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Business Bonus: AWS Outage (12/7/2021)

  There was an AWS outage a few days ago; You were probably impacted in one way or another. If any of my appliances would ever e-mail me, I think I'd die of shock. Every thing from Disney+ to McDonalds was affected, as US-East-1 was US-East-None for a few hours. Even Amazon delivery drivers and warehouse workers couldn't complete their breakneck, no bathroom, tasks. My Alexa couldn't reach AWS. "Guess I better attach it to the new hotspot..." I thought, before moving on with my day and not doing that. Turns out, my hotspot wasn't the issue.

Case Study: The Offline/Online Laptop

  alt: Three panels of a dog with a toy. Panel 1: 'Pls release IP address'. Panel 2: 'No release', Panel 3: 'Only hold onto expired IP' It's not practical for home internet services to let end users distribute their own IP addresses to their devices. The option is there, but it's far easier to let people use DHCP - You get a pool of addresses for your devices, and the router does the work in distributing them. That way, your devices can talk to each other (Somewhat - in a L2 network, they don’t need IP addresses) and reach the internet! But what happens when one Windows 10 device is unused for months? The device is totally off. It holds onto an expired IP address - and then it can't get back on. That's what happened this week. After scanning with Wireshark, no DHCP packets were being sent at all. The laptop didn't want to connect to any home internet router, of which there were two - The main one and the extender. Flushing DHCP didn...

Two Factor Authentication and AWS Cognito Identity Pools

There's always a video to watch. Things to learn, labs to try - and a thought hit - What service does AWS provide that allows users to log in with Two Factor Authentication (2FA)? A refresher; 2FA is a combination of what you know, who you are, what you have - and in the future, probably what you ate for breakfast - to log into sensitive systems.  As of 2021, Google made 2FA mandatory for logging in to your Google accounts For the DoD folks out there, that keycard you use to log into a computer is a form of 2FA.  A fingerprint scanner, or an authentication app on your phone also count. Back to the question - Does AWS have options for 2FA if you use their Directory options?

How to Secure Your Linux Webserver

Article I don't remember which distro of Linux Webserver I used - My computer has Ubuntu, so my guess is that flavor. I'm working in datafile.txt - But not so fast! The initial edited datafile.txt file.

Animal Crossing: New Horizons 2.0 Update

The long-stagnant game has finally returned - And this time, it's actually finished.  Let's look at a little at what's arrived! Photog Fabulous The new camera features and filters are so fun. I love the eye-level view and being able to turn the camera on its axis. Which axis? You tell me. Fun fact; As I don't have Nintendo Online right now*, I sent these images to my smartphone via QR codes and a closed, ad-hoc network. Much easier than sending 4 at a time to my private Twitter and saving them. * ( Hint: Buy the Happy Home Paradise DLC before you buy the Nintendo Online Premium service; Then you have a copy to play with after your membership expires, as opposed to it being a 'feature' of the membership you can lose ) There are also neat new filters in the in-game camera: The first (surveillance) and third (retro) are definitely new.   Coffee Break Brewster is finally back! One of my favorite pastimes in New Leaf was running to the beach where I had placed The...

SD-WAN Cisco Sandbox

  Want to get started using network automation, but don't have a suitable home lab? Cisco, as always, has you covered. The sandbox has configurations with special programming languages (For lack of a more clarifying term) like Ansible, YAML, or JSON, and probably Python. It's reminiscent of Cisco Live's Capture the Flag games, which I've participated in before. The site within the sandbox does not have full connectivity; Is redundancy set up? Are two routers connected to each other and one not? There's more info if you scroll to the right - "Device groups", "up since", "connected vManage", which is an SD-WAN controller that ensures visibility and control from end-to-end.   You'll notice TCP Optimization isn't reachable. This chart is the activity over 24 hours. If I sort by a smaller amount of time - say 1 or 3 - there is no data to show. Here's a reachable device. and here are the active interfaces [vedge01...

Bing Webmaster Tools

  The very large "10 books in 1" tome, "Building Websites (all in one) for Dummies", is something I often peruse late at night. The ways of the Old Web give me comfort. But something caught my eye. 💡 "Submit a sitemap to Google and Bing. Yahoo uses the same search options as Bing, so no need for that." Now, this book is not new (There's a section on how you need to put in some XSS code to be able to take PayPal payments on your Webpress site - Is that still a thing?). So, I thought the idea of sitemaps was long gone. However - sitemaps are still in use today! What is a Sitemap? It's an XML file optimized for search engines to find your website, listing every page on your website. "Spiders" crawl pages to index for search engines. Why Bing? I use Bing for my regular searching on the web. I also submitted my sitemap to Google, as my blog is hosted on their platform and my domain is purchased through them. (I'm not sure it work...