Archive
Posts from 2011
A great presentation on IPv6
I was fortunate enough to attend Michael Warfield's talk on DNS security this past Monday. If you don't know Mike, he is a crazy smart dude who gives spectacular presentations. Can't recommend him enough! Mike has been at the forefront of the IPv6 movement, and has given a number of IPv6 presentations in the past few months…
$ read more →A simple and easy way to encrypt data on Linux, OS X and Windows desktops and servers
I just put up a new article a simple and easy way to encrypt data on Linux, OS X and Windows desktops and servers. The article describes Truecrypt, and shows how it can be used to set up an encrypted device on Linux, Windows and OS X hosts. If you have sensitive data on your machine, you NEED this awesome piece of FREE software. It rocks!
$ read more →Managing and debugging DNS on your Windows XP/Vista/7 clients
Microsoft Windows has all kinds of tools buried throughout the Windows directory. Several of these tools allow you to display and debug DNS and IP issues, which can be handy when you get a call from a customer that they can't access your systems. If you need to display all of the entries your Windows host is caching, you can open cmd.exe and run the ipconfig utility with the "/displaydns" option: C:\ To flush the cached DNS settings you can run ipconfig with the "/flushdns" setting: C:\ If your host is configured to register it's name dynamically with DNS, you can use the the "/registerdns" option to register your host with DNS and to refresh your DHCP lease: C:\ In a follow up post I will discuss Microsoft's DNS server and some tools you can use to debug it.
$ read more →Using dnscap to debug DNS problems on Linux hosts
DNS can often make a SysAdmins life difficult, since a misconfigured entry or a broken authoritative DNS server will cause things to fail in odd ways. If you are fortunate enough to use Linux on your servers and desktops, you have a slew of utilities available to look at problems. I've discussed a few of my favorite DNS debugging utilities in past posts, and recently added the dnscap utility to this list. Dnscap is a command line utility that allows you to view ALL of the DNS requests sent over an interface in a dig-like or binary format…
$ read more →Thoughts on building your own NAS device
In a previous post I shared the research I did on the various NAS solutions that are available. I've been experimenting with the software solutions I described in that post, and have decided to forego a pre-built solution in favor of a DIY project. There were a couple of reasons for this: The hardware costs were significantly less than the pre built solutions. I have quite a bit more flexibility rolling my own box…
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