iSCSI is a widely adopted network storage protocol that makes “you” able to send SCSI commands to a storage device over a network. People working in the server room knows iSCSI very well, for the others is only another weird acronym.

If you are looking for a SOHO NAS – for home and office use – we suggest to choose a model with iSCSI support. There are devices at a really interesting price point with this feature.

Why? Here some good reasons:

• iSCSI makes your NAS capable to be a VMware ESXi datastore, even if performance isn’t stellar you can use it for testing purposes.
• SOHO NAS usually run Linux and store data on EXT3 and EXT4 file systems. This may cause you trouble with Windows integrated System Image Backup functionalities, Storage Spaces and other features. An iSCSI LUN can be formatted with any file system, solving the issue.
• iSCSI provides a much better data management with stronger security..
• ..and a greater flexibility.

Installing IIS (Internet Information Services) on a desktop machine may sound weird but it’s very useful for development purposes.

You can test your website locally before the final deploy and check any modification in a few seconds.

We’ll show you how to install IIS 8 on a Windows 8.1 operating systems and how to deploy your first website.
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VLANs or virtual LANs, are a great tool to segment LANs without having to build a complex and costly network infrastructure. Even with only a unique switch you can build a network with multiple broadcast domains.

Other advantages of adopting VLANs are scalability, network performance, improved efficiency and better security.

Thanks to HP and its 1910 Switch Series, we have an affordable solution to implement VLANs.

We’ll show you how to segment your LAN into VLANs with these switches.
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VPN (Virtual Private Network) is a technology that allows to extend a local network on a public network like the Internet. Using a VPN, a computer connected to the Internet can send and receive data from the computers inside the network as if it was directly connected.

A very powerful tool for today’s companies.

A VPN is easy to set up on Windows Server 2012 R2, just follow these steps and you’ll be ready (server side, we’ll talk about client configuration in the future).
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FileZilla is a free and open source FTP server that may come in handy for setting up an online file repository or to build a webserver.

The installation is quite simple, just follow these steps and you’ll be ready to use your FTP server.

Download FileZilla Server from this page, it’s a Windows-only package.

Installation

Launch the executable and install the software. Skip the two crapware at the beginning, then select everything except the source code:

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XAMPP – acronym for Cross-Platform, Apache, MySQL, PHP and Perl – is a widely adopted Apache distribution used to locally host and test websites.

It’s available as a unique installation package for Windows and other platforms. You can download the package from the official site.

XAMPP is a powerful tool in the hands of a web developer.
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