Blog

Far to often I see folks spending thousands of dollars on new servers and network gear without consideration for improving the server room itself. This oversight can be catastrophic, and the ROI is predictable when proper implementation occurs. The most often overlooked areas, especially with smaller companies, include physical security, electrical power and climate control. More »

If you’ve ever tried to set up NFS behind a firewall, you know that it’s not trivial. NFS relies on several helper applications to do its thing. NFS relies heavily on portmap, which handles incoming NFS connections and coordinates ports for daemons like mountd, statd, and lockd. Each of these daemons listens on its own port (several ports in some cases), and they can be arbitrary in choosing those ports. This makes it next to impossible to firewall a default nfs configuration. We’ll learn how to lock ‘em down in this session, so you can firewall them easily. More »

There are times when you need a decent microphone, whether it’s for Podcasting, conference calls, recording demos or presentations, capturing riffs, recording band practice, etc.

The built-in microphones on computers are great, mainly because they’re built in and you don’t have to do anything to connect them up, but the sound quality is never all that good. Typical Condenser and Dynamic microphones used for pro audio applications sound great, but they require some kind of connection and/or preamp device to connect to your computer. More »

Last time, I wrote about our friend, “Joe the IT guy” and Computer Armageddon. I have been thinking a lot about these things lately, and I have noticed that I’m not getting much sleep. Family responsibilities (and a very active 10 month old) are at the top of the list, but I was thinking about when I was an IT Manager for a medium sized company. I didn’t get much sleep then either. More »

With all the backlash against the iPad and it’s lack of Flash support I thought it would be a good time to reflect on the proper use of Flash on the web. More »

Sometimes it’s the little things that drive you crazy.  Like when you do a tail of /var/log/messages on someone’s linux system only to find a sea of iptables log entries.  Denied DHCP broadcast queries, multicast DNS, everything.  It takes just an extra step to tack on a grep to clear out this stuff, but as any sysadmin can tell you, the little things add up to a lot of time and aggravation.  In addition, the sea of irrelevant denies does little to tell you who’s actually attempting to get into your systems.  With just a few extra switches in iptables, you can send your firewall log to its own file. More »

Regulations and standards such as HIPAA, SOX and PCI-DSS, require many organizations to evaluate their data protection measures.  Moving to the cloud has a direct impact on an organizations ability to comply with these regulations.  Let’s talk about two of the more challenging characteristics of cloud computing that can give organizations headaches while trying to maintain compliance.

More »

The web is massive. Probably a lot bigger and complex than Al Gore ever thought possible. It’s a gigantic, complex organism that only gets more bigger and complexer with every passing day. As the web has grown and permeated each of our personal and professional lives it has also become more important. For many of us it’s not “the internet” anymore so much as “my life.”

If you’re involved in running any kind of business the web presents a couple powerful opportunities; marketing with near endless reach and business intelligence on an unprecedented scale. Unfortunately there’s a caveat to all this – knowing how to take advantage of it at all. More »

Last week, we got the announcement about the new iPad, and the pundits have been working the Hyperbolic Chamber to capacity. So much has been said, written, and parodied about the thing in the last few days, and while most of it is typical ‘net noise, a few good, solid nuggets of info have emerged from the din.

One of the more significant issue surrounding the iPad is the question about support for Flash. Some see a lack of Flash as a huge negative and a deal-breaker for them, but for others (including myself), it doesn’t bother me that much. In fact, after having waded through hundreds of websites full of bad flash, it’ll be nice to take a break from it. More »

I know, I know: I’ve already had a blog post about spam. This is the last one for a while, I promise.  It just continues to be subject that rears it’s ugly head, forcing me to deal with it even when I think I have it solved.

For a while now, I’ve been moving my clients over to Google’s Postini spam filtering service when SpamAssassin isn’t doing the trick (typically for marketing firms that have a large contact base, spreading their contact information around the globe).  For those that aren’t familiar with Postini, it’s a subscription based hosted spam/virus filtering service.  You point your MX records at Postini’s servers, give them your WAN IP address, and they will act as a proxy to filter your email traffic through.  Easy stuff. More »

I recently spent some time working on an iPhone app (ProPrompter – for all your teleprompting needs!). We wanted to add peer to peer capabilities in order to facilitate a remote control function. The natural choice to get there quickly was to leverage the GameKit framework. The API is deceptively simple – as is the documentation – but as usual, there were caveats I had to discover for myself. More »

Computer Armageddon can start in the little details that don’t seem important.  You’re trying to keep things simple, save a little money, and not think about IT stuff unless you absolutely have to.  That can lead some people to consider hiring “Joe the IT guy.”

I’m going to tell you how “Joe the IT guy” can negatively affect your business. More »

A few years ago I was researching IT authentication solutions for a government agency in Seattle. Biometrics was a buzzword in the industry with social and ethical implications. My research found that it wasn’t the Biometric Authentication model itself that was causing so much churn, but rather the idea that such data could be compromised and with it a person’s identity. Identity theft was already an issue then, but the risk could be mitigated, once discovered, via a password change, new credit cards issued and a few letters to credit reporting agencies.

Biometrics presented a new problem, what you are is always you and cannot be reset. More »