Friday, May 27, 2005

Postmaster sites for MSN Hotmail and AOL

For those folks who have to try and get e-mail to work with some of the big boys out there I suggest folks take a look at some of the postmaster sites they maintain. Microsoft just released their site for MSN Hotmail and AOL has had theirs out for awhile. Yahoo does it slightly differently and they run an DomainKeys is a great read if you get a moment.
- Ed

Tuesday, May 24, 2005

Cool site for traceroute listings, looking glasses , bogons and route-servers

traceroute.org has a great link list of sites that run remote traceroute tools, looking glasses and route-servers. The route-servers are pretty useful since you can see if your BGP AS announcements look correct!

I also have used the NANOG site which has some great looking glass links and information.

For those looking for Bogon infomation check out Team Cymru which runs a cool project that allows you to do BGP peering to filter out the Bogon address listings. You can also just get the Bogon List from them to build your own ACL. This can be tough to maintain on your own since the list changes pretty regularly. You should check their site on a monthly basis to make sure you aren't mistakenly blocking a newly activated IP address block.

- Ed

Monday, May 23, 2005

Internet Safety for Children

NOBUG - Novell Oakland/Bay Area Users Group is hosting Laura Chappell this evening. Laura has been traveling around promoting a worthy cause. She will be presenting on "Internet Safety for Children" and I think it will be worth showing up for given some of the headlines recently.

Laura has her own company Protocol Analysis Institute and I recommend her as a speaker. She is very entertaining and engaging.

Doug Spindler also gave a presentation on this topic in Moraga, CA back on May 17th, 2005 you can check out that information here.

If you are at all interested in helping spread the word attend the meeting tonight and Laura can get you set up to present on the topic yourself to the local community.

- Ed

Wednesday, May 18, 2005

Stack3 presentation thoughts from the TVNUG meeting

We had an interesting presenter last evening at the Tri-Valley Network Users Group (www.tvnug.org) meeting. Paul from Stack3 gave a very interesting presentation on the products they are working on.
They basically have two appliances right now, one is an all in one security gateway and the other is a voip pbx that works tightly with the security appliance. They seem remarkable cost effective given everything the products do.
They are running open source software but on the NetBSD OS. They are using Polycom phones which are very affordable and they seems to be a great fit for the SMB market. From back of the envelope math they are significantly cheaper then a similar deployment of either Cisco, Avaya or Shoreline. It remains to be seen if their product is as robust as it needs to be to support telephony for business critical needs.
The security appliance has a SPI firewall, anti-virus, anti-spam, content control, proxy services, and several other interesting services all rolled into a single device. They claim to have tested IPSec compatibility with several of the major vendors so they seem to have a product folks could use right away without cleaning out the bank to get all the features you would want.
- Ed

Interesting projects Microsoft Research is doing

Leo Laporte did a very quick intro into a research project that Microsoft is doing called mywhallop.com. It is pretty interesting, you can read about it at the Microsoft Reseach Social Computing Group site. I use a product out now called MindManager that is pretty cool. There are other interesting solutions out there like TheBrain and interesting projects like James Burke's Knowledge Web. If you are using any similar products please tell me about them, fasinating stuff.
- Ed

Thursday, May 12, 2005

Creative Commons License

I have been reading up about blogs, copyrights, and publishing on the web. It seems that the most practical license out there is the Creative Commons license for protecting your content. To me it seems the best balance of getting your information out there while preventing (if you want) commercial folks from taking your info and running off with it to make some money. There are several different license type to pick from and the stuff just seems to make sense. I recommend folks check them out, especially if you are generating content of any kind and making it available on the web in any format (blog, rss, podcast, etc.).
- Ed

Tuesday, May 10, 2005

EBCUG presentation was a fun time

Thanks to everyone who showed up to the EBCUG meeting, I am glad so many folks found the presentation useful. The slide deck is available for folks who are interested in reviewing the material. Feel free to add some feedback about the presentation onto my blog here if you want.

Oh, I attended the California IPv6 tech conference - there were more folks at the EBCUG meeting then the IPv6 forum! Needless to say, they don't seem to be getting much traction at all. I don't know if that is a function of the lack of interest in IPv6 or some other issues. Anyway, I think some common sense material about IPv6 might be in order. There seems to be no one who is doing a clear and compelling story around IPv6 without lossing folks in the techno-babble.
- Ed

Monday, May 09, 2005

California IPv6 Technology Conference - May 10th

I will be attending the California IPv6 Technology Conference up in Sacramento tomorrow, May 10th during the day then running to the East Bay Cisco User's Group meeting in San Ramon that evening to present on SPAM prevention using DNS. I imagine if I pick up anything cool on the IPv6 happenings I will share that at the meeting also!
This is the first time I will attend a California IPv6 Task Force event. Hope they have some interesting stuff going on.
- Ed

Microsoft MVP info

I have updated my profile information over at the Microsoft MVP site. Here is the most current info about my speaking engagements and other info that might be of interest.
- Ed

Thursday, May 05, 2005

Leoville

Leoville is Leo Laporte's website and I recommend taking a look. Leo came and spoke at the San Francisco Network Technology User Group this last Tuesday and was very engaging. He covered some great general technology subjects and also showed off Apple's newest OS release, 10.4 (Tiger). The RSS screen saver alone was worth coming to the meeting to see!
- Ed

Wednesday, May 04, 2005

Presenting at the EBCUG on Tuesday May 10th

Doug Renner has asked me to present to the East Bay Cisco Users Group about SPAM prevention using DNS. I've updated my slide deck with new information on rDNS, SPF and the links you need to make it all happen. Hopefully folks will find it useful. I want to turn the slide deck into more of a short article for publication since there seems to be a shortage or good practical overview of the how and why of reverse DNS.
- Ed