It is summer time and people are traveling for vacation. Heading to hotels, campgrounds, parks, and friends. If your like my family you have many devices you take with you; tablets, smart phones, laptops, and all kinds of wifi devices. As people travel they see free public wifi for use. Please understand that these networks are not …
I have posted a few times about my home network and in particular all the great things you can do with DDWRT or with PFsense. I recently had my home PFsense firewall have some issues, mainly to a hard drive failure. When I was replacing it, I decided to try a few different versions of firewalls. HARDWARE The hardware for my …
High Traffic WordPress Sites A few websites that I maintain get a large volume of traffic. They are using WordPress as a content management system. To accommodate this traffic I have been utilizing a combination of a great service CDN and a caching plugin. A “CDN” is a Content Delivery Network is a service that will store and forward your items …
Google Endorsements Google has recently made a policy change. You may have seen a notification in your gmail or Plus page. I basically just clicked on the “x” or said OK with out thinking about it. I am sure many other prople are like me and don’t take much time to read any policy changes. However, recently many news sites started …
I was reading my Flipboard feed and noticed an article saying to disable Java based on some zero-day exploit. This article on the The Verge The Verge mentioned that the homeland security team decided to encourage people to disable Java. That is an amazing thing to have a plugin that is as widly used as java to be encourage to be …
A few months back I posted how to setup SARG on pfsense router. Since then there has been a great package created for SARG that works on p. I have uninstalled the components I earlier configured and now use this package. Here is the config and setup for this on pfsense. A listing from the Packages area (Admin | System | …
Dell has just launched a developer focused laptop. The cool thing about this version is that it runs Ubuntu (linux) and is on a 13 inch laptop. (check out the hardware here) The article that I found regarding this was focused on the Sputnik project. I think this is a great start. I’m a fan of small portable computing and the …
When did listening become illegal? After reading this article I got to thinking more about how the concept of wireless is flawed. http://gigaom.com/2012/05/01/google-wi-fi-snooping-and-the-ever-shifting-creepy-line/ As a technology it uses public airwaves to send data. This concept works great when the data is suppose to be freely available. The success of this can be seen with radio and TV. People are able to …
It seems every device you purchase has a web admin page. The little linksys router you purchased, the NAS storage device, your Linux box, etc… The trend is to have any type of appliance have this type of management tool. These tools allow the managemnt of these devices to be done by almost anyone. The challenge is that many people take …
This has been a great book so far. Not only is Kevin a very sociable person but he is a very entertaining writer. His stories are amazing. To think that he left some out. http://www.amazon.com/Ghost-Wires-Adventures-Worlds-Wanted/dp/0316037702 Watch is interview with Snubs on Hak5. “23 Questions with Kevin Mitnick” http://hak5.org/episodes/hak5-1017
UPDATE – Since writing this pfsense has added a package install of SARG. I recommend an updated tutorial of this post – SARG and Pfsense V2. Here is a tutorial on how to setup SARG (http://sarg.sourceforge.net/) – Squid Analysis Report Generator on Pfsense. If you don’t know what any of those words meant then here are some references. SQUID – (www.squid-cache.org): …
My wife went to a seminar today and came back with a good idea. That she and I should have an emergency contact card in our wallet. She also mentioned an ICE contact for our phones. I had not heard of ICE contacts, “In Case of Emergency” – here is a quick blurb from lifehacker – How to add an ICE …
I’m a huge fan of a tool called nmap (nmap.org). It is a network tool that can do many things. The most simple is to determine if a host is active. Anytime I connect to any network I run a quick scan to see who my neighbors are on the network. To do a network scan with nmap you only need …
I get all types of security questions from home users. How do I secure my wireless so people can’t use it? How can I make sure people can’t steal files on my computer? How can I keep the kids from going to sites they are not suppose to be on? For the last one, how to secure and block sites I recommend OpenDNS. …
I am currently at microsoft techEd in Atlanta. Microsoft has some great things going on. Any time you put 10000 geeks together you see a lot of tech. The main take away I found was that the iPad has won. I see as many iPads as I do laptops. That is interesting especially at a Microsoft conference. This simple observation tells …