Network security

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consists of the provisions made in an underlying computer network infrastructure, policies adopted by the network administrator to protect the network and the network-accessible resources from unauthorized access and the effectiveness (or lack) of these measures combined together.

* 1 Comparison with computer security
* 2 Attributes of a secure network
* 3 Security management
o 3.1 Small homes
o 3.2 Medium businesses
o 3.3 Large businesses
o 3.4 Government
* 4 References
* 5 Further reading
* 6 See also
* 7 External links

Comparison with computer security

Securing network infrastructure is like securing possible entry points of attacks on a country by deploying appropriate defense. Computer security is more like providing means to protect a single PC against outside intrusion. The former is better and practical to protect the civilians from getting exposed to the attacks. The preventive measures attempt to secure the access to individual computers--the network itself--thereby protecting the computers and other shared resources such as printers, network-attached storage connected by the network. Attacks could be stopped at their entry points before they spread. As opposed to this, in computer security the measures taken are focused on securing individual computer hosts. A computer host whose security is compromised is likely to infect other hosts connected to a potentially unsecured network. A computer host's security is vulnerable to users with higher access privileges to those hosts.

Attributes of a secure network

Network security starts from authenticating any user, most likely an username and a password. Once authenticated, firewall enforces access policies such as what services are allowed to be accessed by the network users.[1] Though effective to prevent unauthorized access, this component fails to check potentially harmful contents such as computer worms being transmitted over the network. An intrusion prevention system (IPS)[2] helps detect and prevent such malware. IPS also monitors for suspicious network traffic for contents, volume and anomalies to protect the network from attacks such as denial of service. Communication between two hosts using the network could be encrypted to maintain privacy. Individual events occurring on the network could be tracked for audit purposes and for a later high level analysis.

Honeypots, essentially decoy network-accessible resources, could be deployed in a network as surveillance and early-warning tools. Techniques used by the attackers that attempt to compromise these decoy resources are studied during and after an attack to keep an eye on new exploitation techniques. Such analysis could be used to further tighten security of the actual network being protected by the honeypot.[3]
Security management

Security Management for networks is different for all kinds of situations. A small home or an office would only require basic security while large businesses will require high maintenance and advanced software and hardware to prevent malicious attacks from hacking and spamming.

[edit] Small homes

* A basic firewall.
* A basic Antivirus software like Norton AntiVirus, AVG Anti-Virus or Windows Defender, any others may suffice if it contains a virus scanner to scan for malicious software.
* When using a wireless connection, use a robust password.
Medium businesses

* A fairly strong firewall
* A strong Antivirus software and Internet Security Software.
* For authentication, use strong passwords and change it on a bi-weekly/monthly basis.
* When using a wireless connection, use a robust password.
* Raise awareness about physical security to employees.
* Use an optional network analyzer or network monitor.

[edit] Large businesses

* A strong strong firewall and proxy to keep unwanted people out.
* A strong Antivirus software and Internet Security Software.
* For authentication, use strong passwords and change it on a weekly/bi-weekly basis.
* When using a wireless connection, use a robust password.
* Excercise physical security precautions to employees.
* Prepare a network analyzer or network monitor and use it when needed.
* Implement physical security management like closed circuit television for entry areas and restricted zones.
* Security fencing to mark the company's perimeter.
* Fire extinguishers for fire-sensitive areas like server rooms and security rooms.
* Security guards can help to maximize security.

Government

* A strong strong firewall and proxy to keep unwanted people out.
* A strong Antivirus software and Internet Security Software.
* Strong encryption, usually with a 256 bit key.
* Whitelist authorized wireless connection, block all else.
* All network hardware is in secure zones.
* All host should be on a private network that is invisible from the outside.
* Put all servers in a DMZ, or a firewall from the outside and from the inside.
* Security fencing to mark perimeter and set wireless range to this.

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Domain Mapping and CO.CC

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Domain Mapping and CO.CC

Domain Mapping is the process of pointing a registered domain name to a blog or photo album. Domain mapping is more than domain forwarding, because your permalinks and URL contain the address of your domain (www.you.co.cc), and not a sub-domain (example.blogspot.com).

You can map a CO.CC domain to your blog or photo album. In order to use domain mapping, you must create and modify A, MX, and CNAME records.
CO.CC supports free DNS services. This means that CO.CC gives you
control over the DNS records that describe your domain.

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Google AdSense

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Google AdSense is the program that can give you advertising revenue from each page on your website—with a minimal investment in time and no additional resources.

AdSense delivers relevant text and image ads that are precisely targeted to your site and your site content. And when you add a Google search box to your site, AdSense delivers relevant text ads that are targeted to the Google search results pages generated by your visitors’ search request.

You can maximize your revenue potential by displaying Google ads on your website. Google puts relevant CPC (cost-per-click) and CPM (cost per thousand impressions) ads through the same auction, and lets them compete against one another. The auction takes place instantaneously, and, when it’s over, AdSense automatically displays the text or image ad(s) that will generate the maximum revenue for a page -- and the maximum revenue for you.
Becoming an AdSense publisher is simple. All it takes is a single online application. Once you're approved, AdSense takes only minutes to set-up. Just copy and paste a block of HTML and targeted ads start showing up on your website.
With Google's extensive advertiser base, we have ads for all categories of businesses-and for practically all types of content, no matter how broad or specialized. And since Google provides the ads, you have no advertiser relationships to maintain.

The AdSense program represents advertisers ranging from large global brands to small and local companies. Ads are also targeted by geography, so global businesses can display local advertising with no additional effort. And you can use AdSense in many languages.
You can run Google ads on all or just some of your pages, using AdSense strategically to complement your direct sales team. You'll pay nothing, spend little time on set-up, and have no maintenance worries. You can use AdSense for a day, a month or for however long it pleases you to make a profit-it's your choice. click here for more

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Type of Programmer

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Programmers enjoy a reputation for being peculiar people. In fact, even within the development community, there are certain programmer archetypes that other programmers find strange. Here are 10 types of programmers you are likely to run across. Can you think of any more?

Gandalf

This programmer type looks like a short-list candidate to play Gandalf in The Lord of the Rings. He (or even she!) has a beard halfway to his knees, a goofy looking hat, and may wear a cape or a cloak in the winter. Luckily for the team, this person is just as adept at working magic as Gandalf. Unluckily for the team, they will need to endure hours of stories from Gandalf about how he or she to walk uphill both ways in the snow to drop off the punch cards at the computer room. The Gandalf type is your heaviest hitter, but you try to leave them in the rear and call them up only in times of desperation.

The Martyr

In any other profession, The Martyr is simply a “workaholic.” But in the development field, The Martyr goes beyond that and into another dimension. Workaholics at least go home to shower and sleep. The Martyr takes pride in sleeping at the desk amidst empty pizza boxes. The problem is, no one ever asked The Martyr to work like this. And he or she tries to guilt-trip the rest of the team with phrases like, “Yeah, go home and enjoy dinner. I’ll finish up the next three week’s worth of code tonight.”

Fanboy

Watch out for Fanboy. If he or she corners you, you’re in for a three-hour lecture about the superiority of Dragonball Z compared to Gundam Wing, or why the Playstation 3 is better than the XB 360. Fanboy’s workspace is filled with posters, action figures, and other knick-knacks related to some obsession, most likely imported from Japan. Not only are Fanboys obnoxious to deal with, they often put so much time into the obsession (both in and out of the office) that they have no clue when it comes to doing what they were hired to do.

Vince Neil

This 40-something is a throwback to 1984 in all of the wrong ways. Sporting big hair, ripped stonewashed jeans, and a bandana here or there, Vince sits in the office humming Bon Jovi and Def Leppard tunes throughout the workday. This would not be so bad if “Pour Some Sugar on Me” was not so darned infectious.

Vince is generally a fun person to work with, and actually has a ton of experience, but just never grew up. But Vince becomes a hassle when he or she tries living the rock ‘n roll lifestyle to go with the hair and hi-tops. It’s fairly hard to work with someone who carries a hangover to work every day.

The Ninja

The Ninja is your team’s MVP, and no one knows it. Like the legendary assassins, you do not know that The Ninja is even in the building or working, but you discover the evidence in the morning. You fire up the source control system and see that at 4 AM, The Ninja checked in code that addresses the problem you planned to spend all week working on, and you did not even know that The Ninja was aware of the project! See, while you were in Yet Another Meeting, The Ninja was working.

Ninjas are so stealthy, you might not even know their name, but you know that every project they’re on seems to go much more smoothly. Tread carefully, though. The Ninja is a lone warrior; don’t try to force him or her to work with rank and file.

The Theoretician

The Theoretician knows everything there is to know about programming. He or she can spend four hours lecturing about the history of an obscure programming language or providing a proof of how the code you wrote is less than perfectly optimal and may take an extra three nanoseconds to run. The problem is, The Theoretician does not know a thing about software development. When The Theoretician writes code, it is so “elegant” that mere mortals cannot make sense of it. His or her favorite technique is recursion, and every block of code is tweaked to the max, at the expense of timelines and readability.

The Theoretician is also easily distracted. A simple task that should take an hour takes Theoreticians three months, since they decide that the existing tools are not sufficient and they must build new tools to build new libraries to build a whole new system that meets their high standards. The Theoretician can be turned into one of your best players, if you can get him or her to play within the boundaries of the project itself and stop spending time working on The Ultimate Sorting Algorithm.

The Code Cowboy

The Code Cowboy is a force of nature that cannot be stopped. He or she is almost always a great programmer and can do work two or three times faster than anyone else. The problem is, at least half of that speed comes by cutting corners. The Code Cowboy feels that checking code into source control takes too long, storing configuration data outside of the code itself takes too long, communicating with anyone else takes too long… you get the idea.

The Code Cowboy’s code is a spaghetti code mess, because he or she was working so quickly that the needed refactoring never happened. Chances are, seven pages’ worth of core functionality looks like the “don’t do this” example of a programming textbook, but it magically works. The Code Cowboy definitely does not play well with others. And if you put two Code Cowboys on the same project, it is guaranteed to fail, as they trample on each other’s changes and shoot each other in the foot.

Put a Code Cowboy on a project where hitting the deadline is more important than doing it right, and the code will be done just before deadline every time. The Code Cowboy is really just a loud, boisterous version of The Ninja. While The Ninja executes with surgical precision, The Code Cowboy is a raging bull and will gore anything that gets in the way.

The Paratrooper

You know those movies where a sole commando is air-dropped deep behind enemy lines and comes out with the secret battle plans? That person in a software development shop is The Paratrooper. The Paratrooper is the last resort programmer you send in to save a dying project. Paratroopers lack the patience to work on a long-term assignment, but their best asset is an uncanny ability to learn an unfamiliar codebase and work within it. Other programmers might take weeks or months to learn enough about a project to effectively work on it; The Paratrooper takes hours or days. Paratroopers might not learn enough to work on the core of the code, but the lack of ramp-up time means that they can succeed where an entire team might fail.

Mediocre Man

“Good enough” is the best you will ever get from Mediocre Man. Don’t let the name fool you; there are female varieties of Mediocre Man too. And he or she always takes longer to produce worse code than anyone else on the team. “Slow and steady barely finishes the race” could describe Mediocre Man’s projects. But Mediocre Man is always just “good enough” to remain employed.

When you interview this type, they can tell you a lot about the projects they’ve been involved with but not much about their actual involvement. Filtering out the Mediocre Man type is fairly easy: Ask for actual details of the work they’ve done, and they suddenly get a case of amnesia. Let them into your organization, though, and it might take years to get rid of them.

The Evangelist

No matter what kind of environment you have, The Evangelist insists that it can be improved by throwing away all of your tools and processes and replacing them with something else. The Evangelist is actually the opposite of The Theoretician. The Evangelist is outspoken, knows an awful lot about software development, but performs very little actual programming.

The Evangelist is secretly a project manager or department manager at heart but lacks the knowledge or experience to make the jump. So until The Evangelist is able to get into a purely managerial role, everyone else needs to put up with his or her attempts to revolutionize the workplace.

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How To: Remove a worm virus from your computer

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Using the Internet, worms can spread so rapidly that they may often go undetected by anti-virus software because the updates that would enable the software to detect the worm have not yet been developed or downloaded. Because of this, it's advisable to use an anti-virus product that updates frequently (like Kaspersky AntiVirus) which cuts the delay between a virus appearing and the updates arriving to a minimum. Free anti-virus products may only update once or twice a week, leaving your computer vulnerable during the critical period when a new worm is most active.

Even using the best anti-virus, it's a good idea to train the virus detector between your ears to recognize potential worms and avoid being tricked into activating them. But it's easy to be fooled, with the end result that you have a worm on your computer sending copies of itself to every address known to you.

An Internet worm has a number of common characteristics:

* It spreads across the Internet using email, instant messaging or peer-to-peer file sharing networks;
* It uses a trick - known as "social engineering" - to get you to open the email or run the file, which installs the worm on your computer and activates it;
* It may install one or several files on your computer, often masquerading as system files, or with randomly generated names to make removal more difficult;
* It installs entries in the system registry and other places to ensure that the worm is activated whenever you use your computer.

Problems removing worms

Unlike most viruses, worms do not usually modify or "infect" existing files on a computer. They are usually self-contained files, often dropped into system folders such as the Windows folder. Therefore, removing a worm from a computer should simply be a matter of identifying and deleting the files it installed, and the registry links that may be pointing to them. However, removal may be made more complicated because:

* The worm is active, so the files are in use and cannot be deleted;
* More than one worm process may be running, and they may act in such a way as to restart one another whenever they are stopped, making manual removal difficult;
* The registry links may have been made in such a way that if the worm files are removed, vital system processes are prevented from running, making Windows difficult to use, or unusable.
* Windows' System Restore has backed up the worm files and its registry changes, making it possible for the worm to be restored, and causing false alarms that the worm is still present on the computer because copies are found in the System Restore folder.

Virus scanners are good at detecting and removing the files belonging to worms, but they often do not repair or remove the registry changes correctly. Therefore an anti-virus program can sometimes do more harm than the worm, by removing it and leaving the computer unusable, or displaying various error messages when you use it.

The safest and most effective way to disinfect a computer that has been infected by an Internet worm is to use a dedicated removal tool. These tools are provided, free of charge, by several of the anti-virus software developers. Even if you have an anti-virus product on your computer that detects the worm, it may still be safer to remove it using one of these dedicated removal tools.
Avast! Virus Cleaner

The avast! Virus Cleaner provides a very easy way to remove a worm virus from your computer. Download avast! Virus Cleaner and then prepare to clean your computer.

Disable the on-access virus checking of your existing anti-virus (if any), and disable Windows System Restore. Then start Virus Cleaner running.

Virus Cleaner will first check to see if a worm is running, and terminate the process if necessary. It will then scan the hard disk looking for known worm files. If any are found, any registry entries that point to these files will be removed, and then the files themselves will be deleted. Any temporary but harmless files created by the worm will also be deleted. If any worm files could not be removed because they were in use, the computer will be restarted and then the files will be deleted.

At the time of writing, avast! Virus Cleaner is able to detect and remove the following worm viruses:

* Win32/Badtrans
* Win32/Beagle (alias: Bagle)
* Win32/Blaster (alias Lovsan)
* Win32/BugBear
* Win32/Ganda
* Win32/Klez
* Win32/Elkern
* Win32/MiMail
* Win32/Mydoom
* Win32/Nachi (alias: Welchia)
* Win32/NetSky (alias: Moodown)
* Win32/Nimda
* Win32/Opas (alias: Opasoft, Opaserv)
* Win32/Parite (alias: Pinfi)
* Win32/Sasser
* Win32/Scold
* Win32/Sircam
* Win32/Sober
* Win32/Sobig
* Win32/Swen
* Win32/Yaha (alias: Lentin)
* Win32/Zafi

Tip: If the system operation has been adversely affected by an earlier attempt to remove the worm, and you are unable to run any files of type .exe, rename the avast! Virus Cleaner to a .com file and then run it.
Kaspersky Labs Removal Tools

Kaspersky Labs, developers of the highly regarded Kaspersky AntiVirus, also has free virus removal tools for download from its website. Unlike the avast! Virus Cleaner, there is a separate remover for each virus.

At the time of writing, Kaspersky Labs has removers for the following malware, including some backdoors and trojans:

* Backdoor.Afcore
* Backdoor.Agent
* Backdoor.Small
* I-Worm.Avron
* I-Worm.Bagle
* I-Worm.Bagle
* I-Worm.Blebla
* I-Worm.Bridex
* I-Worm.Dumaru
* I-Worm.Fizzer
* I-Worm.Goner
* I-Worm.Klez
* I-Worm.Lentin
* I-Worm.LovGate
* I-Worm.Magold
* I-Worm.Mydoom
* I-Worm.Navidad
* I-Worm.NetSky
* I-Worm.Nimda
* I-Worm.Sircam
* I-Worm.Sober
* I-Worm.Sobig
* I-Worm.Swen
* I-Worm.Tanatos
* I-Worm.Torvil
* I-Worm.Winevar
* I-Worm.Zafi
* Trojan.Win32.SilentLog
* Trojan.Win32.StartPage
* TrojanDownloader.Win32.Agent
* Virus.Win32.Implinker
* Win32.Elkern
* Win32.FunLove
* Worm.Win32.Lovesan
* Worm.Win32.Opasoft
* Worm.Win32.Opasoft
* Worm.Win32.Sasser
* Worm.Win32.Welchia

Remember to disable the on-access virus checking of your existing anti-virus (if any), and disable Windows System Restore before running the virus remover.

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How to Block a Website in Internet Explorer

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Internet is a vast web of inter-connected servers which may host inappropriate websites for certain people, especially kids. Following instructions are for blocking the malicious and unwanted sites in any version of Internet explorer only. If you are using Firefox or other browsers, you might want to consider another way to block sites called host file method which is for more advanced users. Here is the easy and effective method to safely surf the internet through IE.

• Open Internet Explorer. In the Menubar click Tools → Internet Options → Content. In the Content Advisor box, click Enable.
• Click the Approved Sites tab. Enter the address of the website.
• Keep in mind - if you want to block the complete website put * in front. For example to block myspace completely, type *.myspace.com
• Click Never and then OK.
• Click on the General tab and sure to select Users can see websites that have no ratings
• Enter a password you can remember easily with a hint.
• Hit OK. Surf safe Internet.

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How to Do a Windows XP "Repair Install"

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Repairing XP is easy, it takes approximately 20 - 40Mins depending on what processor you have in your computer. It replaces every file on XP with a fresh one. It does not cause loss of data.

1. Place your Windows XP set up disk in your CD drive.
2. Turn off your computer and change your BOOT order to boot from CDs first.
3. Turn your computer back on.
4. Press any key on your keyboard when it asks you to.
5. Press enter when you see a blue screen, one of the options should say, "To setup Windows XP now, press ENTER.".
6. Press enter to start the windows set up.
7. Accept the Licence and Agreement and confirm that the setup is searching for current versions on XP.
8. Press "R" when the set up has found your current version of XP.
9. Notice that the Set up is deleting all your windows xp files and replacing them. (This will not cause loss of data

Read every window! The wrong selection could cost you all your hard drive saved files! Also, you may want to backup any files that you don't want to be lost just in case.
Do not load the recovery console.

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How to Make Bootable CDs

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How to Make Bootable CDs

Creating a CD-ROM that is bootable is easier than you think! Matt Jones explains how, in this practical guide from PC Support Advisor.

There are many applications for bootable CD-ROMs (we'll call them BCDs) - the most common being when undertaking large roll-outs and when using test rigs, where it is often useful to combine operating systems with boot and diagnostic diskettes to automate the process of setting up machines.

If you need to repeatedly test from clean installations it can save lots of time if you image a disk drive and put the image, along with the imaging software, on a BCD.

It can also be a timesaver to have frequently used boot and diagnostic diskettes on CD, and it's an easy way to work with PCs that do not have a floppy disk drive.

To see if a PC supports booting from a CD, check your BIOS set-up screens. SCSI drives have their own BIOS on the adapter; IDE drives use code in the system BIOS. Most modern SCSI adapters have a BIOS that allows it, and most motherboards of the last two years support booting from IDE CD drives.

If you are able to change the boot options, and it lists "CD-ROM", your system supports booting from a CD. If you have a 1995 or 1996 motherboard or SCSI card that does not support it, it's probably worth contacting the manufacturer -many have BIOS upgrades available.

Technical Details

When a BCD is created, a "boot record" is put at the very beginning of the CD, just as it is with a bootable floppy or hard disk.

This record specifies whether the CD is to emulate a floppy or hard disk drive, and contains a pointer to the location of the actual boot image file.

The El Torito specification, created by IBM and Phoenix Technologies, was designed to be completely compatible with the ISO 9660 CD standard. It adds to the ISO 9660 specification by requiring a boot record at sector 11 of the last session on the CD.

The boot record contains an absolute sector number that points to the "boot catalog". There's no restriction on the location of the boot catalog. The catalog contains a list of entries describing all the "boot images" present on the CD. Again, there's no restriction on where the boot images can be on the CD. There can be any number of them, of three different types:

*

"Bootable emulation" causes the image to be mapped to drive A or C, as a conventional bootable storage device.
*

"Non-bootable emulation" maps the image as a conventional storage device, and allocates the last drive letter to it.
*

"No emulation" is a special mode which loads the image into memory and executes it -extremely useful when developing copy protection or "smart" CDs designed for a variety of disparate systems. For example, the "no emulation" mode is used in the Windows NT operating system CDs.

There is much scope for system vendors to create multi-image CDs where the boot image is selected dynamically by the system BIOS, but this requires a lot of manual assembling and editing, and is beyond the range of this article.

Although it is relatively easy to manually assemble the boot catalog, most BIOSes do not allow selection of the image and you will have to write a small amount of low level system code to do it. CDs can be set to boot as drive A or C. The fact that they are a late addition to the PC makes them subject to certain other restrictions.

To boot as drive A, the boot image must be made in the same format as a 1.2 MB, 1. 4 MB or 2. 88 MB floppy disk. The first floppy disk drive, if present, will become the B drive. If the system has a second floppy disk drive, it will not be accessible.

If the CD is set to boot as the C drive, it replaces the normal hard disk drive C, and has no size limit other than that of the CD itself. However, the source drive image must have only one partition. This partition must be both the first entry in the partition table and a standard DOS partition.

Creating The Image

Most current CDR publishing packages are capable of reading a floppy disk and creating a boot image from it. With the appropriate menu choices made, they will automatically "inject" it into the CD image.

With this method it is extremely easy to make a bootable CD. Some of the more advanced packages like Nero can create a bootable CD from any disk image, and allow fine-tuning of parameters such as the emulation type and start-up message. The basic process for making a bootable CD from a floppy disk is as follows:

1.

Create a bootable floppy disk that has all required driver and start-up software on it. You will need a CD driver in order to use the CD in a conventional manner once the system has finished booting. It is wise to use a generic CD driver if you plan on using it in a few different systems.
2.

Make sure that any path names in the config.sys and autoexec. bat files do not specify drive letters.
3.

Make sure your boot process does not attempt to write to the disk. Set the read-only flag on all files and write-protect the disk if possible. If your system tries to write to the CD on boot-up, it will crash.
4.

Test this disk thoroughly in whatever PC environments you wish to use it.
5.

Once you are happy with the bootable disk, create the CD with your CDR publishing package. Selecting the "bootable" option will usually prompt for the floppy disk. Put any other data onto the CD in the same session.

Larger Images

If you wish to create a larger, hard disk type image, there are a few more things to do.

You will need to choose and size your source image hard disk carefully. A program such as PowerQuest's Partition Magic is very handy for tasks like this.

Create and test your image in the same manner as the floppy image procedure detailed above. When you are happy with it, use a program like Norton's DiskEdit or PowerQuest's Drive Image to read the drive and create an image of it in a single file.

At this point, if your CDR publishing software supports disk file images, you can simply select the appropriate file and it will automatically create the correct boot records.

If your software does not support hard disk images, it is still possible to create them if you are willing to delve into image files and boot records with a hex editor. This is not as difficult as it sounds, and Phoenix Technologies have an excellent guide on how to do it on their Web site at www. ptltd. com.

It should be noted, however, that in most cases the floppy disk image method is sufficient because drivers can be loaded that allow the rest of the CD to be mounted in the DOS session.

Tips

* A rewriteable CDR drive is an extremely useful tool when experimenting with bootable CDs. Although your test CD-RW may be unusable in some standard CD drives, it can be used on the mastering system if the CD-RW drive is set as the primary CD, and this is enough for general test purposes.

If you are planning on making a variety of bootable CDs, or just experimenting, CD-RW has the obvious advantage of media cost. If you don't have a CD-RW, any failed experiments can be used as multi-session backups.

* When making hard disk image CDs, an old hard disk drive around 650 MB in size makes a useful addition to your mastering system. As hard disk images have certain partitioning requirements, detailed above, it's much easier to have a whole disk to use for your layout if you are doing this type of work.

* Under Windows NT, you will need to have administrative rights if you are creating hard disk images (this requires access to all disk sectors).

* It is possible that you will encounter older CDs that start to boot, fail immediately and hang your system. This is because there was no initial standard for the first few sectors of CDs and, although unlikely, some may contain a correct "validation entry" without any of the other required boot files.

CDR Software

Until fairly recently, bootable CDs had to be made manually with a combination of low level tools.

Utility programs such as BOOTISO and DISKIMG were used to read bootable disks and write images to disk files. These disk images were then hex edited and manually added to the CD layout.

It has now become much easier, with many current CDR writer software packages able to make bootable CDs from a floppy disk image, a hard disk or an image file. Notable software packages are Easy CD Creator, WinOnCD, CDRWIN, HyCD and Nero.

The latter is an extremely powerful tool that offers complete control of the CD writing process, and can create bootable CDs for many platforms. It can also create "oversized" CDs which can be used to gain a small amount of copy protection.

Many of these programs can be evaluated before purchase, and this is advisable due to the wide variation in CDR drivers and hardware.

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