Posts by unccvince

Email blocklisting: A Christmas gift from Microsoft that Linode can't seem to return

Re: Before long, all email will have to be sent through one of the "big" providers

In our company we have had to buy a mail gateway from GOOG and one from MSFT. It costs more to pocess the GOOG and MSFT invoices than what the products themselves cost, but whatever.

Our MTA is now configured :

- mail goes to MSFT managed mail => routed via paid MSFT mail gateway

- mail goes to GOOG managed mail => routed via paid GOOG mail gateway

- mail goes to self-hosted managed mail => routed via our SMTP

We thought this solution would solve our problems, we hoped.

Now, our legitimate mail spamness score is downgraded because the MSFT gateway estimates that we don't send enough emails, so this looks suspicious, and the IP address of the GOOG mail gateway has itself a very much fluctuating intra-day trust ratio, so the spam filters on the receiving end send legitimate mails into the SPAM Inbox.

This is very, very frustrating to say the least without employing any curse word appropriate to the situation.

Paid antivirus? On ads? Think of all the beer you could buy without that subscription

No need for VPN, nor AV

Just have a clean OS image to start from, close all incoming ports, have an agent installed on the machine running the display that regularly fetches signed billboard updates on an internet facing web server, authenticating with the web server using a client certificate.

Bam, best security, no AV, no VPN, the billboard will update as long as it has sometimes some internet connectivity.

The PrintNightmare continues: Microsoft confirms presence of vulnerable code in all versions of Windows

The solution to rule them all ... in that situation

Replace the MSAD with Samba-AD, don't use a print server, use WAPT or a software and configuration deployment tool to deploy printer drivers locally.

There is a little learning to do, but the described setup is highly scalable, horizontally (reproduce on many networks) and vertically (will work on networks of any size).

Microsoft releases command-line package manager for Windows (there are snags)

Did you know that apt-get for Windows has existed for 8 years ?

The product is called WAPT. It's made in France by a team 3000 times smaller than the MS team.

It is agent and pull based so that it works well with NATs, firewalls and proxies, users don't need to be local admins, you have command line and console based management capabilities. Actions and packages are signed using certificates and all communications are https. You can catch return codes and even configure the user environment for their immediate productive use of the software package.

Repositories are self hosted so you can customize your packages.

It is designed to be flexible, secure and simple to set up and use.

Cherry on the cake, it even has a security certification from the French Cyberdefense agency.

Winget is what WAPT was in 2014.

https://www.wapt.fr/en/doc/

https://wapt.tranquil.it/

OVH says burned data centre’s UPS, batteries, fuses in the hands of insurers and police

Re: Anyone knows what type of UPSes were involved?

Perhaps was it a solarwinds because it was very bright on the videos of the burning DC :)

Python 2 bows out after epic transition. And there was much applause because you've all moved to version 3, right? Uh, right?

Re: Repeat Offenders?

I had to use a few years ago a web application to post my social security contributions in France. I'm not technical but it it must have been javascript client based.

On Internet Explorer, the amount I had to pay was XXX and on firefox it was YYY. I like Firefox better but YYY was bigger than XXX so I was not happy. I reported the problem to the IT team and I got a call the next day from the CIO thanking me for the finding.

Conclusion of the story : there will be problems for some organisations transitioning from Python2 to Python3, their only option will be to to react quickly to their customers / users finding the issues that have slipped through testing, that's all.

Imposed change is not a big deal if you can react quickly.

Be safe, stay home and keep loving Python.

25 years of Delphi and no Oracle in sight: Not a Visual Basic killer but hard to kill

Re: A great product that is too expensive now..

For the Delphi people on this thread who don't know yet Lazarus, this link will take you to screenshots of what can be done using Lazarus:

https://wiki.freepascal.org/Lazarus_Application_Gallery

We have several developers working with Lazarus and we use Lazarus and Python to produce WAPT, a sysadmin tool for software deployment (https://github.com/tranquilit/WAPT).

We've realized that younger devs who have learned Java or C++ in school adapt very well to Lazarus and FPC. They can become very productive very quickly under the guidance of an experienced Delphi mentor.

Vincent