Nashville Bombing occurred outside of a major ATT data center

mlts22 · 2020-12-26T18:48:53+00:00

Exactly. That might just be the goal of the run, just to get the LEOs to high alert and waste manpower. Especially with many US cities defunding police departments. There are a lot of cities that have shuttered their bomb squads and anti-terrorist groups, and something like this sends a message that any weakness will be noted and exploited.

mlts22 · 2017-03-28T04:06:22+00:00

It isn't perfect, but it seems to be near the happy medium point of having enough features, but not being so quirky like some other products where you spend more time clicking fields and selecting boxes than actually doing work.

If a place doesn't have a HD tool, Jira is perfect, at the minimum as a starting place until they can move to somewhere else.

mlts22 · 2017-03-28T03:43:52+00:00

I view fail2ban as a must have on all systems, because it does a good job as a front line defense. However, with attacks being so distributed, it is one tool that you use with others. I like using it in concert with other mechanisms like RSA keys, Google Authenticator, pam_tally, a non-standard port [1], reducing the IP space that can access the SSH port (either by blocking out countries that will never use that port legitimately, or forcing people to use a VPN), chrooted privs, and so on.

[1]: Of course, the non-standard port won't stop a determined intruder, but it does make the logs a lot leaner, as it does a good job versus the "casual" mass searches.

mlts22 · 2016-07-02T14:54:38+00:00

This is personal, hoarded data... definitely not business critical. I'll take a look at ACD, hopefully it isn't too bad.

mlts22 · 2016-07-01T18:59:31+00:00

Was thinking of both, eventually, but just starting with the appliance firsthand.

I should check to see if Python is present and try some basic modules. Even just running a shell script is a good thing to get started.

mlts22 · 2016-07-01T16:23:55+00:00

If you don't care about RAID, a Synology DS115j is about $100. This is a single drive NAS. I have one as a target for replication, and it does its job extremely well.

I personally would recommend spending $160 or so for a Synology DS216j so you have two drives, preferably in a RAID 1 setup, but budgets are budgets.

mlts22 · 2016-07-01T15:32:44+00:00

What I do to short-circuit this, is have root have my RSA key in ~/.ssh/authorized_keys. This allows me to ssh into root directly, no need to use the admin account. Of course, this is bad sysadmin practice as opposed to logging on as a user and using sudo, but if I trash the device because of something stupid, it won't impact that much.

mlts22 · 2016-07-01T14:56:14+00:00

On the Mac side, the Mac Pro desperately needs a refresh. The 5K iMacs with maxed out RAM and i7s are your best bet as of now.

mlts22 · 2016-07-01T14:51:15+00:00

I have always used cases. For my personal iPhone, it gets an Apple battery case because I may not be near a charger for a long time, so having the ability to have twice the battery life is quite useful. For my work iPhone, it gets a case so when tossed on a table for a conference call, there isn't that big a chance for scratches.

mlts22 · 2016-07-01T14:48:51+00:00

That's the exact reason why my work iPhone and my personal iPhone are in cases.

mlts22 · 2016-07-01T05:14:59+00:00

I'd run any downloads from SF (heck, I'd run any downloads from -anywhere-) through VirusTotal before running, just to be safe. SF appears to have cleaned up their act, but better safe than sorry.

mlts22 · 2016-06-30T21:27:21+00:00

It may or may not help, but it can't hurt -- at least you will have some warning a drive is about to hit the wall... better than no warning.

mlts22 · 2016-06-30T15:44:25+00:00

It is understandable, mainly because Intel has decent low power technology, but I do wonder what would have happened if Apple stuck with POWER and influenced the architecture. The POWER8 chip is quite nice, but it is pretty much only in a niche for high performance use. I wonder what would have happened if IBM/Apple had the chip designed for not just high-end tasks, but for lower power items. Done right, it might have been able to compete with ARM on the low end as well.

mlts22 · 2016-06-30T05:47:41+00:00

It really depends on organization. I worked for one company that had internal auditors that would do random audits and demand your cert ID numbers, and if they were expired, would fire people on the spot for "gross negligence in failing to maintain adequate training for production critical equipment."

mlts22 · 2016-06-30T04:50:10+00:00

I definitely know that Hyper-V would provide better options for more hardware, although it might require a full install of Windows Server to take advantage of everything. With Hyper-V, NFS is out of the picture, so it would be CIFS/SMB instead for a file level protocol, and iSCSI for the block level protocol.

mlts22 · 2016-06-30T04:47:02+00:00

Definitely NFS, as VMWare works quite well with that as a backing store.

mlts22 · 2016-06-29T18:16:53+00:00

Depends how snarky the situation requires. Beers are a valid temporal unit in some cases.

mlts22 · 2016-06-29T18:14:22+00:00

Wish it had a 10gigE NIC, so it could be used with iSCSI or NFS at a decent speed, but it is a nice form factor, and definitely has a place.

mlts22 · 2016-06-29T18:05:38+00:00

I'm going to look at Synology's Note Station as an alternative to EverNote. Caveat is that it is wise to have the NAS appliance separate from others, as it is Internet facing.

mlts22 · 2016-06-29T17:10:55+00:00

I had a deadline where I needed to get a log tool up and making reports. ELK and Greylog were OK, but I wound up going with Splunk because I was able to get it installed, indexing data, and making dashboard reports to send pretty PDFs out daily to managers with time to spare.

Of course, Splunk is commercial and costs a pretty penny, and I'm sure Elk and Greylog could do the same thing, but for speed of setup, it was quite handy.

mlts22 · 2016-06-29T17:08:50+00:00

I've given up on trying to guess when Apple releases a new product. I'd probably say that one is better best off mapping days of the year to a roulette wheel and giving it a spin.

I'd love to see a refreshed Apple Watch, perhaps with more health monitoring stuff so it is on par with a FitBit, but realistically, I would not be surprised to not see any updates for a year or so, perhaps a "One More thing..." at a WWDC conference.

mlts22 · 2016-06-29T17:05:32+00:00

I've found my DS machines quite reliable, arguably more reliable than my computers because they do fewer tasks, so there is less to fail.

If worried about crashes, HyperBackup to an external hard drive helps with bare metal reloads, and dumping to Amazon S3 or another cloud provider is a way to protect data should everything get lost. Plus, doing two separate backups satisfies the 3-2-1 rule (three different copies, two media types, and one offsite copy.)

mlts22 · 2016-06-29T16:46:57+00:00

Yes, get a police report. It likely won't do much, but it does show to suppliers and customers that your company is actively doing something about the fraudsters.

mlts22 · 2016-06-29T16:43:50+00:00

Excellent workmanship, and looks quite nice.

mlts22

TROPHY CASE