Author: sikander

my computer died two days ago. it rebooted automatically and then halted at the boot screen with a message saying “Hardrive failure is imminent. Backup immediately.” i turned off the computer immediately, called harry and asked if he had ever seen such a message before. he had and he also advised me to back up immediately and get a new hardrive. i called skid and asked which should brand i should buy since he has had two hardrives fail on him in the past. his recommendation was a Seagate barracuda. i had two Western Digitals in my computer.. a 60GB and an 80GB.

the computer never did turn back on. the warning message was about the hardrive but the CPU had died too. doh! i had a 2.5 Ghz Celeron and i decided to upgrade to a 3 Ghz Pentium 4. i had to buy a motherboard as well since the old one had fried itself along with the cpu. it was probably some kind of a power surge that killed everything.

in the meantime i connected my laptop to my dell 2405 for a very odd computing experience. infonec worked on my computer for a day and a half and installed the new motherboard and cpu. i also bought a 120 GB seagate and a DVD writer for backups and today i spent most the day installing Windows XP and setting up all the required programs.

luckily the hardrive that was going to fail imminently only had a few corrupt folders and i did not loose much. phewh. a very sudden and expensive upgrade… but wow, CounterStrike runs soo much better now.

SecurID is a mechanism developed by RSA Security for authenticating a user to a network resource.

The SecurID authentication mechanism consists of a “token” — a piece of hardware assigned to a user that generates an authentication code every sixty seconds using a built-in clock and the card’s factory-encoded random key (known as the “seed”). The seed is different for each token, and is loaded into the corresponding SecurID server (the “ACE Server”) as the tokens are purchased.

The token hardware is designed to be tamper resistant to deter reverse engineering of the token.

A user authenticating to a network resource — say, a dial-in server or a firewall — needs to enter both a PIN (something you know) and the number being displayed at that moment in time on her SecurID token (something you have). The server, which also has a real-time clock and a database of valid cards with the associated seed records, computes what number the token is supposed to be showing at that moment in time, checks it against what the user entered, and makes the decision to allow or deny access.

While the SecurID system can add a layer of security to a network, difficulty can occur if the authentication server’s clock becomes out of synch with the clock built in to the authentication tokens. However, typically the ACE Server automatically corrects for this without affecting the user. It is also possible to manually re-sync a token in the ACE server. Also, providing authentication tokens to everyone who might need to access a network resource can be expensive, particularly as the tokens are programmed to “expire” at a fixed time, usually three years, requiring purchase of a new token.

[ wikipedia ]