Marko Ristic
Editor, Packet BasicsMarko Ristic runs Packet Basics. He writes the reference library, applies the software rubric to every ranking, and checks every provider listing before it appears. Every page on this site carries his name and the date he last reviewed it, so there is one person to hold to account for what it says.
On Packet Basics
- Pages written
- 233
- Silos
- Networking, Security, Storage, Systems, Virtualization, Hardware, Software, Directory
- Writing since
- September 2026
- Last published
- Sep 23, 2026
Latest by Marko
233 pages, newest first
Most small estates scale up for years and then scale out once, and not for capacity. The move almost always follows an outage, which changes...
Nothing on the list is hard. The work fails because nobody owns the calendar, and the gap only becomes visible during an outage.
A CMDB and an automation tool are both sold as configuration management, and they solve opposite halves of the same problem. Buying one and...
Almost no office deploys a controller and speaks OpenFlow to bare metal switches. The same idea arrives packaged as cloud managed networking...
A machine short of memory is slow all day and says nothing about why. A machine short of storage says so clearly. Task Manager tells the two...
Most drivers should be left alone. The four routes a driver can reach a PC by, the one Microsoft calls best, and what to do when an update b...
A chipset name is not a speed rating. It is the list of what a computer will still be able to do in three years, decided once, at the moment...
Every firewall, switch, printer, drive and motherboard in the building runs firmware, and each one is its own update stream. Most offices pa...
The comparison is usually framed as a preference. It is not. What flows through the pipeline is the real difference, and what you administer...
Btrfs is not a newer ext4. It buys snapshots, rollback and data checksums with extra moving parts, and one of those parts carries a warning...
Most classification schemes fail the same way: the labels exist and nothing about how the data is handled changes. Keep the levels few and t...
PAM is not a rival to IAM but the strictest layer of it. A small company builds the directory first, then gets most of PAM from separate adm...
Thirty commands cover almost everything done in Command Prompt. The useful part is knowing which ones need an elevated prompt and which ones...
Stopping Windows Update is easy and almost always the wrong goal. Pause it for a short window, and let deferral policies decide when a busin...
The choice between NFS and SMB is made by the clients, not by benchmarks. The difference that really matters is authentication: SMB checks t...
On a wired network the modes only matter when they disagree. A duplex mismatch passes every ping and crawls under load, and the counters on...
Feature lists do not answer the real question, which is what to format this particular drive as. The answer follows the drive's job: stays w...
The difference between one source and many decides where the defense lives. A single source attack is yours to block. A distributed flood fi...
The two use the same mechanism and serve opposite sides. A small business rarely runs a forward proxy anymore, but everything it publishes o...
On one computer the two formats are interchangeable. On forty, the MSI installs with a command you already know and the EXE starts with dete...