Networking

While working on an IDS Solution for a client, I came across Untangle, and I loved it so much that I pulled out an old box and loaded it up as my office firewall. One thing that is lacking, from my perspective (at least in the ‘free’ edition) is the firewall interface; Untangle uses an IpTables based firewall, but doesn’t replicate the usual INPUT FOWARD OUTPUT rulebase. I think that in 90% of usecases for Untangle, this isnt a problem, but I found it a little bit alien to have portfowarding hidden in the Networking config pane, and firewall separatly. ...

Take one Dual-Boot laptop, with three partitions: /dev/sda1:Windows File System /dev/sda2:Linux File System /dev/sda3:Data Partition I already had Dropbox installed on the Windows side and didn’t want to have things duplicated on the linux side, problem is Ubuntu currently does not mount internal drives automatically on boot, so every time I fired up Ubuntu, I had to re-mount the drive, password and all. Easy enough fix: Make a new /etc/fstab entry for the shared drive and define a mount point. ...

Recent events in the cyber-security world have got me feeling paranoid. Between Estonia, Georgia, and the ever-increasing focus on Chinese cyber-political-warfare, geo-political entities are starting to realise that the whole ’lets stockpile enough weapons to blow up the world enough times for the number to be rendered pointless’ may not have been the best plan. China has caught everyone off-guard with its recent, albeit ‘hush hush’, displays of force (while not entirely getting off scott-free), and we should probably be alot more afraid of a cyber war than of flaming pants or security-crossed lovers. ...

As part of the whole New Years Resolutions plan, I’m gonna get started on the OSS development thing. The Gist: Cross Platform Mobile application to collect international data on cell reception. The Gimmick: While services that do this exist, they assume even circular propagation of the signal. Granular reception maps that tell you where to head to to get more bars. The Detail: Low level should be relatively simple; the Android, Blackberry and Iphone API stacks allow easy reading of the current cell ID, RSSI, and GPS Co-ords. Upload those three values over XML (or Something), Web service plugs that into a MySQL server, which is then aggregated, and displayed on the Web, and can be queried by the mobile app. The Potential: While its unlikely that its going to ‘blow up’ since there is relatively little incentive for the end user, since the Applications are going to be free, there will be some that will install it for the sake of it. There is the opportunity to license the data gained service providers but the aggregated data will be made available online in open formats. ...

Recently the only additions I’ve been making to this blog are presumptious ' I’ll be doing this’ messages, and this is no excection. I’ve been living and working in Athlone, Ireland for the past year and have really learnt alot and very much enjoyed myself, but however much I will miss the place, academia drags on; it sounds like a campaign slogan but I’m back in Queens for ‘TWO MORE YEARS…TWO MORE YEARS’ ...

I must apologise for my lack of activity on the blog, but more is coming. I’ve begun working towards working with Ian Clarke on his Swarm project, that is if i can bring my Java and Scala chops up to scratch enough to give meaningful impact. Beyond that I’m heading to NJ this week to be with my partner for her graduation and have my 21st birthday while im over there (21 means absolutly squat in Ireland, so I’m expecting a repeat of my 18th…) ...

Last week or there abouts, there was a big buzz around the interwebs revisiting Dan Kaminski’s OzymanDNS tool, a perl based toolkit for tunnelling TCP traffic over DNS requests (technically its TCP over SSL over DNS but whos counting) That was originally released mid-2004. I never really found the true source of the new hype surrounding a “old” project (it may have been HAK5’s episode 504 that demonstrated the tool, mubix has put the write up in at room362) ...

Yeah, i know, “What does a guy who hasnt even graduated yet and is in a placement job have to say about education and employability?”, and usually i would agree with the sentiment. But the times they are a-changing. The world, especially for current or incumbant students, is very uncertain. I was lucky, when i was in first year i already had the connections to secure a job close to my Uni. ...

Check Email / Twitter / Facebook / et-al for 10 minutes every 3 hours (10/1/4) Focus on 1-3 activites / fixes / waypoint actions a day Keep a Log of those actions Obviously this only applies to my working life :D Original

So, I’ve made the plunge and am determined to catch up on everything I’ve left behind the past couple of years. I have embraced the new interconnections, Twitter,LinkedIn, Facebook, Facebook is personal, LinkedIn will be exclusivly business, And as wel all know twitter is a free for all.