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On this date twenty years ago the Internet came as close to a total meltdown as we’ve ever seen since the commercialization of the Internet. A tiny UDP worm payload of just 376 bytes spread to all remotely accessible and vulnerable Microsoft SQL servers listening on port 1434 within a matter of minutes. This tiny payload ultimately infected roughly 75 thousand hosts worldwide and the disruption it caused made international news. Read more...
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The title of this post refers to a network function commonly known as duplicate address detection (DAD). The complete story will cover a range of seemingly unrelated technologies including ARP, Perl socket programming, systemd, IPv6, and a once-popular LAN technology that if you’ve never seen you probably never will, Token Ring. It all starts with a fake DNS server. Oh yeah, I forgot to mention DNS is here as well, but that is just a happy coincidence. Read more...
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“DNS over TCP is a thing, please don’t block it. kthxbye.” That is how I whimsically tweeted my summary of IETF RFC 9210, a new BCP co-authored with Duane Wessels. The history of the document is rooted in a chance encounter over seven years ago. For posterity, here is my version of how it came to be. In December 2014, a former student informed me of an interaction with another instructor where my name had come up. Read more...
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My first ThinkPad was the 600e with 128 MB of RAM. In 2000 I wiped out Windows NT that came with it and installed Mandrake. A couple years later I switched to Debian and I’ve been using that as my preferred OS ever since. My most recent ThinkPad is the P15 Gen2. As of this writing there is not a Wikipedia page for it. This is a brief record of my experience getting Debian running on the P15. Read more...