The number one hook in most of the targeted malicious SPAM I’m seeing lately has to do with jobs. Either fake “responses” to a resume/CV, or offers of employment. With the US official unemployment rate above 9 percent, and the actual number of unemployed closer to 1 in 5, spammers know how to get their [...]
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Background: In today’s current environment it’s not unusual to see log files filled with thousands of entries for failed logins. Botnets, compromised servers, and even foreign governments are directing their energies toward harvesting valid username/passwords for mail servers, SSH access, and web sites with massive dictionary and brute force attacks. These attacks can come from several [...]
Most system administrators look at virtual servers such as Amazon’s EC2 or RackSpace’s Cloud Servers as a boon to IT, a way to scale to meet problems quickly, easily, and less expensively. Server virtualization is all the rage, and virtualization has replaced “web 2.0″ in every vendors lexicon. The advantages of cloud based virtualized servers [...]
A surprising number of small businesses have connected their office networks to the Internet with consumer grade NAT routers. These devices are inexpensive and easy to setup, but they lack features that most businesses should have. These devices are often left unsecured with default passwords and access levels. More importantly when something goes wrong they are [...]
A majority of dynamically created websites on the web today are backended* by MySQL. Even though NoSQL solutions like project voldemort are all the rage, for a majority of people not doing Facebook type traffic, MySQL is still going to be the backend of choice. In other words, the reports of MySQL’s death are greatly [...]
Often part of the magic of working in fast paced environment is the people that you work with. Below is a true story about one of those moments. I hope you have as much fun reading as we had doing. The Scenario A brand new golf course had been selected to host a PGA tournament. [...]
No job is complete until the documentation is done. That is just as relevant in corporate world as it is in consulting (and often just as ignored by some **ahem**). The de facto standard for producing network documentation has been Microsoft’s Visio. This program is part of Microsoft’s Office suite and lots of vendors make [...]
According to a study done last year by Forrester Research nearly half large enterprise are “evaluating alternative options for managing and providing email”. Why? It’s relatively easy to build a highly available, highly redundant email system that can support tens or hundreds of thousands of users easily with free software. The answer to the”why” is [...]
Yesterday I had the pleasure of being one of four speakers at the network storage event sponsored by the CFITS (Central Florida Information Technology Society). All four presentations have been put together in a single power point that is posted on the CFITS website. I’ve included a flash version of just the GeeForce slides here. [...]
For a lot of places in the rural US, the only game in town for WAN connectivity is the local telephone company, know in the business as the ILEC (Incumbent Local Exchange Carrier). Even if you didn’t get your Internet, ATM, or Frame network from that carrier the local loop (The piece between you and [...]
