best practices

DFS-What it is

2010-06-16

  Finding myself needing to explain why having a single namespace server was a bad idea, I decided to devote today’s post to the Distributed File System: what it is, why you want it, and what you should consider when designing it. I have found that a lot of admins have heard of it, and [...]

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Zen and the Art of Naming Conventions-aliases

2010-05-12

  As a follow up to our post on naming conventions, today let’s talk about the aliases that every company should populate in DNS and use internally. These aliases will be for well known and well used services, that might just move from server to server over time. By placing CNAMEs in DNS, and promoting [...]

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The Eleven Immutable Laws of Security Explained

2010-03-26

  About ten years ago, Microsoft published The Ten Immutable Laws of Security to try to raise awareness of security issues and the importance of incorporating security at all levels of the organisation, back around and in all aspects of a system. I was one of the speakers in the Philadelphia market that got to [...]

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…and then there’s complete paranoia

2010-03-24

  So I’d like to share a word or two about firewalls. More specifically, their configuration and the responses they provide (or don’t) when they encounter traffic that is, shall we say, less than desirable. My goal here is to bring some rationality to the way our maligned little friends act on the wire, simplify [...]

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How to Find the Best Web Filtering Solution for Your Business

2010-03-17

  One of the necessary evils of business today is the availability of seemingly unlimited web access to employees and customers. Security threats from allowing users’ web access on company computers are numerous. These include data leaks, loss of employee productivity, malware, phishing and other scams, loss of network bandwidth, as well as liability issues [...]

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NetBIOS Name Resolution is Full of WIN(S)

2010-03-10

  This post is not about how to install WINS, it’s about why you actually need it. Yes, that’s right folks, you need WINS, even today in 2010, with Windows 7 and 2008 R2 firmly deployed in your network.Windows has NetBIOS names encoded in its DNA, and we’re probably NEVER going to get away from [...]

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Eleven programs that should be a part of every Windows server build

2010-03-05

  There have been hundreds of posts about the top tools for Windows. This one is about the server side of the house here. Each version of Windows comes with a great selection of accessories, utilities, and cmd-line tools. And every company has their particular chosen antivirus software, host intrusion detection agent, backup agent, patching [...]

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howto://create strong passwords that are easy to remember

2010-02-04

  It’s the classic challenge of finding the right balance between security and accessibility. As admins, we know that bad guys really are trying to crack passwords, and the stronger the password requirements, the more secure we’ll be. As users, they want to be able to access systems quickly and easily, and not spend hours [...]

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Designing your external DNS solution

2010-01-30

  One of my favourite subjects is DNS. I really love resolvers and queries, discussing the relative merits of recursion versus iteration, the different types of records that are out there, and how to tune DNS just so. Primaries and secondaries, AXFR or IXFR, tuning the TTL of your individual records so that you can [...]

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Zen and the Art of Naming Conventions-hostnames

2010-01-25

    I spent all weekend with a 6 second long sound bite stuck in my head. It’s from a song I used to love, that I’d played thousands of times, and probably haven’t thought of this century. I knew that the name of the group had something to do with Bangkok, or Tokyo, or [...]

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howto://Use SPF records to combat domain spoofing

2010-01-16

  Spam. When you’re talking about the Hormel product, love it. When you’re talking about unsolicited commercial email, I hate it with an abiding passion usually reserved only for the ankle-biter at Fox that cancelled Serenity. But any way you slice it, the bane of email’s existence is spam. Spam spam spam spam, lovely spam! [...]

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An open letter to web app developers

2009-07-07

Dear web developer, Congratulations on creating a wonderful web based application to assist your company’s customers with registering and accessing your site. I cannot help but admire your use of concise, compliant code, the choice of fonts and colours, and other little niceties that went into your work. It seems a shame that you did [...]

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