Larmeir.com

I worked through the DNS issues and they are solved permanently, The issue appeared to revolve around a bad serial that was generated for my zone file. A small issue but enough to mess up several resolvers ability to properly resolve my urls.

I have heard from some of my visitors that the page is messed up and they are seeing other problems. This is being caused by a strange DNS issue I am tracking down. In the mean time I have switched DNS providers until I can further isolate the issue and you may see intermittent errors in DNS cache until the changes are 100% propagated. – Dustin

Password strength is incredibly important! Having worked in the Tech industry for years I have seen so many servers get rooted, hacked and owned simply by a bruteforce attack or password guess. Realistically this should not be a problem but many people feel that passwords such as “password”  “hellokitty” or whatever is strong enough. Generally as a guideline you will want a mixed lower case, upper case, alpha numeric passwords with special characters. An example of such a password is below:

U$34r341P4$$W0rdN00b13t!!

The key characteristics of a strong password are in this password above and this can be used as a guideline. Yes they are harder to remember but almost impossible to guess through a brute force. An example of what ignorance about password strength can do is in this article below:

http://news.techworld.com/security/3210769/users-on-hacked-site-used-trivial-passwords/?olo=rss

290,000 accounts were hijacked on this website. If that doesn’t hit home I don’t know what will. Keeping a strong password not only keeps you safe but also keeps others safe from you.  In case you want a autgenerated password, you can use something like this: http://www.pctools.com/guides/password/ – this will do it for you

This video cracks me up! I don’t know why but it got everyone at work laughing…

Yeah, I can make a mean bubble! I made this  @ Fair Park.

http://www.natureandscience.org/

Want a cool login screen when you login to the linux shell at the console of via ssh? All you need to do is modify the /etc/motd file:

]# cat /etc/motd
. . .     |
| | |,---.|    ,---.,---.,-.-.,---.
| | ||---'|    |    |   || | ||---'
`-'-'`---'`---'`---'`---'` ' '`---'
       __,-----._                       ,-.
     ,'   ,-.    \`---.          ,-----<._/
    (,.-. o:.`    )),"\\-._    ,'         `.
   ('"-` .\       \`:_ )\  `-;'-._          \
  ,,-.    \` ;  :  \( `-'     ) -._     :   `:
 (    \ `._\\ ` ;             ;    `    :    )
  \`.  `-.    __   ,         /  \        ;, (
   `.`-.___--'  `-          /    ;     | :   |
     `-' `-.`--._          '           ;     |
           (`--._`.                ;   /\    |
            \     '                \  ,  )   :
            |  `--::----            \'   ;  ;|
            \    .__,-      (        )   :  
             \    : `------; \      |    |   ;
              \   :       / , )     |    |  (
               \   \      `-^-|     |   / , ,\
                )  )          | -^- ;   `-^-^'
             _,' _ ;          |    |
            / , , ,'         /---. :
            `-^-^'          (  :  :,'
                             `-^--'

Just place in your preferred art/text with your preferred editor and your good to go!

I purchased Verizon FIOS a little over a year ago and have been using it daily since that time. I have to admit that FIOS is the best internet I have ever used in a residential capacity.  There are some pros and cons though I will list below:

Pros:

Lightning fast – I can generally meet or even exceed my plan. Most ISP’s cut you under your max throughput. – I am using the 25/25 as of this time.

Good uptime – I have only had one 5 minute outage since I started using the service. Other than that it has been up all of the time.

Sales/Support – Anytime we call they are polite and get things taken care of quickly.

Cons:

Price - price tends to be a bit high but you do get what you pay for

Filtered ports – The filtering of port 80 is annoying, but made up for by allowing 443. I understand the reasoning for this though as people may try to host malicous sites and this could present abuse issues. Other ports like 25 are filtered but this doesn’t bother me.

Crapware – When the verizon techs install the service they install crapware on yoru computer. ( this is perhaps the most annoying thing)

MOCA – Media over Coax  is a pain in the neck and now Verizon’s default install. You can get cat 5 activated from the ONT upon request though.

For a tech like me FIOS is awesome! it is fast enough for me to host offsite backups and make the Internet an enjoyable experience. If you are shopping for Internet I would recommend seeing if it is available in your area.

I was at the arcade a couple of months ago and wanted to play the fast and the furious tokyo drift arcade game. Much to my dissapointment it was BSOD’d

Looks like an NVidia crash to me………………

Seems even an arcade machine with windows that serves only one purpose in life can’t even remain stable.

This is in reference to http://news.cnet.com/8301-30684_3-10433745-265.html

Rarely do I give opinions in matters relating to politics or activism, but today is a new day. Google does many great things for the Internet as I can attest to every day, but also does some bad. Google being a part of China’s internet service in the first place was a horrible idea… Google to an extent was just as equally responsible for blocking freedom as China was. In fact Google has helped China suppress and oppress it’s people through it’s search filtering. Why would a company built on the founding principals of Capitalism help to advance the agenda of such a communist regime? You would think that an American company built from free information/searching would know better. I doubt anybody from Google even hears this lone voice on the net, but you need to straighten up, be American and take care of business. I hope you do live up to what you have been saying and your principals and show China whats up.

For those of you who regularily read my blog I am sorry I haven’t written anything new lately. I will have some good stuff up here soon – just have a back log of projects including two sites I am building and my regular job. My Nginx howto will be here soon   I hope everyone has had a happy holiday season thus far!