Networking

All in one wifi router vs separate parts?

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If you had:

  • 100mbit Ethernet
  • 11g wireless
  • router/firewall
  • all in one device

and wanted to upgrade to:

  • 1gbit Ethernet
  • 11n wireless
  • router/firewall

would you go with one device or separate them into multiple components? And, what requirements would you have for the component(s)? Lastly, any model recommendations?

Thanks interweb, you're the best! :-)

Hot to fix a suicidal Cisco VPN client on OSX

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After starting to use the Cisco VPN client to do remote work on my McBook, I noticed that it would give an oh-so-useful "Error 51: Unable to communicate with the VPN subsystem" error fairly often, like this:

200807082121.jpg

As it turns out the Cisco kernel extension is a bit flaky and craps out, so you have to restart it. Thankfully Anders Brownworth at anders.com worked out how to fix this inane Error 51 thing. Thanks Anders!

ICANN shows they are http://stu.pid/

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Web developers are well used to doing certain data validations to ensure people are entering correct information into their websites. A perfect example of this is the common email address, which must follow a format of being in the format (something)@some.domain.(com) where the (com) part, the so-called Top-Level Domain (TLD) has to be one of a finite series of words - either "com", "org", "net", a limited number of others, plus the defined two-letter country codes. This makes it straight forward to ensure that people aren't trying to fill in junk into your form so that your boss / client can have the correct information they need for their visitors, for whatever reason.

Well, today this once straight forward process has taken a turn for the worst - the ICANN has announced any large organization can get a new TLD if they pay up. So once this starts rolling out, any company that wants to can have a http://www.i.rock/ just for themselves. This is going to be crazy!

DD-WRT v24 is out!

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The latest release of the excellent Linux-driven open router stack, DD-WRT, is finally out so you are all encouraged to try it. DD-WRT is a greatly enhanced replacement OS for network routers (both wired and wireless, or just a PC with cards!) which boasts an incredible amount of improvements over the out-of-the-box functionality - wifi strength boost, greatly extended configuration, dynamic DNS support, and lots, lots more. One really cool feature is the ability to take different hardware and link them all together in a mesh, which normally costs quite a bit to do. Great stuff.

SPF the easy way

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Sender Policy Framework (SPF) is an open standard that aims to help prevent spam, and stop legitimate email from being tagged as such. While the specifications can take some time to understand, there are some web-based tools to help you make creating your SPF records a little easier than by hand, but I still find them to be a bit misleading. According to the SPF FAQ the simplest way to create your SPF record is to simply list the IP addresses of all servers that mail goes out through, e.g.:

v=spf1 ip4:192.168.0.10 ip4:192.168.0.12 ~all

and just add more "ip4" strings for each address. Then just paste it into a TXT record in your domain's DNS and you're good to go!

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