Month: May 2010

by Kris on Networking

I am the gatekeeper…

Are you the keymaster. Or how to stop some joker messing up your beautiful network by screwing with client side DNS.

Scenario: You’re a system administrator/network administrator/IT guy (whatever you want to call it) with an excellent setup, and while you sit staring at the blinking lights in the comms room pondering the quintessential meaning of things, or more realistically chatting on IRC (whatever floats your boat) you’re interrupted for the fifteenth time that week by that luser, um user you were forced to give local admin access to. Turns out now they can’t access the intranet or send e-mail.

Upon investigating you find that once again this user has changed the DNS settings on their computer, breaking Active Directory/OpenLDAP/e-mail whatever, despite repeated warnings. They’re operating under the mistaken belief that using the DNS servers provided by OpenDNS, Google DNS or any number of resolvers found here. Will make their Interweb downloads of funny cat pictures faster, you’ve tried chatting and explaining it to the guy, you tried approaching their line manager with no success. Short of beating the user with a hammer you need to find a way to resolve this situation, what do you do? You could block external DNS but that’s only half an answer. If they do it again it will break more connectivity. … →

 
by Kris on Blogging

I can has a blog evidently

Ten years in the making; it’s been a long time coming, but it seems I finally have a blog. I’ve had one domain or another since 1999, I was mainly using them for e-mail and shell access, but since the beginning I’ve been meaning to put up a site of some sort. Every time I tried, I would get really motivated for short periods, get so much done, then a new technology would come along or I’d change my mind on what I wanted.

For the longest time, I had wanted to code my own site – there being a certain geek pride in writing your own systems and me having an affinity for being different – It occurred to me recently that while I could code something that worked, it would be full of potential errors and security holes despite my best efforts. Not because I’m a bad programmer, that’s just the nature of the beast, that’s what happens when you developed something on your own of that scale that’s open to the public. So long story short I decided to go with WordPress, I did code my own theme though.

Now that’s out of the way, what can you expect from this site? Well, it’s mainly going to be a place for me to post tutorials, rants and set out my arguments and opinions. I don’t expect anyone else to actually read them, they’re primarily for my future self. If other people happen to find anything useful or enlightening, well that’s a bonus.