The ramblings of a computer geek
Sometimes its easy to get wrapped up in the more complicated things and forget about the basics. Something as simple as power to your equipment being fully resilient can be forgotten but if it fails you can find yourself dealing with an outage that you don’t really want to have had to deal with. Balancing … Read more
There are a number of ways to protect your WordPress site, one of the best quick wins is to ensure that your Admin page cannot be accessed by any IP address on the Internet. If you have a static IP address (or a number of static IP addresses), then the below will allow you to … Read more
Using Data Centre/Center Expert and adding an APC ATS switch, even though the configuration was correct, FTP was enabled and the relevant settings set for SNMP for the relevant IP addresses the following error is observed in the Data Centre Expert “Device status may be inaccurate due to attempt to transfer DDF failed”. After much … Read more
I recently purchased a 2 Bay Synology 720+ NAS, however at the time of purchase I only had enough money to buy one drive and then wanted to add the second one at a later date. I also wanted to ensure that these were installed with a Mirror for 1 drive fault tolerance. The answer … Read more
I recently bought the Tado Smart Thermostats for my house to attach to my radiators. You’ll be familiar with such things as Hive and Nest which are Smart Thermostats, essentially these just make your Heating Thermostat you’ll typically have in your hall or landing into your home Internet enabled, so you can control it from … Read more
I had a bit of a read about that issue you were talking about with the fire suppression system causing system outages for Channel 4 recently (article). The reports all used seem to use the phrase “sucked the air out of the room”, this would imply a vacuum, which it wouldn’t have been. So in … Read more
The Synology NAS range can be used to run the Plex Media Server. However the Plex service needs to be configured with permissions to read your media files. In my example I have a Shared Folder on the NAS called “tv”, and I want Plex to be able to read, index and play these files. … Read more
The 5520-VIM-4YE, this has 4 x SFP28 ports 10/25. You can use 10Gbit or 25Gbit speeds on these ports. On an Extreme 5520 Universal hardware switch this will be ports 57-60 (on 48port model) or 33-36 (on a 24 port model) If you want to use 4 x SFP+ modules running at 10Gbit, you need … Read more
Emails crossing the internet use secure connections encrypted using Transport Layer Security (TLS). However, there remain vulnerabilities in this method of protecting the confidentiality of emails, whereby a person-in-the-middle can trick incoming connections to send to another server and/or send information in the clear. MTA-STS is a standard designed to address these vulnerabilities and is … Read more
The Kemp Load Master allows for the configuration of authentication offloading to itself (from the Microsoft Exchange server supporting Kerberos) to allow for the Kemp Load Master to act as a sP (Service Provider) against an IdP (Identity Provider) for example OKTA. The use of SAML via OKTA allows for any SAML (and Kerberos KCD … Read more