It must be that time of year again. There seems to be heightened activity of script-driven attacks on servers. Most of these attacks are attempted brute-force password cracks of WordPress accounts. Here’s a list of countries (by ISO country code) that attacks have come on one of my servers from in the last 48 hours….
Continue reading →I’ve been running fail2ban on my Linux servers for years. It’s a neat little piece of software that detects people trying to break into your system, and then ignores any further packets from the intruder’s IP address for a period of time. It comes as a standard package for many distributions, and is easy to…
Continue reading →From time to time, I get asked to perform technical due diligence on investment opportunities. I have a checklist, and I thought I’d share it with others in the hope that it might be useful. If you have anything you think I’ve missed or got wrong, please let me know in the comments, and I’ll…
Continue reading →I’ve just returned from a 3-1/2 month trip, mostly holiday with my wife Kate and 11 year old son Dan, in which we visited Hong Kong, Vietnam, Italy, Switzerland, France, Spain, and the USA, generally avoiding big cities. Naturally, it was important to stay well-connected every place we went, so we employed a combination of…
Continue reading →I’ll be giving a talk at TEDxWellington next weekend. I’m not allowed to reveal too much about what I’m going to say, but I will be spending some time talking about the IETF’s Requests for Comments, or RFC’s for short. One of the most important RFC’s is RFC 760, which defined Internet Protocol, or IP…
Continue reading →This year’s NetHui conference was full of unexpected delights, but this gave me the biggest (if shortest) shock – Yes, I had finally achieved my lifelong ambition of being popular, even if only for fifteen seconds. Thank you, tweeps.
Continue reading →I finally upgraded my Thinkpad X201 from Kubuntu Lucid to Maverick over the weekend. I’m pleased to report that the process was nearly flawless using KPackageKit. Despite segfaults in KPackageKit which didn’t seem to deter it, the upgrade process went very smoothly and took about an hour. I’ve only encountered three minor problems: There were…
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