Technical Blog of an Amish Network Administrator

The following is an old post in a series of posts I made about being a Network Administrator.  It’s possible the forum will be going offline in the future, so I’ve extracted many of the posts and will be placing them here for posterity.
Another day and another time to play “Stump the Salesperson”.
I was asked [...]

I’m not going to be able to post anything much for the next few days due to an emergency bathroom remodel.  So here’s a simple list of my pet peeves for the time being.  (More on the Snort Sensor is coming soon…)

Semi-Auto pistols on TV shows that go “click click click” on an empty magazine [...]

System specifications
Hardware: alix2d3
OS: FreeBSD 7.2
Storage: 4Gb Compact Flash
Components: Snort, fprobe, webmin, net-snmp, syslogd

I’ve been using Snort on and off for the past several years but I haven’t been using it recently due to changes in the network topology here at work, I just didn’t have a good spot to install it where it would actually [...]

Last summer I was visiting another plant for meeting and they still had their original Graphics Panel functional.  They also had a SCADA system, so I think they were maintaining their graphics panel for nostalgia reasons.  For months before that I had been trying to come up with a way to display our entire process [...]

I’m probably like many other people in my field, every Monday, Wednesday and Friday we stop by xkcd for a weekly dose of reality and humor.  I’ve been reading it for quite sometime and always look forward to what’s new there.
This particular one I found funny and true, as I just had a conversation relating [...]

The “need it right away” is probably one of the more frustrating users you’ll find.  This is normally a person of actual minor importance in the organization, but they view themselves as being the most important of all.  Everything that they need done needs to be completed 5 seconds before they asked for it.  If [...]

The “Know Nothing” user is probably the most dangerous user you can have on your network.  This is the person that will always proclaim that they know nothing about computers.  They see doing anything with a computer as being stupid, silly or a waste of time.  But in reality, they know a great deal about [...]

This special edition of Backtrack was spotted at Shmoocon 2010.  It should actually serve as a lesson that you should never walk away from your computer without first locking the desktop first.  After all, you never know what you might come back to.

As a good Network Admin that is aware that we need good security, I know that many other Network Admins often run into a roadblock when it comes to passwords – something I like to call the Password Paradox.  We want our users to have complex passwords, but most users just don’t want to be [...]

I know a lot of network people have different methods of setting up DNS schemes, and as far as I know there’s really no set standard for naming your devices. I try to name my devices so it’s a little easier to keep track of device names without having to resort to look up [...]

I’m currently working on a massive post about how to convert one of these little boxes into a remote Snort Sensor.

I’ve been in and out of many different networks through the years.  Many I set up from scratch, many others were set up by others.  I’ve found many times there is no rhyme or reason why the IP scheme was setup the way it was.  As a matter of fact, when I started in my [...]