Computer Tips -Tech Info

I would dare say there are more than a couple people “out there” right now that are puzzled as to WHY some of their mail is bouncing back to them as being rejected. Right now I’m talking about Bellsouth / AT&T mail users…. it appears that this week AT&T is in the process of transitioning […]

There are some tools that I make use of almost daily. Either because something strikes my curiousity or because of necessity to find out a bit more about a computer issue. DNS lookup tools fall into the category of “must have” for the kind of stuff I wind up doing. Whether it’s a whois lookup […]

I’ve noticed several times in the last week a server of mine that is using postfix has rejected messages due to a failure in the lookup at relays.ordb.org. At first, I thought this was just a false positive in the database at ordb… but this morning I finally “caught it” while it was happening and […]

As I mentioned earlier, Bellsouth seemed to be in the midst of a big DNS meltdown when I got up this morning. I spent some time getting various bellsouth customers “worked around” the issue by setting up an alternate DNS server for them. For starters…. DNS translates addresses like google.com into numbers (like 72.14.207.99) Think […]

This morning, I’m noticing some of the machines I monitor having big DNS problems. It seems to be Bellsouth.net’s dns servers gone sideways – none seem to respond. On one network in particular we’re having trouble getting a secondary (outside network) dns server to respond. From outside the bellsouth network things seem fine though. As […]

Yesterday I had a bit of a realization. I had just been looking at a wireless router/firewall setup and was thinking about the firewalling rules (which seemed to be geared at the WIRELESS lan… i.e. blocking that activity on the Wireless segment.) You know, traditionally firewalls have had the attitude of defending the internal network […]

This really could be used to encyrpt web traffic over any “hostile” network. Here’s what I’m talking about. Laptop using wireless. Within our internal network we would LIKE all our web traffic to be encrypted at least from the laptop to a wired host. (From there to the outside world it will be open.) At […]

According to the securityfix, Florida leads the nation in the number of networks with signs of computers infested with the sony rootkit. In total, 12,588 networks in Florida seem to have computers with the rootkit. Now, these numbers could reflect as few as one machine per network….    Send article as PDF   

Yesterday the hexblog, which is the site of the person that wrote the unofficial patch for the WMF exploit, was offline for bandwidth over use. Several mirror sites popped up to host the patch. Today the site is back up at http://www.hexblog.com/ in a more minimal form. It’s suggested if you can’t reach the page […]

Most of the time when I need to do a Dig or whois or traceroute I’m at a machine that I can use a good command line version of these essential network utilities. However, there are always times when you’re at a PC or situation that is either missing some of those, or you’d rather […]