive the understatement.) The reality is that, in good times and bad, there's always a need for quality products and services. You have my firm commitment to continue providing high quality learning solutions at fair prices, delivering great value. That's what we expect from our vendors and that's what you can expect from us.

We're Growing!

Please welcome a new addition to the soundtraining.net family. Jeff Martin joins us as National Accounts Manager. Jeff has been a trainer, content developer, and even a paramedic. He most recently was manager of content development at SkillPath Seminars. Jeff brings a wealth of experience in technical training (he has been certified as both MCSE and CCNA), content development, and customer relations. Jeff is responsible for developing onsite training opportunities nationwide. Jeff will be in the office starting this coming Monday and he'll be getting in touch with you over the next few weeks to introduce himself.

Week of Geek

Our onsite customers often ask us to customize the training for their particular needs. That makes sense, of course. You get focused training that targets your particular areas of interest and needs. Now, we've created a program to help you customize the training and we've even priced it to make a great value. We call it "Week of Geek". You select your choice of up to 30 modules from nearly 100 available and we deliver the training for your group of up to 14 over a period of five days. Each of the learners gets a customized workbook and you get a staff that's more knowledgeable and more motivated in just one week's time. You can find out more about "Week of Geek" here: www.soundtraining.net/weekofgeek. Please let me know what you think.

Blocking dictionary attacks against SSH

If you've ever looked at /etc/log/secure on your Internet-connected Linux box, you've probably been shocked at the number of logon attempts (hopefully failed attempts) from IP addresses you've never heard of. Of course, it's just some bad guy attempting a dictionary attack using common usernames and random passwords. One of the things you can do that's helpful is to use DenyHosts. It's a daemon that will create entries in /etc/hosts.deny after a pre-determined number of failed logon attempts. It's open source and available at www.denyhosts.net.

Windows 7 Beta

I'm not sure what got into me. I'm not usually interested in beta software for the sake of beta software. Maybe it's just the incredible amount of hype surrounding it, but I decided to install the beta of Windows 7 on my desktop system. (My laptop is my main computer...my desktop system is for testing, but it's usually some version of Linux that I'm playing with or maybe an application.) Anyway, I went ahead and installed Windows 7 on it. It's nothing special...3.40GHz P4 with 2GB of RAM and a 160GB hard drive. Cool eye candy, but that's expected on any modern O.S. What surprised me was how quickly pages load in I.E. 8. Admittedly, I just finished the installation, so there hasn't been time for any browser bloat to creep in, but still, it's noticeably faster. I'll add more comments as I run it for a while.