Ever heard of Samba? You should. Samba is an open-source project “that provides seamless file and print services to SMB/CIFS clients.” That’s from the project’s website, but what the hell does it mean? In a nutshell, it’s an open-source application that lets non-Windows machines share files and printers with Windows machines. In most cases,...
Uncategorized
Make Your Own Ethernet Cables
If you need to buy an Ethernet cable, you’ll pay quite a premium for it at your local CompUSA or Circuit City. $22.99 for a 7′ Ethernet cable is terrible. For just a few dollars more, you can buy a 250′ roll of cable and make 35 of them yourself. You’ll need to invest...
Common Cisco IOS Commands
Here’s a list of IOS commands that I use all the time that aren’t a part of the basics. I obviously use more than just these, and you do, too, but I hope there’s at least one eye-opener in there. show env all: Shows the environment status, including fan, power supplies, etc. Good for...
Port Knocking
A few months ago, a friend of mine told me about the concept of port knocking, where you send packets to a server on certain ports to authenticate access to the box. A daemon running on your server detects the sequence of packets that you send and runs a script (usually IPtables commands), waits...
Using an Old Server as a Home Firewall
You can use an old PC as a firewall at home (and at work, I guess). It’s not that hard to do if you have a basic knowledge of Linux, DHCP, and IPtables, but that may be saying a lot. Why would anyone want to do this, though? If you’re like me, you like...
Mixed-platform LANs and Spanning Tree
We just an HP C-class blade chassis which included two GbE2c network modules. These modules are Nortel switches running AlteonOS that connect the blades to the rest of your network. When I turned these guys up the other day, every VLAN stopped working, so I ran down to the data center and unplugged the...
The Principle of Least Privilege
The Principle of Least Privilege says that users or applications should only have access to the what it needs to access and that access should be as limited as possible. This idea can be applied to any number of things, but it is a very important topic when talking about security. The idea is...
Recent Comments