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Showing posts from January, 2017

The unintentional DoS

DoS - Denial of Service Over the weekend it was very hot here - 39C over both days and air conditioning was being pushed pretty hard. My team and I had two unrelated, but linked situations evolve that could have hit us with a DoS. You see, we have a network attached storage device (NAS) that had a fan failure. While this NAS has redundant fans in it, one wasn't enough to keep the temperatures under the 55C warning threshold. So it started to complain.... Over the course of the 48 hour weekend, this NAS sent out over three and a half thousand emails! 3500+ emails! All to our logging email addresses, which then sent it out to the members of the team. 5 team members, 3500+ emails.... 17,500 emails being sent and received. That's a lot email in a short time. Most email servers will handle that and ours certainly did. Fortunately too we use G-Suite (Google Apps new fancy name) and so the volume of mail wasn't an issue. What became an issue though - and this did have an eff

3 Word Processors compared - Microsoft Word, Apple Pages and Google Docs

In the course of work and university I've been jumping a bit between Word, Pages and Docs for various reasons. I thought it might be useful to compare them. Let's start. Price Google Docs is included either in a free Gmail account or G-Suite. Its available for free on your mobile device with native apps on iOS and Android Pages is $30.99 and can be found in the Apple Store. It's included in iOS on the iPhone or iPad Word is part of the Microsoft Office Suite. The cheapest of which is Office365 Personal (for Mac) which is $89 inc GST per year (See the Microsoft Office pricing page here ). Includes a licence for a single mobile device On price Docs is the obvious winner. Free to get access to and solid support on mobile devices.  Usability All three of these applications are very useable - but which one is *most* usable? Google Docs is a clean, uncluttered interface with relatively few options available: Simple and uncluttered with everything there and

osTicket and OTRS - a comparison

While I have been a fan of OTRS for many years and like the interface, reporting and usability of it, I recently chanced across osTicket (from the TV series Mr Robot). It looked interesting and a client I have wants an internal ticket management system (they had also seen it). After a bit of to and fro, they agreed to some research time and I set up osTicket. My usual server OS is Ubuntu's latest LTS. In this case, 16.04LTS. The problem is, it ships with PHP7, and osTicket doesn't play nicely with that. There is a good tutorial over on Chubbable that's worth checking out: https://chubbable.com/osticket-install-guide/2#ubuntu-based Have a look at that if you want to install it - it's pretty straightforward. So my impression of osTicket is that its pretty good. The interface is reasonable intuitive and I've set it up at home to manage the stuff I'm going (but mostly just to play with it). There is a client interface and an agent interface. The Agent interfac

2017 - a new year and new challenges in IT ahead!

Welcome back. We've got a lot to do this year - the number of attacks is increasing again, Microsoft's new update policy will have it's full effect on the computing ecosystem and Linux will be a prominent part of this blog. Lots happening indeed.... We're at the 10th day of January and I've already had servers lose their Kerberos connectivity with active directory, our first cryptolocker infection and so much more.... I need a lot more coffee to deal with this pish. Stay tuned - I'm hoping to get my hands on some new tech and describe, some old tech and revive it, and just generally putter around for your amusement. So far I have learned this: MacBook Pro's (2012) can and do lose their wifi capability - I think the on-board adapter and finding one that works with a Mac can be tricky.  MacBook Air's have a battery problem - they turn off and won't turn back on until you remove the battery (an annoying exercise) Plus all the stuff on fixin