Adventures of a Technical MasterMind

I'm very impressed by all the new features that Sonicwall has added to v5.8.  I spoke to Jock Breitwieser and Eric Crutchlow who gave us a nice overview of some of the features.  I wanted to make sure I didn't miss anything as there were quite a few changes.  There are even more NG (Next Generation) Firewall features coming this year in v6.0.  Sonicwall has been a great vendor for us, I am very happy we moved to their platforms. Here is some of the new features (screenshots) with some explanation above the screen capture. Before you can turn on the netflow sender (and built in netflow collector) you need to consider the impact this will have on your firewall.  You should keep an eye on your CPU and ensure you aren't running above 50%, or you will probably have CPU contention issues.  You also need to be aware that the memory usage of the netflow database and visualization will reduce your peek connections.  This model is a NSA 350...

I follow a lot of different sites.  I tend to read my news every other day.  I'm always trying the best tools to deal with my data on multiple devices (iphone, ipad) and multiple computers (google crome OS, Windows).  I have found the best combination to be the following: 1.   Master feeds on google reader (works great on any device) 2.   Feeddemon (Windows) FeedDemon is a great app, it will sync with my google feeds and give me the same view of what I have read and what I have not.  You have a better user interface for getting through all that data.  I also customize the views to work for the way that I want to fly through all my news.  These kinds of user interface tweaks aren't possible with google reader yet, but it will improve.  Google reader is a great app and works great on mobile or desktop browsers. I always use google chrome as my primary browser, it wins the speed race hands down, and supports the critical extensions I need...

I came home today to find a strange looking box with odd shapes on the outside of it. Once I opened it I didn’t expect to find a small netbook there shipped from google. This is the Chrome OS Netbook they shipped to me for free. It’s a nice form factor, not too large and not too small. Once the OS booted up, you just hook it up to wifi, login with your google account, snap a profile picture, and you are off. After some time it upgraded itself, similar to chrome. It required a reboot after the update. It runs very well. It does a good job with flash and other web media. It took quite a while to get my full extension sync from the PC, but most of my extensions worked without a hitch. The major one which doesn’t work is lastpass, which I really need! I tried many sites on it, and everything looks like it works well. I also installed several “apps” from the store which make for easy access to my google products and other sites I use a lot. It will make a good ipad type to...

Thanks to the awesome community and software over at spiceworks - www.spiceworks.com I found these great free tools from Netwrix - www.netwrix.com that are superb for any system admin dealing with windows systems. I could have used this fileserver monitor freeware in the past for basic audits. I wish I had known about it sooner. The other really useful tools we are using are the following freeware tools. Essentially the free versions just email you at 3am every night with changes or reports. You can change the schedule using the scheduled task control panel: Password Expiration Notifier - http://www.netwrix.com/password_expiration_notifier_freeware.html This tool emails the end users when their passwords are expiring, its good for us because we have some remote users and mac users who do not get notified. This should prevent the lockouts we see when passwords expire. AD Change Reporter - http://www.netwrix.com/active_directory_change_reporting_freeware.html This p...

Netflix is one of those really secretive companies, there have beens some interesting articles how they run the operations for the disc delivery, but not much on the way the deliver digital content. I came across this really cool article on how they use AWS: http://www.readwriteweb.com/cloud/2010/11/why-netflix-switched-its-api-a.php Pretty interesting read. Not sure I agree with some of the statements about less system admin and less database folks when they use AWS. I can understand less datacenter staff, but managing virtual or cloud infrastructure is just as much work. Obviously this is only the case when its running customized software and databases built internally (such as netflix). You still need to release software, manage the databases, and handle the same problems you would if you were doing it all in house. The only items you don't need to worry about would be the following: Backups Provisioning new hardware (which is pretty simple if you run your own vm...

So I am doing a PCI audit, and one of the requirements is that there must not be weak cipher support enabled on systems which collect credit cards from the web. I started doing some testing around some of the larger ecommerce sites out there, and it had some pretty startling findings. SSLv3 has been in Browsers since 1996 (think mozilla 2.0... way before we had firefox). http://blog.zenone.org/2009/03/pci-compliance-disable-sslv2-and-weak.html From my testing these sites to have SSLv2 disabled: google, paypal, delta, etrade These sites don’t have SSLv2 disabled, this is strictly against PCI: Home depot, bank of America, Scottrade, Microsoft, Amazon, QVC, Dell, Orbitz Really concerning that these big commerce sites allow something like that to slip by the auditors. Time to hire me to fix your compliance :)

Had a good time in Miami for a few days this week, got a lot of good content from the conference. I'm going to go over my notes some more next week, but there are some of the highlights from the show: New offering Fraud detection and scoring - Akamai does tokenization removing PCI scope, and they can build a profile on the end users and given them scores. Cybersource - they are one of the processors of the akamai pci solution. Edge encryption - Encrypts the data at the edge all the way to the database Only privledged systems can decrypt the data from the database. (might be useful, not sure) Siteshield - ACL only allowing requests from specific akamai servers (protects against ddos) ADS - Predictive analytics Shows the proper ads based on what they are looking at across all sites Look across 500+ shopping sites, on 160M users Don't use pixels to allocate ads (slows down the site) Akamai - Velocitude mobile reformatting on the fly - http://www.akamai.co...