Bank of America ATMs: Technologically Impressive, Slow as Molasses.

BOA ATMs are the second best thing since sliced bread. They can count bills and read checks (and print check images out on thermal paper!), but for god’s sake, why are they so slow? It’s as if every time you press a button it fires up a dial up modem in back and executes a MySQL query over 9600 baud.

I appreciate the tech in the machine, but the implementation of the communication architecture must be horrific…

DNS Made Easy: DNS Service that isn’t terrible!

UPDATE: This article shows that DNS Made Easy has the fastest response time of all managed DNS solutions available.

I saw the DNSMadeEasy.com free trial and jumped on it. We used them at my job this past summer, so I had experience with their API (which tragically isn’t available to the low-end tier…alas).

Massive-DDoS-Hits-DNS-Services-Provider-2

Continue reading DNS Made Easy: DNS Service that isn’t terrible!

Linux Sysadmin Lesson 135: Do not configure your firewall over SSH.

Wanted to make sure my server was secure, so I was updating IPTables config. I was also curious what would happen if I configured my firewall over SSH. I was correct: my SSH connection was instantly dropped. Time for a walk to the other side of campus to hit the reset button.

UPDATE: So I managed to clear out everything and reconfigure IPTables. Seems like a program that would be cool to learn more about (re: setting up my own NAT router with a linux computer and two NICs). Overall, I’ve simply allowed all outgoing and only allowed incoming on ports that I’m actually using (just in case some random thing is running that I’m not aware of).

Of course I’m still vulnerable to the reverse SSH tunnel…