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Showing posts from May, 2016

Digital forensics on an SSD

Recently I was able to listen to a guest lecturer by a chap working the digital forensics field. There were a few interesting things to come out of the lecture. They are, in no particular order: document and timestamp everything you do - it doesn't matter if it's written down, or you use software, but you have to show the steps you went through to reach the conclusions you're putting forward EnCase is an industry favourite software small cases can take you in surprising directions and you can go from a $40,000 fraud case and end up with a $250,000 + fraud case! recovering RAID arrays can be a trick - but you can image each disk and use EnCase to rebuild the array which is pretty neat! you can't carve an SSD to recover data like you would a HDD That last point is the one I want to mention. On a magnetic hard disk drive (the regular type of drive people have been using) when a file is deleted, it's removed from the File Allocation Table and the computer reco

Netgear D6300 Review

After my poor little TPlink Router bit the dust with a recent power fluctuation I was keen to get something with a solid WiFi capability. The TPlink router I was using didn't have the greatest coverage around the house, and certainly not outside the house, and with the recent installation of a Chromecast I was keen to find something with a bit more zing. Also, due to my dodgy cabling set up, I have half my machines on one side of the house, and the other half on the other side. The cabling between the two goes through the router and I wanted a gigabit link between the two halves. So a router with 5GHz wireless and gigabit networking? My local nerd supplier handed over the $399 Netgear D6300 and told me it was the best he had. He noted my sceptical look, but assured me that it was good to go. OK I'll have a crack at it and see how it goes. It took about 45 minutes to configure it - I've got a fairly complex network with a lot of crap all over the place, all sorts of forw

Ubuntu 16.04 LTS First Impressions

Another polished release - Xenial Xerus (at least I hope it’s polished!) I’m using it for a test WordPress system at the moment so I’ve been concerned mostly with that. PHP5 is gone, replaced by PHP7. The main issue with this is no more SSH2 PHP7 extension! It makes installing new themes or plugins, or updating them tricky in WordPress as it relies on this. I’ve had to default back to using vsftpd but even that is crashing at this time. To work around that, add: define(‘FS_METHOD’, ‘direct’); into wp-config.php See https://www.digitalocean.com/community/tutorials/how-to-install-wordpress-with-lemp-on-ubuntu-16-04 for a great walk through on this - in fact, check out Digital Ocean - they have some excellent stuff on there, including these tutorials. If you're like me and would love to delve into the intricacies of nginx or some other equally complex bit of software but don't have the time, Digital Ocean give you a way to get things up and going with very little in

Blogger vs WordPress - a comparison of great products

This blog is written on Blogger - I am a big Google fan and I love a lot of their products. Blogger dovetails nicely with the other Google Apps I use and so it's a handy piece of kit. The interface hasn't really changed much in quite a while - it's simple yet user friendly. If you're looking for a blogging tool, it's really quite good. I started to play with WordPress a short while ago for a client. They are using it to power their website and the more I've played with it the more I like it. There's a great interface - and I really like the new posting experience on it. Here is a comparison of the three different ways you can create a post with Blogger, old WordPress and new WordPress: How meta! A blog post in a blog post - this is the Blogger interface The old interface for WordPress - it has some nice features indeed. The new posting experience in WordPress. Takes a bit to get used to. I like the stark simplicity of Blogger - I've creat

Conversations about the cloud in Australia

Another day and another chat with a client about cloud computing options. There are some absolute turkeys out there peddling cloud this and cloud that to people. Stop it! ADSL2+ doesn't provide enough bandwidth for your plans - in the war between reality and expectation, reality wins. This particular client is fortunately on the ball enough to realise that pushing all their key applications off their local server and into the cloud isn't a brilliant plan. So what else do we do for these clients? What clever options can we provide? It comes down to the application of course. If they're doing scanning or uploading large files to an offsite location it's not hard to use a Raspberry Pi or similar to get the data trickling out, or bulk upload it over night with a script. If it's email or something like that - then get it into the cloud. Just let 'em know the limitations that their server currently manages - i.e. sending a large email out will take time. Yo

Google Keep and Apple Notes

This isn't so much a comparison, more of a discussion with myself about which one to focus on. First, the environment that you are in will determine this question much of the time - if you're on Apple, then the notes thing is built into their OS on desktops/laptops and into the iOS on your mobile devices. It has some nice features - encryption in transit, password protection, pictures and built into your iCloud experience. Here is where Keep has an advantage - it's available on nearly all platforms via the web browser. And it does most of those other things too. Both companies are very clever. The interfaces, while different, share the same characteristics of note taking - different options for getting ideas down and into writing, while trying to make it all as straightforward as possible. They have in the main, quite slick interfaces too and very user friendly. We are truly spoiled for choice and this is part of the problem. I use Macs, and PCs with Linux Mint and Micr