slaptijack

A legacy pre-launchd guide to creating a BIND Startup Item on early Mac OS X releases.

By default, Mac OS X 10.4 (Tiger) comes with BIND 9 pre-installed and pre-configured to operate in caching-only mode. Unfortunately, the operating system is not configured to start the server at boot time, or even use the server if it was running. In this series of articles, we'll create …

By default, a BIND DNS server will report which version it is running to anyone that's interested. All it takes is a simple lookup of the version.bind text record in the chaos class of your server. Check this out:

Skadi:~ slap$ dig version.bind txt chaos @localhost

; <<>> DiG 9 …

It's recently come to my attention that a large percentage of the Slaptijack site has ended up in the dreaded "Google Supplemental Index". This means that key pages are not being served during normal searches. You can see which pages are in the Supplemental Index by running the following search …

DS3 (also known as T3) scrambling is not an issue that comes up very often. It's something every network administrator should know about, though. After all, it just might save your bacon.

Some physical layer protocols depend on the transition from 1 to 0 in a frame to maintain clocking …

Most network administrators should be familiar with Spanning Tree Protocol (STP; IEEE 802.1D). <acronym title="Spanning Tree Protocol">STP</acronym> is tasked with ensuring there are no loops in a bridged network. Unfortunately, STP is an older protocol and doesn't quite mesh with today's high speed networks. Here are …

This is just a little humorous anecdote along the lines of frantically searching the house for the glasses you happen to be wearing. After yesterday's somewhat "heavy" post, I thought the mood needed a little lightening.

I've only recently (in the last month or so) begun using Gmail as my …

I came across this graphic by way of Pick the Brain who found it at Creating Passionate Users. This image perfectly describes what I believe all network and system administrators should be striving for.

All too often, when their ideas are confronted, I hear established network and system administrators say …

Is your network bandwidth being consumed by Peer-to-Peer (P2P) traffic? (Hint: If you don't know, it's time to fire up NBAR and do a little investigating.) One way to stop P2P traffic is to use an access-list to block traffic on the well-know P2P ports. Unfortunately, many P2P technologies no …

I've written before regarding the command-line email client Mutt, and how useful it can be. Unfortunately, Mutt is designed to read a local mail spool by default. If you need to use Mutt to read email from a remote mail server, <acronym title="Internet Message Access Protocol">IMAP</acronym> may …

I've recently begun designing my own WordPress theme. The last time I really worked with any sort of web "design" (I'm using that word rather loosely here), layout was done via tables instead of divs. Stephen at Acadian Imaging told me that in order to get my theme to work …

I recently wrote about using Cisco's NBAR to investigate what protocols were in use on your network. I thought it might be interesting to take a look at the top 10 protocols on a residential broadband network. If you're running a large network, or planning a large network, perhaps this …

The following is a list of alarms you may receive on your T1 or T3 (or E1/E3) interface. Where applicable, troubleshooting hints are included.

Loss of Signal (LOS)

A Loss of Signal (LOS) alarm indicates that the interface is not receiving a valid T1 or T3 signal. This is …

Mutt is a text-based email client for UNIX-based operating systems. To say it is highly configurable is an understatement. It can be compiled to support a variety of mail protocols and runs in almost any terminal emulator. Unfortunately, the glory days of Mutt have come and gone. In the days …

This is a little off-topic for this website, but I had to pass this widget along for any Mac OS X users out there. The MLB Schedule widget from Logan Rockmore Design is a simple widget that displays the 5 day schedule for any MLB team. It will show the …