So I'm trying something new here - and there's no multiple pages of story time. The best popcorn is made on the stove. 1. Get a big pot - turn your burner up to high. 2. Put a 1/4 cup of butter-flavor coconut oil at the bottom, let it melt. 3. Cover the bottom of the pot with popcorn 4. Sprinkle on a tablespoon of Flavatrol 5. Let it pop until it stops for 15 seconds. I would shake the pot during…
I'm a poor writer - hopefully this will be better than my anti-Lavabit rant. With the proliferation of Locky and it's variants, I'm sure every single one of us is finding that we're missing a piece of the security puzzle somewhere. If you're unfamiliar with Locky, it's a form of malware that encrypts vital documents and programs and requests you pay a fee in BitCoin in order to decrypt them. My…
So at VFEmail we've received this nice bit of extortion from some script kiddies: Return-Path: X-Spam-Checker-Version: SpamAssassin 3.3.2 (2011-06-06) on spam100.vfemail.net X-Spam-Level: X-Spam-Status: No, score=0.4 required=5.0 tests=DKIM_SIGNED,DKIM_VALID, DKIM_VALID_AU,FROM_LOCAL_NOVOWEL,T_RP_MATCHES_RCVD,URIBL_BLOCKED autolearn=disabled version=3.3.2 Delivered-To:…
I run an email service. In fact I've run VFEmail.net since 2001 - that's before Gmail. There's been a lot of talk about privacy and re-writing SMTP to provide more encryption and 'mask' metadata. Long articles about email headers and how correlation of To/From/Subject can lead to a 'highly accurate guess' without any actual content. This is definitely a concern, especially because correlation only…
Once upon a time I had awesome credit - not anymore. Mostly due to Chase. Sometime in 2006 Chase sent me a credit card offer - $20,000 credit, 0% until paid off. I should have saved the document. There was no '0% for 24 months' or 18 months or whatever. It was just straight up '0% until paid off'. I even called them to confirm. I should have recorded the call. I already had 3 other credit cards…
So I'm a 'vacation owner'. Yeah, I was stupid and bought this almost 15 years ago. I fell for the lines and the empty promises. They tell you things like "It's a real-estate investment", and "You get priority booking at your 'home base'". It's all bullshit. After dropping something like $6k on it, I now spend $30/month on Maintenance. I get 120k points to 'spend' every other year. So those cost me…
Ugh. I signed up for Experts Exchange to ask a single question, then didn't cancel like I should have. They require a PHONE CALL to cancel a web membership. Now they've gotten a good 6 months of dues out of me. So I finally did it. I called. The following hilarity ensued : MAY 22, 2014 | 10:34AM PDT Charles Nickerson replied: Hello Mr. Romero, Thank you for your voice mail message. I apologize you…
I know I'm going to get hit from the security community for this, but there's no good reason for a CA to not sign certificates for Tor sites. Why? The premise of signing a certificate is that the browser manufacturer has verified CAs (Certificate Authorities) as 'noble'. By doing so, they include these CA's so users can establish secure connections with websites who are 'known' to be the correct…
So, much like many other email providers, Spammers try and abuse VFEmail servers by creating thousands of account to use for SMTP sending. We set daily limits per account, which forces this 'many accounts' issue - but we also have other throttling in place that prevents the Spam from actually leaving our systems. What's odd is that Chinese spammers have lately been coming FROM GOOGLE. Now, it's…
P.T. Barnum was a master showman. His name has fallen from public use, but his methods haven't. You may be familiar with his name as part of the Ringling Bros. and Barnum & Bailey Circus. He's notably remembered for promoting many hoaxes, and associated with the phrase "There's a sucker born every minute". It likely wasn't his phrase , but when I see a monkey head sewn to a fish, that's the man I…
VFEmail is in the final stages of a set of whirlwind upgrades. In the end, we'll have upgraded hardware, software, and a better overall design. VFEmail also runs Openmail.cc. These two sites share hardware and core infrastructure, but currently operate mostly independently. Only the user authentication has been merged. Webmail is still a separate database and install, though the same webservers…
I have a site that REQUIRES zero dropped calls. These calls are sales, and bring in revenue. If the office cannot be contacted, not only could we lose that referral, but the referer may not bother to send more sales our way. I am offsite. In fact, I'm out of state. Too far to quickly physically resolve an issue. I've been using Asterisk for almost 10 years, and it just keeps getting better. I used…
I swear I added a CA cert to Firefox 1.5 via Netware back in the day, but the more I think about it, the more I recall Netware's application deployment was far better than Microsoft's. In any case I've found a lot of info and some bad scripts, which I'm compiling and fixing for your benefit. I have to add that batch file writing skills are sorely lacking these days. Wow. A lot of copy/pasting…
Another shortcoming with Exchange - it doesn't handle subaddressing. (you know, name-this@domain.com or name+this@domain.com) So I have give all these slimeballs my 'real' email address with no way to track or filter out that particular slimeball. My solution is to rewrite the address in Qmail, and put the subaddress in the Subject before forwarding to Exchange. Since I already front-end my…
For whatever reason my new Exchange 2010 server does not properly update everyone's offline addressbook in Outlook. I've given up trying to fix it. Here's a batch file to restart all the services, so I don't have to reboot the entire damn thing. @Echo Off Echo 'Stopping Microsoft Exchange Services' net stop MSExchangeAB net stop MSExchangeADTopology net stop MSExchangeAntispamUpdate net stop…
I always get this wrong, because I only deal with NFS maybe once a year - typically it just works, but I always have issues when first getting it up and running. I'd prefer not to reboot, so this is the proper order: # killall -9 mountd # /etc/rc.d/nfsd stop # /etc/rc.d/rpcbind stop # /etc/rc.d/rpcbind start # /etc/rc.d/nfsd start Starting mountd. Starting nfsd. Thanks to:…
The Active Directory UserMod Assistant is an awesome application for your end users to change their own AD profile data, such as telephone number or address. It's a free solution, and it's built on HTML and VBScript - so all the core requirements should be on your user's workstations. In addition, the program is not compiled, allowing easy editing. For example, we put extensions in the 'Business'…
I've been building an IT Department, and of course, one of the basic requirements is metrics and monitoring. I played with AlienVault for a bit, but it's more of a vulnerability management/log consolidation tool. I stumbled upon ZenOSS via Proxmox (it's an included VM), and seems to work quite well. After some setup, I now get both WMI and SNMP notifications (like Nagios) from various devices. I…
So I ran some quick dd-based write numbers before choosing a filesystem for my new Proxmox based virtual server. I really wanted ZFS, but I need OpenVZ and KVM more, and ZFS-Fuse just does cut it. In short - ext4 is the winner, though ZFS sure looks pretty damn fast. SolarisInternals has more info on ZFS write speed Another thing to note, though the below numbers for ZFS-Fuse don't reflect it, is…
So I'm back in the thick of things as IT Manager of a small company and having been specifically in a Security role for a year, my first action is to push out Group Policy changes to make sure Updates are installed and more importantly - Flash is up to date. I've discovered Windows 7 x64 on Win2k3 domains have major issues. First they won't join the domain in the normal manner. Then I found one…
This is mostly a reminder for myself, when installing ioncube from FreeBSD ports an ioncube.ini loader is created (or exists) in /usr/local/etc/php If you have xcache installed, there is also a /usr/local/etc/php/xcache.ini When firing up php (php -v / php -m), you will receive an error: PHP Fatal error: [ionCube Loader] The Loader must appear as the first entry in the php.ini file in Unknown on…
I can't let this die .. It's a solution with such high potential. It seems with the Oracle purchase of Sun, the Sun links are all dead. So I'm reposting the original page from the Wayback Machine for reference.. How 'suite' it is... - Jackie Gleason The "Availability Suite" * All * Personal * Sun « Sun StorageTek Avail... | Main Tuesday Jun 12, 2007 AVS and ZFS, seamless? A question was recently…
So I stumbled across this Register article with some fine information regarding DNSSEC: http://www.theregister.co.uk/2010/04/13/dnssec/ After running some nice tests from the folloing link, I determined my firewalls were an issue: http://labs.ripe.net/content/preparing-k-root-signed-root-zone#diy After an hour of dinking around, I went and verified a couple other sites, and discovered the…
I don't think this post is going to be very fluid, just going to post some notes on the two systems. I currently have 2 FreeBSD 7.2-ish load balanced web/smtp clients with a FreeBSD 7.2-ish NFS/SQL server in the back. Will be migrating that backend server to OpenSolaris. With any luck, I can hot replicate maildirs between the new and the old servers, allowing for a hot backup. Solved FreeBSD + ZFS…
*This post is IN PROGRESS and will/may be edited* * I have given up on this. I've gotten zero help from Sun, and others have posted that THIS DOES NOT WORK - Good luck with OpenSolaris and AVS / ZFS replication* In this post, I'll describe what I had to do to get Seemless AVS /ZFS replication on my homegrown OpenSolaris box. This is based on this blog entry…