Monday, January 5, 2015

Remmina won't connect to Windows machines?

If you're like me, you still have to deal with Windows servers in your environment.  I typically RDP over to the ones in my environment with Remmina.  Every so often I run into an issue where a saved RDP connection will stop working and I have to blow it away and recreate it.  I finally had my fill and looked for a solution today.  Apparently the fix is to just change the security method from 'Negotiate' to 'TLS'.  Amazing what you can find when your annoyance level exceeds your laziness level.

Take a look at the original post where I found the fix over at Bauer-Power.net.

Thursday, November 6, 2014

Microsoft's next surprise is free Office for iPad, iPhone, and Android | The Verge

Microsoft announced today that non-commercial users of their mobile Office apps will no longer require an active Office365 subscription in order to edit documents.  By "non-commercial," they mean anything not stored on OneDrive for business or Dropbox for business.  For anyone that has had to look into licensing their Office365 product, this should come as no surprise.  Why anyone would pay their exorbitant licensing fees simply to have edit functionality in a mobile app when there are plenty of free and low-cost solutions out there simply mystifies me.  I could see the argument for some desktop users, but who is really going to work on a complex spreadsheet or powerpoint on a mobile device?

Microsoft's next surprise is free Office for iPad, iPhone, and Android | The Verge

Serious Linux/UNIX FTP Flaw Allows Command Execution - Darknet - The Darkside

Alright boys and girls, it's time for another installment of Vulnerability of the Day!

Serious Linux/UNIX FTP Flaw Allows Command Execution - Darknet - The Darkside

StartSSL - Can a free SSL cert be trusted?

During the course of renewing my SSL certs for another term, I happened upon an advertisement for a company called StartSSL who offers free SSL certificates.  My curiosity got the better of me and I had to click to find out more.

StartSSL offers several products ranging from extremely basic free certificates all the way to extended validation (EV) certs.

Saturday, November 1, 2014

Three Sysadmin Rules You Can’t (And Shouldn’t) Break

Saw this posted on the local LUG mailing list, and it's a must read!  I think I may have to print this out and put a laminated copy on the wall at work.

Three Sysadmin Rules You Can’t (And Shouldn’t) Break

Wednesday, October 29, 2014

Major Cyber Attack Will Cause Significant Loss of Life By 2025, Experts Predict - Defense One

Everybody get your tin foil hats ready!
Tin foil hat 2
(Photo credit: Wikipedia)

Major Cyber Attack Will Cause Significant Loss of Life By 2025, Experts Predict - Defense One

Somehow I get the feeling that no matter how many dire predictions of an inevitable large scale cyber attack are made, there will still be a lot of folks completely caught by surprise.

Monday, October 27, 2014

Dude, where's my A record?

I ran into something a bit odd today while setting up a couple of new CentOS 6.5 virtual machines.  The VM's were both set to receive IP addresses via Windows DHCP, which was working except for one small bit.  That particular DHCP scope is set to dynamically create both forward (A) and reverse (PTR) records when a lease is obtained.  Oddly, this was not happening.  Being a Linux admin, I immediately thought, "must be Windows!"

After digging into the Windows side of the house, I was left scratching my head.  All of the settings for both DHCP and DNS were as they should be.  I set up a packet capture and sent a few DHCP requests from the VM's which revealed the issue.  The default behavior for dhclient in CentOS now is to not pass the hostname in the request.  Adding one simple parameter in the /etc/sysconfig/network-scripts/ifcfg-eth0 file solved everything.  If you run into this issue, simply add the following to the file for the affected interface:
DHCP_HOSTNAME=`hostname -s`
 By including this line, you are telling dhclient to pass the hostname to the DHCP server in the request.