Author Archives: john

What credit card fraud looks like

Posted on July 31, 2018 by john | 8 views

Intro A lost credit card. Or was it misplaced? Months later a whole bunch of “modest” charges appear all at once, a couple days after a few lower-value test charges were made. Thank goodness I had the presence of mind … Continue reading →

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NJ homeowners: how to sell your SRECs from your solar panels

Posted on July 30, 2018 by john | 5 views

Intro I was an enthusiast and got solar panels on my roof while there was still a tax credit for doing so. But then i became lazy and didn’t want to bother selling the SRECs I was awarded. Here is … Continue reading →

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Linux tip: how to enable remote syslog on SLES

Posted on July 27, 2018 by john | 8 views

Intro I write this knowing I still don’t know anything to speak of about syslog, but, sometimes you gotta act without knowing. I needed to send syslog to somewhere in a big hurry so I figured out the absolute minimum … Continue reading →

Posted in Admin, Linux, Network Technologies, SLES | Tagged , , | Leave a comment

Suppress /apple-touch-icon URLs on an F5 ASM

Posted on July 20, 2018 by john | 10 views

Intro Displaying the ASM event log is slow – it can take minutes on our older equipment. So anything that helps cut out the clutter in the returned log entries may save precious minutes of, e.g., paging to the next … Continue reading →

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Pi-hole: it’s as easy as pi to get rid of your advertisements

Posted on June 26, 2018 by john | 24 views

Intro I learned about pi-hole from Bloomberg Businessweek of all places. Seems right up my alley – uses Raspberry Pi in your home to get rid of advertisements. Turns out it was too easy and I don’t have much to … Continue reading →

Posted in Raspberry Pi, SLES, Web Site Technologies | Tagged , | Leave a comment

Docker on CentOS 6: FAIL

Posted on June 24, 2018 by john | 18 views

Intro I think I’ve been running CentOS 6 for six years now. With upgrades I’m at v 6.9. It was nice and new six years ago, but not so much anymore. I think it showed its age when I tried … Continue reading →

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Future project idea: Interplanetary file system, IPFS

Posted on June 10, 2018 by john | 22 views

Intro If I had more time and more energy, what I’d like is to explore the Interplanetary Filesystem, perhaps put up a server and create some objects. It seems right up my alley as I was an early adapter and … Continue reading →

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LDAP authentication on the F5 BigIP without Access Policy Manager

Posted on June 7, 2018 by john | 38 views

Intro I recently received revised guidelines for dmz best practices which mentioned a requirement to implement application-independent authentication using the F5 web application firewall. I had never heard of it and didn’t think it was possible without buying the very … Continue reading →

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The IT Detective Agency: the vanishing certificate error

Posted on April 30, 2018 by john | 32 views

Intro I was confronted with a web site certificate error. A user was reluctant – correctly – to proceed to an internal web site because he saw a message to the effect: I tried it myself with IE and got … Continue reading →

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

The IT Detective agency: Some insights into 4096-bit SSL keys

Posted on April 26, 2018 by john | 35 views

Intro I was recently asked if a new certificate a web site is about to deploy would require any changes to our clients such as needing to import this certificate into their Java keystore. The details Well, I saved the … Continue reading →

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