Welcome to Joe's Revised Homepage

This site is now hosted by Amazon via free S3 functionality and No-IP (free) using the URL http://joegranto.ddns.net/

About Me

Professionally, I have spent most of my time as a Systems Architect (Windows) and Systems Engineer (Windows). I transitioned to Cloud Systems Architect, spending most of my time on AWS and OCI. I then transitioned to Cybersecurity Engineer, which is my current role. You can view my resume on LinkedIn.

For fun, I enjoy playing PC games (always NetHack, currently Helldivers 2 and Warframe). I love playing Dungeons and Dragons when I can find a group willing to play on weeknights or Saturdays.

I am an avid sci-fi/fantasy fan, and rejoice over Babylon 5, quite simply the best sci-fi show to ever hit television. I also like Japanese anime (more often series than movies), especially if it does not include stupid animals and crap, but rather focuses on a good story (e.g., Cowboy Bebop [Edward is annoying], Death Note, and Ghost in the Shell [with spin-offs]). My favorite authors include Julian May (the Pliocene series is awesome) and Frank Herbert (Destination: Void and sequels, the Jorg X. McKie Series [Whipping Star and The Dosadi Experiment], Dragon in the Sea, and Soul Catcher).

I like American muscle cars and all sports cars. I have owned a 1991 Mustang LX 5.0, a 2001 Pontiac Trans Am Firehawk with T-tops, and a custom-ordered 2011 Ford Mustang GT Premium convertible (modified with custom exhaust, tuned for a few extra horsepower, and lowered).

While in Gainesville (the first time) I studied Wado Kai karate under Sensei Mike Sawyer at the Florida Karate Center, attaining the rank of ni kyu. I stopped training after moving to Atlanta. In addition to everything above, my other hobbies include cooking (here is my sourdough recipe), SCUBA, spearfishing, and lobstering, fishing, board games, and pistol shooting.

I am an active member of The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-Day Saints and currently serve on the Gainesville Florida Stake High Council.

Joe's Useful Links:

Antivirus and Security

  • Antivirus review sites:
    • AV Comparatives.org, an antivirus review site. I use it to help find the best retail and free antivirus programs.
    • AV-Test.org, another good antivirus review site.
    • Virus Bulletin, for antivirus software reviews (your software may not be as good as you think...).
  • RECOMMENDEDBitwarden, one of the few free password managers with a SOC 2 Type 2 audit. You are using a password managers, right? Right?
  • RECOMMENDEDMicrosoft Defender. Starting in late 2019, Microsoft finally got Windows Defender working well, and it is a viable antivirus product. It does not have the granular features as most retail software and works well. Because it is included with Windows it is free and well integrated with the OS. Avoid McAfee and Symantec - the free solutions listed below are better options. Free antivirus software I recommend:
    • avast! by Avast, a free antivirus alternative to Windows Defender.
    • AntiVir® PersonalEdition Classic by Avira. A free antivirus alternative to Windows Defender.
    • AVG by AVG Technologies (formerly Grisoft). Intel bought them back in 2005. A free antivirus alternative to Windows Defender.
    • All of the above products are "traditional" antivirus products. They download definition files, they have large libraries and intercept reads and writes, etc. As a result, they can interfere with system performance. Next-gen antivirus has been becoming more popular since 2016 or so. These products are typically cloud-based, do not have local definitions, do not intercept all reads and writes, have a very small footprint, and have the potential to be awesome. They typically look at "bad behavior" and intercept any process (virus, malware, trojan, command-line, whatever) that breaks the rules. CrowdStrike (business) and Webroot (retail) are examples of such products. Amazon has awesome sales on Webroot, but given that Microsoft Defender is free, it is hard to recommend the next-gen products, especially since the consumer-level stuff has iffy reviews.
  • Bit Defender, free virus recovery program.
  • HijackThis, another good spyware removal program (free).
  • Secunia Personal Software Inspector, a cool utility that will scan your computer for all kinds of vulnerabilities and provide a nice summary.
  • Spybot Search & Destroy, the best (free) spyware removal program out there. For the very few items it cannot remove, use HijackThis and/or Ad Aware. Between these three, you can remove pretty much any spy-/ad-ware out there.

Fun and/or Funny

Games

Hardware

  • AnandTech, a great place for hardware reviews.
  • ArsTechnica, the hardware site with so much technical information it makes my brain hurt.
  • Tom's Hardware Guide, a great place for hardware reviews.

Networking

  • IANA, the Internet Assigned Numbers Authority. Need information on port number and protocols? Go to IANA.
  • IP Security: A simple way to protect your system by creating secure (encrypted) tunnels, blocking ports, etc. They are relatively simple, and there are many examples on the web. Here is a sample SMB rule you can play with; it secures SMB (port 445) using a preshared key for only remote connections, allowing unsecured LAN connections (i.e., local connections will not use IPSec).
  • nmap, a free network security scanner (arguably the best and most popular).
  • OpenVPN in AWS, my instructions for setting up a free VPN server in AWS.
  • PuTTY, an SSH (secure telnet) client. Also check out WinSCP, a secure copy/ftp (scp/sftp) client, and FileZilla.
  • SSH (secure shell): Microsoft now offers OpenSSH as a free SSH solution for Windows. I used to use copSSH, which is free. Here is my documentation on how to tunnel almost anything, including SMB (really NetBT), over SSH on Windows XP.
  • RECOMMENDED Syncthing, a great file/folder synchronization utility for Windows. I use it in conjunction with ZeroTier for secure file synchronization without the need for using "the cloud" as an intermediary.
  • TOR (The Onion Router), a freeware utility originally designed by the U.S. Navy that protects certain network activity (such as browsing) by constantly hiding and changing the route by which you access resources.
  • VPN: WireGuard (when supported) and OpenVPN (when WireGuard is unavailable). Both are free - just makes sure whatever VPN service you use supports one or both.
  • WireShark, a freeware sniffer utility (arguably one of the best).
  • RECOMMENDED ZeroTier, a free SDN (Software Defined Network) utility. I use it in conjunction with Syncthing. I also run a VM with iptables and set up routing so that I can use ZeroTier as a home-based VPN.

Windows Applications and Utilities

  • 7-Zip, a free ZIP utility. Has a GUI and command-line.
  • Encrypted scripting: Encrypting batch scripts containing passwords.
  • Encryption under Windows: Microsoft BitLocker or VeraCrypt (Open source). The performance penalty for BitLocker is reportedly minimal, especially if you purchase a drive with hardware encryption support.
  • Environment variables: How to set variables from stdout (batch scripting).
  • Offline NT Password & Registry Editor. This utility is a bit dated and Hiren's BootCD is probably a better alternative for most people.
  • UNIX utilities for Win32.
  • Virtual machine products (aka hypervisors) create virtual computers that allow you to install an OS, configure things, install/remove applications, etc., all without affecting a real system. The virtual system creates virtual devices (NICs, hard drives, etc.), and allows you to install nearly any OS. They are thus ideal for testing and development. They are also perfect for creating honeypots. Products I recommend:
    • AWS (Free tier).
    • Hyper-V (free on most Windows OSes). This is my app of choice on Windows systems.
    • VirtualBox: My alternative application when I can't use Hyper-V.
    • VMWare products and clustering steps. The products have changed over time and licensing sucks since BroadCom bought them...
  • Windows Sandbox, great for Windows sandboxing. I used to use Sandboxie but don't really see the need for it any more.

About This Site

This site was originally created back in 1996 in plain HTML, when web search engines were much less useful than they are now. It was literally written with Notepad.exe. It was a time when NNTP and web forums (which were hard to find) were where you got information, and when you downloaded files via gopher and ftp. I initially created it to provide information on Windows NT 3.51/4.0, batch scripting, wireless networking, and useful software. The site also serves as a jokes repository - I spent years scouring rec.humor.funny to find good jokes. This was a time before YouTube, so when I found a funny video I had to host it locally.

For many years I hosted this site on my gaming PC - I think it started out as a Windows 95 Microsoft Personal Web Server (PWS) site, but it may have initially been a site running on SunOS or Solaris when I worked at CISE and then made the migration to PWS. It then migrated to Windows 98 IIS, matured into a Windows XP IIS site running URLScan, and in 2017 finally got migrated to AWS S3 so that I did not have to host it locally.

Interesting side note: while running the site on IIS I used to parse the logs to see who was trying to exploit it to get access. This was back in the late 1990's and early 2000's when people were running Windows 95, 98, and ME. Very few, if any, of the attempts were directly from a malicious actor. Rather, they were all from Windows systems that had been compromised because people were not running antivirus, firewalls, etc. - often they were directly connected to the internet or in a DMZ(!). I used to connect to their IPC$ share (because they had no password, of course), write a text file to their Startup folder telling them that their system had malware and giving them links to free AV products, and then would reboot their system. Hopefully this helped someone...

I have removed much of the content from those early days - it just isn't relevant in the days of Google and YouTube. Some of the sites I reference no longer exist - I have to use the Wayback Machine to provide working links. As part of the 2026 website renovation I decided to use Gemini (Thinking and Fast models) to modernize the site - it did a pretty good job. Wherever possible I replaced the locally hosted files with files available on YouTube and other hosting sites.

Here is a sterilized version of the old website's main page - as you can see, it was very 1990's.

AWS S3 Hosting Instructions

For those interested, making an S3 bucket a website is very easy and secure. It is also free as long as you stay below thresholds. Here are the settings:

  1. Enable Static Website Hosting
    • By default, an S3 bucket is just a storage container. You must explicitly tell AWS to treat it like a web server.
    • Location: Go to the Properties tab of your bucket and scroll to the very bottom.
    • Action: Click Edit on "Static website hosting."
    • Configuration:
      • Select Enable
      • Index document: Usually index.html
  2. Disable "Block Public Access". Go to the Permissions tab, click Edit under "Block public access (bucket settings)," and uncheck the box Block all public access.
  3. Set the property bucket policy. Go to Permissions and paste this JSON - be sure to modify {bucket_name} to your bucket name: 
    {
  "Version": "2012-10-17",
  "Statement": [
    {
      "Sid": "PublicReadGetObject",
      "Effect": "Allow",
      "Principal": "*",
      "Action": "s3:GetObject",
      "Resource": "arn:aws:s3:::{bucket_name}/*"
    }
  ]
}
  4. (Optional) Configure HTTPS. These instructions are for creating a HTTP site. If you want HTTPS you must use CloudFront and get an SSL certificate. This can be done for free, with restrictions (as with the S3 bucket - everything free on AWS has restrictions). You will also need a registered DNS name, which can include a free service like No-IP.