Category: Nerd Babel
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The Guessing Game. Guessing Passwords
My wife read my article on passwords and “got it”. Which is nice. I was attempting to explain how password crackers use rule sets to modify input dictionaries to create more guesses from a single word list. I decided to see how much things have advanced. To say I was shocked would be an understatement.…
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Two Factor Authentication
What we are talking about is “authentication.” Authentication is the method of confirming that you are who you say you are. There are three methods to determine authentication: Something only you know Something only you have Something unique about you In the old days, when people carried checkbooks with them and wrote checks for things,…
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Password Security/Password Managers
Password Security There are four ways of cracking a password. Guess the password Brute Force the password Go around the password authentication Trick the password from the owner If your password is easy to guess, then it is a weak password. Examples of weak passwords are: password, 1234, YOUR_NAME, BIRTHDAYS. Many things use a four…
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Single Point of Failure?
Resiliency is a goal. I’m not sure if we ever actually reach it. In my configuration, I’ve decided that the loss of a single node should be tolerated. This means that any hardware failure that takes a node of line is considered to be within the redundancy tolerance of the data center. This means that…
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What Did I Buy?
In upgrading from copper to fiber, I’ve been exploring the different options and learning as I go. Some learning curves have been steep, others have been “relearning” what I already knew. One of the biggest things I needed to learn is that there are “switches” that are actually “routers”. That was mind-bending. The other is…
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What Time Is It?
I own a pocket watch. It is beautiful, but I don’t use it very often. I know that I own a couple of watches. One of them is a battery powered solar recharging thing. My standard “watch” today is my cell phone. When I was in high school, I was very interested in accurate time…
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How to you get there from here?
The Internet is a fantastic creature. I’m not speaking of the information you can find on the internet. Nor am I speaking of the entertainment that is available on the Internet. The mere fact that you can ask for information at your desk or on your phone and somehow that request gets there, and the…
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You Get What You Pay For
My first fiber switch turned out to be a L3 managed “switch”. Way cool. But I purchased a cheap switch and found that it completely undocumented. It has taken me a while to figure things out. The configuration GUI is an What You See Is All You Get type. There is enough there that you…
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Maximum Transmission Unit (MTU)
In 1983, CCITT and ISO merged their network definition to create The Basic Reference Model for Open Systems Interconnection. This is the “famous” seven layer model. Which works for ISO standards but is a poor match for the Internet. The three layers we are interested in are: Physical layer Data link layer Network layer 1…
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There is a reason…
The problem that people have been attempting to solve, for years, is the lack of space in the IPv4 addresses space. There are currently more devices attached to the Internet or “the network” than there are addresses in the IPv4 space. This requires address overlap. The smallest section of a network is the “subnet”. A…