Two days ago my wife was notified by one of her customers of a defacement of their site. Obviously this kinda stuff always happens when I’m ill and the last thing I want to be doing is dealing with some random hacker. This post is about what I found and how this should motivate people to at all times update their websites with the latest security fixes and practices.

As far as I’m aware no sensitive data was access nor was any serious damage done other than a few index.html files over written. The only real loss is the joomla site that was broken into as the owner is on holiday and hadn’t updated it for a while, suffice to say it’s down for the time being.

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Tags: apache2,hackers,htaccess,joomla,linkedin
Categories: Main blog
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Type-2 interconnects are fun, but mtu issues are not. When faced with migrating subnets  from one MPLS cloud to another -different AS numbers you see- the three common inter-AS types were taken off the shelf and dusted off…

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Tags: 3600,7600,cisco,IP,linkedin,MP-eBGP,mpls,mtu
Categories: Networking
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Seeing this initiative made me think of my wife who has spent the last year carving out her own piece of the IT industry. Some may call me biased, true. Call it what you like, I’m taking this opportunity to put my wife in the limelight and honour her for her efforts and achievements after we relocated to the UK.

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Tags: linkedin
Categories: Main blog
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Doing a network upgrade of 28 sites, 60 services and roughly 160 old devices to just 60 devices. Python has become my friend for reading configs, creating csv files and verification. Will be posting my scripts later. I’m sure there are clever people out there who can tell me where I went wrong or what I could be doing better. However time fails me to post them right now.

Tags: cisco,linkedin,migration,nortel,python
Categories: Work
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Been hacking away as I found out I couldn’t edit a page nor did the page show up. My about page linked to the gallery instead. Spilt some blood and danced around on the keyboard loads. the result:

Note to self: DO NOT alter permalinks for pages! my about page was linked as who-am-i and this caused major issues. I also turned off the automatic XHTML corrections in the write-options page, not sure what it does so I’d rather get an error when writing a page than have my site go down. Priorities they say…

next to that my gallery now runs mod_rewrite in safe mode which works fine and I’ve re-linked an image on my about page. I recon the link was old style from WP 2.3 and older versions of WPG2 and Gallery2.

Please let me know if you find any issues, particularly with missing images. I hope all is well now and my server won’t die another terrible dead due to rewite/permalink hell.

Finally I have found the real culprit: /.htaccess was messing with things. What made it hard to find was that this file has been in place for a few years now. Upgrading WordPress to v2.7 as well as WPG2/Gallery2 tipped the balance.

What worked?
RewriteRule ^$ /wordpress/ [R=301,L]

Instead of:
RewriteCond %{REQUEST_URI} !^/.+
RewriteRule ^(.*)$ /wordpress/ [R=301,L]

Tags: linkedin,mod_rewrite,XHTML
Categories: Main blog
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I’ll leave the debate to others about running services on routers. As usual ymmv and all that, though besides the obvious objections I think it’s quite cool of my little c877 to proxy DNS and serve what it has locally. Imho, my home DNS config is not heavy enough to warrant rigging up DNS on my Samba server.

My first google tonight led me to an article on the excellent ios hints and tricks site (ioshints.info). Though this is for a full public DNS server it was a little overkill for me, please read this article as well if you do plan to go that route.

My goal was to have my DSL router serve local IP’s for a few public and local domain names. For example this allows me to use sip.djerk.nl as my proxy address in my soft-phone both at home and away.

The following code is what I ended up with.

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Tags: dns,ios,linkedin
Categories: Networking
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