Antivirus software can only protect your computer from viruses trying to infect it via email, CD-Rom, floppy disk, Word documents or other types of computer files. Antivirus software alone will not keep your computer 100% safe. You also need to use firewall software.

Firewall Software The use of firewall software by home computer users is a relatively new occurence. All Internet connections are a two way process. Data must be sent and received by your computer. This data is sent through something called ports. These are not physical things rather aspects of way your computer communicates online.

Firewall software watches these ports to make sure that only safe communication is happening between your computer and other computers online. If it sees something dangerous happening it blocks that port on your computer to make sure your computer stays safe from person who is trying to hack into your system.

An easier way to understand a firewall would be to picture your computer as an apartment complex. At front door of this complex there is a security guard. Every person who enters complex must pass this security guard. If security guard recognizes person entering as a resident he allows them to pass without saying anything. If, however, person entering complex is unknown to him then he will stop that person and ask for identification. If they have no business being at apartment complex he escorts them from building.

If you are not currently using firewall software your computer will get hacked into - that's a guarantee.

PopUp Blocker You can get a good popup blocker at no cost. An easy way to do this is to install either Google or Yahoo toolbar. Both of these come with popup blockers built in. Popups are not necessarily dangerous but are a nuisance and using either of these toolbars will make your life that bit easier.

A simple rule for practicing online security is: "If in doubt then don't". If you don't recognize file, email address, website or if your gut feeling says "no" then don't click that button.

"dump.tar" is name of file we want to save into, and "*" means we want to put everything into this TAR archive -- files, folders, everything.

You may get some sort of warning about not adding dump.tar to archive, that's no big deal because we don't want this file to add itself.

Your files are backed up. At this point it's time to move things over to next host. There's a way we can do this without you having to download whole thing, and re-upload it.

STEP 4: ARRANGE YOUR FILE FOR PICKUP

Remember how I said when you were in "wwwroot" or "public_html" not to browse into folder containing a domain name? Well now it's time to move that dump over into one of them so it can be picked up.

If one of your folders is, say, yourdomain.com, type:

mv dump.tar yourdomain.com

This moves "dump.tar" into folder "yourdomain.com".

STEP 5: MOVE THE NEW FILE OVER

Login to your new host. Browse to its "wwwroot" or "public_html" folder.

Most hosts include a program called "wget" which works sort of like a browser in that you give it a URL to pick-up that it loads. Only this browser also saves file you want to load.

If your old host was at yourdomain.com, you'd just type:

wget http://www.yourdomain.com/dump.tar

This will load that URL and save it as "dump.tar". You'll probably see some sort of progress indicator as it goes.

STEP 6: DECOMPRESSING THE FILE

Once you have file, you use that same TAR program to decompress it. Type:

tar -xvf test.tar

The "v" and "f" are still there, but instead of "c" (create) we use "x" (extract). This will unpack each file and let us know which one it's working on.

STEP 7: RESTORING THE MYSQL DATABASE

Before you can put mySQL dump back into database, you have to go into this new web host's control panel and create blank databases with same names as you had before.

You also have to create a mySQL user and make sure that user has access to all those databases you've created.

Once that's done find dump.sql that was unpacked with all of other files.

Instead of using program "mysqldump" to dump files, we use program "mysql" which let's us put commands into database. That's basically what a dump is, a file full of commands that, when run, will recreate old database exactly.

This time we don't type in database name right away. To get into mySQL from command prompt, type:

mysql -umyuser -pmypassword

Where "myuser" and "mypassword" are your mySQL username and password. Once you're in you'll get kind of a weird looking prompt. All you have to do at this point is type:

source dump.sql

This says, open up file dump.sql, read through it and do whatever it says to do in that file. You will see a bunch of lines telling you a command has been entered (0 Rows Affected, 1 Rows Affected, something like that).

If everything goes smoothly, type "quit" and you will be back in shell.

You've just moved one site (or a bunch of sites) over from one host to another in about 5 minutes.

Article by Robert Plank