February 17, 2012 archive

Feb 17

Deploy360 Stickers and Pens!

Working remotely, I was delighted to receive a package recently from my colleague Megan down in our Reston, VA, office that was full of Deploy360 stickers and pens!  One Deploy360 sticker now is nicely on the back of my iPad and another adorns the cover of my laptop. (Yes, I’m that kind of person who puts stickers all over his laptop cover.  Provides an easy way to make sure no one grabs my laptop in a sea of other laptops. :-) )  The pens are also awesome and I’m looking forward to using them as my writing instrument of choice.

Would you like to receive a Deploy360 sticker or pen?  Just find us at one of our upcoming events and we’ll do what we can to get you one!

Deploy360 Stickers and Pens

Feb 17

Need A Weekend Project? Install The New DNSSEC-Trigger 0.10 Release

Dnssec TriggerLooking for a quick weekend project to learn more about DNSSEC? Want to set up your home network to correctly validate DNSSEC info?

If so, the NLnet Labs team just announced the 0.10 release of DNSSEC-Trigger, a local DNSSEC-validating resolver you can run on your Linux, Windows or Mac OS X system.

Per the change log on the project page, version 0.10 includes the following changes:

  • truncate pidfile (just like NSD fix, in case directory not owned).
  • If hotspot-signon, set override servers right away on a network change, so the user does not have to wait for 10 seconds after a change of the wifi.
  • Attempt to add DHCPv6 support for windows.
  • Use Processes.dll code (can be freely used, source provided) for kill process in windows NSIS installer. Compiled to 6kb (not 50kb). Processes.dll was made by Andrei Ciubotaru.
  • show version number in add-removeprograms configpanel (windows).
  • install script removes leftover trayicons using direct windows API.
  • dnssec-trigger-control uses registry config location (for windows).
  • fix dnssec-trigger-control error printout if SSL files fail.
  • show package version in probe results dialog.
  • updated acx.nlnetlabs.m4 for gcc 4.6 compat for portability tests.
  • Do not show the insecure and hotspot windows at the same time.
  • Fix for OSX to show the popups on top of the other windows.
  • alert icon easier to read.

I just updated my local MacBook Pro and the installation went perfectly fine. (To “update” on Mac OS X, you simply download the latest version and run through the installation process again.)

How will you know if DNSSEC-Trigger is working? Well, one simple test is to try to go to either of the “bad” websites we mention on the DNSSEC Tools page in your web browser: www.dnssec-failed.org or www.rhybar.cz. If DNSSEC-Trigger is working correctly, your web browser will probably tell you that it can’t find either of those sites. DNSSEC-Trigger is determining that the sites do not correctly validate and is therefore not providing any DNS information for those domains.

Anyway, the new 0.10 release of DNSSEC-Trigger is available now for download for Windows, Mac OS X or Linux. Download it now and get started using DNSSEC validation!

Feb 17

Chris Grundemann’s Excellent “Introducing IPv6″ Article Series

Over on his “don’t panic” blog, Chris Grundemann has started an excellent series of articles on the topic of “Introducing IPv6″.  You can see the articles he’s written so far:

http://chrisgrundemann.com/index.php/category/ipv6/introducing-ipv6/

In his first post in the 4-part series, Understanding IPv6 Addresses, Chris goes down to a bit level to explain exactly why we wound up writing IPv6 addresses in hexadecimal notation, and then explains some of the shortcuts we use.  In part 2, Classifying IPv6 Addresses, Chris takes a look at the different types of IPv6 addresses and walks through each of them works.  In part 3, IPv6 Headers, he looks at what is different in IPv6 headers and how extension headers work… and his final part 4 will cover “Neighbor Discovery and SLAAC“.

Chris has a great writing style that’s very easy to understand.  It’s great that he’s writing this series and I look forward to seeing more of these kinds of IPv6 posts coming our way from Chris!

Introducing IPv6