Author Archives: john

curl showing its age with SSL error

Posted on May 26, 2017 by john | 29 views

Intro I’ve used curl as a debugging tool for a long time. But time moves on and my testing system didn’t. So now for the first time I saw an error that is produced by this situation, and I will … Continue reading →

Posted in Linux, Web Site Technologies | Tagged , , | Leave a comment

Adding a swap file in Amazon AWS for CentOS

Posted on May 1, 2017 by john | 34 views

Intro I was running a new daemon on my server, factomd, to experiment with digital currency. It’s an old m1.small instance with only 1.7 GB of memory. The first few times I ran it it would 70000 or so blocks, … Continue reading →

Posted in Admin, CentOS, Digital Currency, Linux | Tagged , , | Leave a comment

Automating guest wireless access for monitoring purposes with Raspberry Pi

Posted on April 26, 2017 by john | 29 views

Intro I decided to monitor guest wireless access to the Internet using a Raspberry Pi. By that I mean a basic, binary, is it working now or not response. The back end is a Cisco wireless LAN Controller (WLC). Like … Continue reading →

Posted in Apache, Raspberry Pi | Tagged , | Leave a comment

WAN load-balancing routers

Posted on April 23, 2017 by john | 32 views

Intro I got an offer for $20/month broadband access from Centurylink. It got me to thinking, could I somehow use that as a backup connection to my current cable ISP? How would that work? Could I use a Raspberry Pi … Continue reading →

Posted in Consumer Tech, Network Technologies, Raspberry Pi | Leave a comment

Google Authenticator – not tough to self-host

Posted on April 17, 2017 by john | 21 views

Intro I wanted to learn a bit more about digital currencies. I’ll certainly be posting about them in the future. The best way to get some is to open an account with coinbase. But for security reasons – and I … Continue reading →

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Obscure curl error explained – partially

Posted on April 17, 2017 by john | 15 views

Intro Are you, like me, vexed by this curl error: curl: (51) SSL peer certificate or SSH remote key was not OK ? More details I have many Linux systems from which to test. But I can only produce this … Continue reading →

Posted in Network Technologies | Tagged | Leave a comment

SSL Interception: troubleshooting

Posted on April 6, 2017 by john | 68 views

Intro SSl Interception is a reality at some larger companies. From a security perspective it is vital as it permits you to extend your AV scanning, botnet detection, 0-day, DLP, cloud security, etc to your https traffic which is normally … Continue reading →

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What I’m working on now: Poor man’s version of Speedtest.net

Posted on March 7, 2017 by john | 33 views

Intro Now that I have a dual-band router I wanted to run some tests to see if 5 GHz is really faster and more stable than 2.4 GHz, as my intuition was telling me. But my only 5 GHz device … Continue reading →

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White web page: maximizes your backlight with no invasion of privacy

Posted on February 28, 2017 by john | 27 views

Intro Maybe it’s just me, but I’ve always had some issues getting my flashlight app to work on my phones. First there’s the issue of finding one from a trusted source (many contain spyware: access to my contacts?? for a … Continue reading →

Posted in Consumer Tech, Web Site Technologies | Leave a comment

Bluecoat ProxySG and DNS using edns seem incompatible

Posted on February 24, 2017 by john | 42 views

Intro Imagine your DNS server had this behaviour when queried using dig: $ dig drjohnstechtalk.com @146.201.145.30 ; <<>> DiG 9.9.2-P2 <<>> drjohnstechtalk.com @10.201.145.30 ;; global options: +cmd ;; Got answer: ;; ->>HEADER<<- opcode: QUERY, status: FORMERR, id: 48905 ;; flags: … Continue reading →

Posted in Admin, DNS, Network Technologies | Tagged , , | Leave a comment