DNS Cache Poison
Well I like a lot of people have been reading and reading about all the vulnerabilities being found with DNS. What baffles me is that companies like AT&T and Verizon have yet to complete patching. Even while on an iPhone you can be at risk as I found reading this iPhone DNS Test. If you haven’t tested at home or at work already DO IT NOW!! Either of these links will work DoxPara Research or DNS-OARC. If the test returns a message similar to “Your name server, at 2xx.2xx.1xx.1x, appears vulnerable to DNS Cache Poisoning,” then you may need to patch your desktop system as well as look into using another DNS provider. At home I currently use OpenDNS and I have run numerous tests and they are all positive. My home ISP is comcast I plan on running a test on their servers tonight just to test and will update my post later on. I can’t stress this enough make sure you run a test on any network you browse the internet on just to be safe. Till then happy surfing 
It’s been awhile…
I have to say I’m a bit disappointed in myself for not keeping up with this blog recently, I guess life has just been keeping me that busy. Anyway a few small updates, after trying to force myself to study for the GRE Exam and sending off my applications I was accepted to the University of Pittsburgh for their Masters of Telecommunications with a concentration on Security. I still haven’t heard back from CMU and I don’t think I’m going to wait any longer for them. MST - Security Program - I think for where I want to go in my career this will be the best technical degree I can pursue.
In other news work has been keeping me quite busy and I’m continuing to learn a lot about different aspects of networking and security. I have to travel to Texas next week for a VoIP roll out at one of our sites for about 1600 users over 3 weeks and I’m in the second group.
I’ll make it a point to get myself back in gear to start studying again, taking notes to post, and keep up on blogging. Until then thanks for reading!
Joe
GRE Exam
Well I have been busy studying away for the past few weeks for my second run at the GRE exam. I mainly focused my review time on the math portion and went through the 2007 Kaplan Math Review work book. After taking the test I improved to 600 which is much lower then then I had hoped, but these tests always test for the obscure. Then for the verbal I felt very confident but ended up doing even worse then before. So I’m done with that between my two attempts so I’m going to send in my applications and hope for the best. My grades from my undergrad are pretty good so I’m confident that I’ll get accepted to atleast Pitt and maybe CMU if a miracle happens.
It’s really hard to prepare for this exam I think there is just such a multitude of vocab that they pull from that there is no real way to learn them all. What I used for preparation are in the links below…
The math work book I think was well put together and realy gave me a good refresh in the topics I was tested on, even though some of the questions I got stumped me. Math always came very easy to me and I enjoyed this part of the review. Though I am still very disappointed in my score and feel it was not what I should have gotten.
and
This I thought would be a great help to the verbal section of the exam, unfortunately with my luck none of the words I studied in the flash cards appeared on my exam. Go figure! I’d still recommend the material just because it can be useful and I did learn some new vocab words.
All in all I think the GRE is a test that needs to be restructured much like they plan to coming in November 2008 it doesn’t really test you on what you know and more so on how you can conform to their test style. Maybe I’m just bitter because of how I did but I’ve taken nearly a dozen computer exams and none were this obscure. Oh well I think I did well enough to get into grad school which is all that matters now.
Joe
Business Trip
Well this week I am down in New Jersey for a large user migration to our domain, I haven’t done much work with the NOS group or AD in awhile so this should be fun. Long hours with late meetings and work, but should be a good time. Not to many updates this week.
Vmware/Dynamips Server
Well my first order of business is to get my server up and running, my current hardware specs are 3Ghz Intel Pentium D, 3 GB DDR2 PC6400 RAM, and 250 GB SATA Drive. This setup will be optimal for a VMware and Dynamips aside from the issue with my Pentium D being prone to have heat issues, so I will need to tweak lm-sensors to monitor the hardware temps. I have chosen Ubuntu 7.10 Server as the host OS mainly because I’m am a big fan of the ubuntu distro and what they have been doing. I will update later to report how the install and configurations went, I have a feeling this will take a few nights since I never get anything *nix related right on the first try…
Hello world!
Welcome to my Blog!!! This will be my first post since I created this site. This site is mainly meant for a repository of anything I found interesting that I will want to refer to later. I plan to write about different things I encounter in my work, studies, and life in general. Stay tuned as I’m sure this will become very addicting for myself and will probably spend wayy to much time with it. However if there’s nothing interesting for you at the moment check www.techexams.net a great forum I’ve belonged to for over a year now. Has helped me reach where I am today and will continue to help me along my way. Thanks for stopping by and don’t forget to come back.
Joe