Keeping IT Up With The Joneses
We’ve all been in that meeting. We’re learning the important facts about a company and their awesome technology. We think we’ve got a handle of the problem they’re solving and how we can apply it to our needs. And then…BAM! Our eyes are assaulted by a billboard full of company logos. We’re told how every one of these companies think that this product or solution is awesome. And because they think it’s awesome and bought it, you should think it’s awesome as well and buy it too.
Do As They Do
This particular exchange in a presentation has a term: the NASCAR slide. When I came up with the term years ago during a Tech Field Day presentation, I referred to the fact that the slide was covered by all of the logos of customers and sponsors, not unlike the side of a NASCAR race car or the coveralls worn by the drivers. It turned the presentation into a giant neon sign signaling all the companies that bought the solution.
Vendors love to tell you who their customers are. They love holding those solution bidding wins over their competitor’s heads and informing the populace that a company like Victoria’s Continue reading
Cisco Press CCDE Study Guide
Are you looking for a book that will teach you all the topics on advanced technical networking? If so, I would be very pleased to recommend CCDE Study Guide written by Marwan Al-Shawi to you. As one of the professionals who contributed immensely to this book, I must admit that Marwan wrote this book […]
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Why it’s harder to forge a SHA-1 certificate than it is to find a SHA-1 collision
It’s well known that SHA-1 is no longer considered a secure cryptographic hash function. Researchers now believe that finding a hash collision (two values that result in the same value when SHA-1 is applied) is inevitable and likely to happen in a matter of months. This poses a potential threat to trust on the web, as many websites use certificates that are digitally signed with algorithms that rely on SHA-1. Luckily for everyone, finding a hash collision is not enough to forge a digital certificate and break the trust model of the Internet.
We’ll explore how hash collisions have been used to forge digital signatures in the past. We’ll also discuss how certificate authorities can make this significantly harder for attackers in the future by including randomness in certificate serial numbers.
Digital signatures are the bedrock of trust
The Internet relies on trust. Whether it’s logging in to your bank or reading Reddit, HTTPS protects you by encrypting the data you exchange with a site and authenticating the site's identity with a digital certificate. Browsers visually display the added security of HTTPS as a padlock in the address bar.
HTTPS can prove a site’s authenticity to a browser when a Continue reading
2015: A Cloud Security Wake Up Call
2015 was no stranger to security breaches, so we have to wonder: What needs to change?
Elliott Management Was a Disruptive Force in 2015
Citrix, Riverbed, Juniper, and EMC were on the receiving end of the hedge fund’s meddling ways.
Python script to generate RADIUS users
Just for future reference, I wrote this quick script using python to generate RADIUS users in the Freeradius /etc/raddb/users file. Makes light work of what I used to do rather painfully in Excel:
__author__ = 'amulheirn'
# Create lots of radius users for /etc/raddb/users file
interface = 'ge-0/2/0' # Local source interface
ipaddr = '89.20.80.' # First three octets of IP addr
startuser = 1 # Start of the user range
enduser = 20 # End of the user
for i in range (startuser, enduser):
print 'user%[email protected] Cleartext-Password := "password"' % (i)
print ' Service-Type := "Framed-User",'
print ' Framed-Protocol := "PPP",'
print ' Framed-IP-Address := "%s%d",' % (ipaddr, i)
print ' Context-Name := "tuk_llu",'
print "======[END]====="
5 Things Your Network Needs In 2016
These trends and technologies will have a big impact on enterprise networks in the near future, so ignore them at your peril.5 Things Your Network Needs In 2016
These trends and technologies will have a big impact on enterprise networks in the near future, so ignore them at your peril.
Static Route Load Balance
How does Internet work - We know what is networking
Routing table will then leave to the switching process the job of load-sharing. That is, route-cache mechanisms like CEF on Cisco device will do load-share per session using source-destination IP.
What’s in a Name?
What’s the difference between .local and .here? Or between .onion and .apple? All four of these labels are capable of being represented in the Internet’s Domain Name System as a generic Top Level Domains (gTLDs), but only two of these are in fact delegated names while the other two cannot be delegated. It seems that Internet no longer has a single coherent name space, but has developed a number of silent and unsignalled fracture lines, and instead of being administered by a single administrative body there are a number of folk who appear to want to have a hand on the tiller! How have we managed to get ourselves into this somewhat uncomfortable position?Process images for your blog with ImageMagick
When writing a blog post about a technical topic, I often capture a lot of screen shots that I need to edit before adding them to my blog article. Usually I want to add a border around each image and I sometimes want to reduce the size of images that are too large. I want to do this quickly and easily so I use ImageMagick, an open-source command line image editor.
It takes too long to edit a large number of images one by one in an image editor like Photoshop or Gimp. Using ImageMagick makes it easy to batch process all images in a folder by entering a simple command. You may also incorporate ImageMagick into shell scripts, batch files, or other programs to automate the preparation of images for your blog.
ImageMagick is a powerful image manipulation tool with an intimidating set of options and subcommands. However, most bloggers will use only a few simple options. In this post, I will show how to install and use ImageMagick to perform the simple image conversions bloggers typically need. I will show how this can be done on each of the major operating systems: Linux, Windows, and Mac OS X.