Earlier today AU experience an extended service outage affecting the forums, blog and wiki. I was not immediately reachable, so I was not aware until sometime after 2pm, unfortunately. The web service was down, and the database was not responding, a restart of those services restored the system to a live status. Early this morning …
Author Archives: Rickc
A Lesson in Cloud
A recent Threatpost article http://threatpost.com/en_us/a3t where Greg Hoglund comes pretty close to ranting about the actions of Anon and that they did not “hack” HBGary – they just weaseled their way into the HBGary Google account – does illuminate some of the issues with using Cloud services. You see, Greg tried to do some damage …
In Case of Fire…
When disaster strikes, do you grab the cat and head for the hills? Did you remember to turn off the gas, call your gardener and cancel you golf lesson? Perhaps you need a plan…
Replicate Me!
One thing I deal with all too frequently these days, is a rather unique and overly testy MSSQL db server. I have the distinct displeasure of being thrown to the lions as the resident pseudo-DBA, since there is a lack of a real DBA. Unfortunately, my years of MySQL experience didn’t prepare me for the …
Season’s Greeting from AppliedUsers!
From all of us – to all of you, have a safe and happy Holiday and Merry Christmas, Happy Hanukkah, Happy Kwanza to you and yours. Our team has put together a little special greeting this year: Make a photo slideshow See you all out at our online Yule Party in the forums on Dec. …
Making the Web Work for You – Part 5
Getting Social Now before you cast aside the idea of getting involved in any kind of social networking, take a minute to comprehend that what in one hand can be a time-waster and security nightmare you try so hard to keep your users away from, can on the other hand be a powerful business tool …
*Sigh* What’s ‘Google’ for BS?
http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/39745736/ns/technology_and_science-security/ This stuff just won’t die – but what is even more annoying than the never-ending banality of this journalistic tripe, is the mind-numbing notion that Google does anything inadvertently. In the words of Johnny Rotten ‘Bollocks!”. You don’t inadventently War-Drive custom network-sniffin’, gas-sippin’, picture snappin’, Google-mappin’ vehicles through 100-some-odd countries by accident folks. How …
Making the Web Work for You – Part 4
Sprechen Zie Blog? Although your first reaction might be ‘Why would I want a blog on my website?’, a better question is likely ‘Why wouldn’t you?’. You have yourself a well-designed and functioning site, you have done your due diligence with respect to Search Engine Optimization and you are keeping tabs on your site with …
GMail Security Checklist
The folks at Google have been nice enough to create a checklist to help you secure your system – it’s mostly a collection of best practices known to those in information security, but maybe less obvious to the general user populace. Either way, it would be beneficial for any GMail user to work through the …
Why SORBS sucks.
I like RDNSBLs – they are extremely useful, and when used properly, they can reduce your SPAM intake by 90% or more easily. When they don’t work well though, they kind of suck. No, actually, they really suck. One big problem with SORBS is it’s overly aggressively blacklist of supposed dynamic IP addresses – many …