Capture DHCP packets to get a lease on your troubleshooting life

Ever feel like your network just decides not to work? That’s usually DHCP quietly causing chaos behind the scenes. Capturing DHCP packets is like eavesdropping on the most important conversation happening on your LAN. You get to watch the full DORA process — Discover, Offer, Request, Acknowledge — play out in real time. Is the client yelling “Anybody got an IP?” and getting ghosted? Is the server offering an address that never gets accepted? A quick packet capture tells the story faster than any guesswork ever could.

Drilled .. And Missed The SSD That Refused to Die

Yes, this is true—or at least it's a real incident that went viral recently (around mid-February 2026, based on the reports).

The image and caption comes from a post originally shared on Reddit (in r/LinusTechTips and similar subs), where someone posted photos of a drilled 2.5-inch SATA SSD. The drill went straight through the metal/plastic casing but completely missed the actual PCB (printed circuit board) and NAND flash chips, which were clustered toward one end near the SATA connector. The hole was basically in empty space inside the enclosure.

The Evolving Challenge: Criminal Investigations in the Age of Digital Media and AI

Introduction

The modern criminal investigation has changed more in the past fifteen years than in the previous fifty.
Where cases once relied heavily on physical evidence, witness testimony, and paper records, today’s investigations are dominated by digital artifacts. Smartphones, cloud accounts, messaging platforms, IoT devices, encrypted apps, and artificial intelligence–generated media now shape the evidentiary landscape.

For investigators, prosecutors, and forensic examiners, this transformation has introduced both unprecedented opportunity and significant complexity.

1. The Explosion of Digital Evidence

Every crime scene today has the potential to be a digital crime scene.

Even traditional offenses such as domestic violence, fraud, homicide, or theft now involve mobile phone data, social media interactions, cloud storage accounts, smart home devices, vehicle telematics, surveillance systems, and wearable technology.

Last Months Draw Winner

Let me start with how impressed I was with how many people participated, reached out to thank me for the fun draw and provide some suggestions for the next one.

Spoiler alert !! Three times was a charm for Matthew. Heres how the draw went.

The first person I drew was Jeff from youtube, but i couldnt find him in my followers - use your youtube id next time Jeff..

The second person was Elias from Linkedin - I couldnt find him in my Linkedin followers

The third person was Matthew Wyatt from Facebook, that I did find , woo hoo!!

CONGRATS MATTHEW!!

I WILL HAVE THE NEXT DRAW OUT SOON.

https://thetechfirm.com/25000quiz/

Todays Rant: Then Microsoft wonders why people dislike them

I

I don't mind admitting it, I still use a lot of free Microsoft products and utilities, because they work fine and mostly because they are free and convenient. 

A good example is Clipchamp that I use for quick video editing because it does what its supposed to do and works fairly well.

One thing I loathe  about all vendors that do this, is when they do a software update and change my preferences.