Difficult Captcha

March 30th, 2011 No comments

People always complain about Captcha’s, especially the very obfuscated ones.

I was browsing a supplier’s website, and one of their forms had a Captcha at the end of it to verify that I was human.

Unfortunately I couldn’t pass the test.

Difficult Captcha

Categories: Humor, Tech Tags:

RSA servers compromised

March 17th, 2011 No comments

It appears that RSA’s servers have been compromised and SecureID may be affected.

http://securosis.com/blog/rsa-breached-secureid-affected

RSA have filed an 8-k – see Here

Categories: Ramblings, Tech Tags:

Shutting down an SMTP-Auth relay attack

March 5th, 2011 No comments

My friend, colleague, and brother-in-law Paul Hite and I had a client who was the unfortunate victim of an SMTP-Auth attack on their SMTP server. You can read about the issue, how we diagnosed it, and how we resolved it here.

Categories: Tech, Virus Tags:

Basic computer maintenance

February 21st, 2011 No comments

Every day I come across various machine configurations; some are fantastic and others…well, let’s just say I wonder how in the heck they are still able to work.

People seem to forget that they need to maintain their computers. Clean up the temporary files, run a disk check, run a defragmentation program. It’s not a difficult regime, but one that many people seem to forget.
Read more…

Categories: Ramblings, Tech Tags:

Updated site.

February 11th, 2011 No comments

Installed the new wordpress, enabled caching, got my Google analytic code working. Feeling like hell but dozing and working as i go.

Categories: Ramblings Tags:

The Right Way

February 8th, 2011 No comments

One of the problems in IT is that there is very little to go on, in terms of ensuring things are done “The Right Way”.

For many people “The Right Way” is just the way of doing things that they are used to, and anything else is “wrong”. The problem with this viewpoint is that there are various ways of resolving issues or configuring servers, some are just more efficient than others.

To be fair, I’ve seen some pretty horrendous implementations of DHCP and DNS services on Windows Server operating systems over the years and it’s something that gives me something of a nervous twitch… I’m sure there have been servers that I’ve set up in the past that have made my colleagues do the same thing, but the main thing is that we learn, and we look at how it is/isn’t working and the error messages the Operating System gives us.

I hope to help over the next few weeks with some practical guidelines on setting up these sorts of servers on a Windows based OS and how you can avoid some of the pitfalls I see on a daily basis. Will my way be “The Right Way”?. No, but it should help resolve some commonly seen issues.

Categories: Ramblings, Tech Tags:

Time certainly creeps up on me

February 5th, 2011 No comments

I’m always making promises to myself that I don’t seem to be able to keep. A fine example is this blog. “Sure,” I say to myself “I’ll have plenty of time to get this done!”, but then life comes along and smacks me upside the head with the reality check that a full time job that sometimes strays to 7 days a week, a 14 month old son who still doesn’t sleep through the night, and my wife who works random hours (including weekends when I’m off :) ) makes for very little “blogosphere” time.

There are a whole host of subjects that I hope to get in to here, and have basic draft ideas for how it will be structured. I now have the wordpress app on my Android-based phone so I certainly hope to see myself pushing more “quick thought” posts such as the last two, even when I’m on the road, or it’s 3am and my wife and son are sleeping in the bed with me :)

I’m not making any more promises about this. I will, however, do what I can, when I can.

Categories: Ramblings Tags:

Recent events in Egypt

February 4th, 2011 No comments

As many of you may know, Egypt went through what can only be described as an Internet Blackout.

The president ordered that all external access through the internet, cell phones calls, and sms messages be cut off. It was certainly interesting watching the bgp announcements with the dropped routes from the announced prefixes.

With internet connectivity being restored after 5 days, and text messaging also being re-enabled (despite some protests about the govt using it to send incorrectly attributed messages to subscribers…) we have to ask ourselves the question “In a modern civilization where so much relies on communication, do we place too much faith in concentrated exchanges without suitable independent redundancy of transit links?”.

Categories: Ramblings, Tech Tags:

Last of the Ipv4 address space.

February 3rd, 2011 No comments

Those of you following the recent tech news will no doubt have come across the tidbit about the last of the unallocated ipv4 blocks.

We are down to 5 prefixes, one of each which will go to the 5 Rirs.

Have we run out of space? No… But the unallocated pool is looking shallow these days. 

The move to ipv6 will be gradual as there is still a lot of debate about the features and pitfalls. It is a major paradigm shift in the way we consider networks, routing, address allocation and the like.

More to come as I get back in to my blog.

Categories: Ramblings, Tech Tags:

Google and Microsoft “cheat”…

November 30th, 2010 No comments

Interesting article from Ben Strong on how Google and Microsoft “cheat” on their page load times. Please note though that neither site actually break the main RFC, they just don’t use the default settings:

http://blog.benstrong.com/2010/11/google-and-microsoft-cheat-on-slow.html

Categories: Tech Tags: