Posts by robpomeroy

Hm, why are so many DrayTek routers stuck in a bootloop?

Re: O M G

I used a lot of DrayTek routers early in my I.T. career, and they were unbeatable on price, features and support. But they're also quite ... eccentric. After having exposure to mainstream enterprise products (Palo Alto, Fortinet, Juniper, Cisco, etc.), I felt pretty "cramped" going back to working on DrayTeks.

In recent years, Netgate has replaced DrayTek as my weapon of choice in the SME or SOHO space - particularly the pfSense-based routers. They tend not to come with built-in modems or Wi-Fi, but on other features (firewall, NAT, logging & monitoring, DNS resolver, etc.), they blow equivalent DrayTeks out of the water. You can add packages as you require (e.g. Snort, Wireguard, haproxy, Squid, etc.). And the devices normally receive updates for a long time. I have an SG-1100 at home, which was released in 2019, and there's no sign yet of Netgate announcing an EOL. Still regularly updated. (For SME I use larger appliances - 2100 and 4200.)

Yes, you can run pfSense on lots of other hardware, but for an SME, it makes sense to go with a supported device. The main drawback is that their "Multi-Instance Management" implementation is still very early stage. If you're managing a fleet of routers, maybe try Sophos XG. Not as strong a value proposition as Netgate, but more mainstream, while being (IMHO) more accessible than any of the Gartner leaders.

Requiem for Google Reader, dead for a decade but not forgotten

A big part of that was a large company cheerfully sunsetting a product with a very large user base. We probably should have seen it coming.

Re: Google Reader was the beginning for me

Gosh - self-hosting email is not for the faint hearted! Respect!

Re: RSS

I've just migrated from Selfoss to FreshRSS, both open source and self-hosted. Migration to FreshRSS (using the Docker container) took minutes. It's excellent. Can warmly recommend, if you're in a position to self-host your RSS reader/aggregator.

Businesses should dump Windows for the Linux desktop

Presumably you are not factoring ACLs or mandatory access control systems like SELinux into this "primitive permission system" allegation.

Re: Genuine Question

You'll get something similar to "best practice" guides, if you opt for a RHEL-based distribution (Rocky, AlmaLinux, Oracle Linux, etc.). The Red Hat documentation has a lot of examples of good practice along with many how-to guides.

Re: Genuine Question

SCCM has a few moving parts. Rather than a single Linuux product being a complete replacement, you might consider one or more of the following:

Rudder - configuration compliance: https://www.rudder.io/

Ansible - a shallower learning curve than Chef or Puppet, I think, and doesn't require an agent: https://ansible.com

Rundeck - task automation: https://www.rundeck.com/

Foreman - lifecycle and patch management: https://www.theforeman.org/

FreeIPA - identity and policy management: https://www.freeipa.org/

These are all open source, so you can use them FoC. Commercial power-ups exist.

What an IDORable Giggle: AI-powered 'female only' app gets in Twitter kerfuffle over breach notification

Re: It is disturbing to me...

Unfortunately thanks to the Computer Misuse Act the position of security researchers in the UK is a little precarious. Legislative reform is long overdue.

BlackBerry tells UK High Court that security outfit SentinelOne is its direct rival

Re: Staff who wipe machines

There could be a legitimate reason, in the sense that they had been using the machine for personal purposes. If permitted by the company policy, there's no real issue with that.

If I'd been doing personal banking on a company laptop, I might do a precautionary wipe, since you can never be certain where the laptop would end up, ultimately. I'd just do a free space wipe though - far less likely to raise the alarm.

Wait a minute, we're supposed to haggle! ISPs want folk to bargain over broadband

Re: PlusNet Billing

Under the Limitations Act, an alleged breach (non payment) would have to be actioned within 6 years. So the max you could ever owe if the beach were deliberate would be 6 years' worth plus interest.

If you've been trying to pay and can demonstrate you've tried to pay, and the ISP took you to court, the judge would probably make the ISP pay your legal bills. Unfortunately there's no tariff for incompetence.

While US fires criminal charges at Huawei, UK tells legislators not to worry, everything's fine

Quelle surprise

Chinese company in intellectual property theft shocker.

Seriously, anyone who didn't already assume this was the case must have been living in a cave.

On the first day of Christmas, Microsoft gave to me... an emergency out-of-band security patch for IE

...with the added bonus that, without JavaScript, you won't be able to log onto any Google service anymore!

Carbon Black denies its IT security guard system oozes customer secrets

Security company says other security is rubbish shocker

In other news DirectDefense CEO said Carbon CEO''s mother was fat and ugly - only to receive a retaliatory Chinese burn.

LogMeIn collapses its 'Cubby' Dropbox clone into LogMeIn Pro

Re: Anyone know of a good replacement?

Syncthing is the open source answer to BTSync/Resilio and is looking increasingly mature.

152k cameras in 990Gbps record-breaking dual DDoS

Re: I'm trying to think of that sci-fi story...

Lawnmower Man

Teenage noughties protocol BitTorrent reinvents itself again

Re: Rsync

Take a look at Syncthing. I've been using it for a couple of years for on- and off-site replication of similar-sized datasets. It's been pretty stable for a while now, with binaries for Windows, Mac, Linux, Android and so on. Has some interesting versioning features that might assist with your use case too. No VPN required. You can use a public introduction server or run your own. Not particularly difficult to set up.

Personally I use it to synchronise between the contents of done Veracrypt containers and several different computers at different locations. A reasonably good private "Dropbox".

Open source, fairly secure, active dev community. Well worth checking out.

https://syncthing.net/