Pandemic Platitude Post

 

CORONAVIRUS PANDEMIC UPDATE

Please keep 2m away from your screen when reading this.

Normal inane ramblings will resume once "normal" returns.

If anyone knows the whereabouts of Normal, please return Normal to Mainstream Society ASAP.  Thanks.

CMD Networks

You might have seen us here at UTCIAD.co.uk make reference to, or mention, CMD Networks, and you may be wondering who they are and where they fit into the technological marvel that is UTCIAD.

CMD Networks are the dedicated Networking arm of UTCIAD.co.uk.  They're responsible for IP transit and routing operations, switch and router configurations and maintenance, and network consultancy services.  They're in charge of getting computers to talk to other computers.

Electronic Emancipation aka The 1337NMEs

We'll be kicking off this year with a special look at what is regarded as probably the fastest-moving and most over-hyped sector of IT and networking these days - cybersecurity.  I say cybersecurity, but effectively it's just plain old "security" these days if your role/job concerns looking after or using pretty much anything that has a plug on one end and more than two buttons on the other.

We'll look at how security affects you, what you should worry about, and how worried you should be.  We'll look at some brief history, the changes over the years, and what the future might hold.  We'll also look at The Hacker ©, his many differing hats and the ethics of "non-Ethical" Ethical Hacking, and the Non-Hacking Ethical's Ethics.  Or something.  So yeah.

Today we kick off with how things have changed over the past quarter of a century (holy shit... I suddenly feel incredibly old having written that...)....

Why You Need To Think Very Carerfully Before Adopting A Service-Oriented Architecture Model

It's the latest craze - take whatever you can think of in IT and networking, and add "as a service" to the end of it.  Infrastructure as a Service (IaaS), Platform as a Service (PaaS) and Software as a Service (SaaS) are the three main types, and all the other xxx-as-a-Service types and aaS abbreviations can be classified as Infrastructure-based, Platform-based or Software-based.

Gerry Cinnamon In Boscombe (Macdonalds)

Whilst waiting for my gourmet food order to be lovingly prepared, cooked and served, a fairly famous singing bloke attended Maccy D's.

Hollywank - Things The Movies Get Wrong

Some things in the movies just plain and simply piss me off because they are so wrong and just don't happen in real life.  Here are my (least?) favourite Hollywood cock-ups and second (least?) favourite in three categories: Health/Human Body, Guns/Weapons and Vehicles/Cars:

How To Create A Wormhole

In this step-by-step tutorial we walk you through the process to create your very own wormhole at home.  It should be noted that wormholes and Einstein-Rosen bridges are not fully understood and that time travel/dilation and apparent faster-than-light travel is potentially dangerous and care should be taken whenever dealing with gravity wells and point singularities.  Black holes can and do kill.

Programmers Are F%$!ing Lazy

It's true.  As Moore's Law still holds true after 50 years and processors double in speed every two years, hard drive density also loosely follows this trend with storage capacities generally also doubling every two years, programmers have just gotten plain lazy.

Grow Your Sysadmin-Fu

There are a few commands that the Linux sysadmin simply can't live without.  The need to see exactly what is going on with your army of *nixs and what any one is doing at any particular time is a must.  Here are a few commands that I would seriously miss, and ones that I make sure are installed on every box I administer.  So, in no particular order....

US Army, US Navy. US Air Force, US Marines, NASA, Google

Google - Rise Of The Cyberspies

Google's parent company is called Alphabet.  Whether this is just a coincidence or whether it has meaning I don't know, but you have to wonder what is Aphabet?  Could it be just 3 of the 26 available letters? NSA for example? Or CIA? DoD?

Subscribe To LDTV For A Chance To Win...

Subscribe to my LDTV YouTube Channel for a chance to win absolutely nothing.  Well, no, not quite true, you will have the chance to win either some sleep, some technical knowledge, or just knowledge of the fact that computers bore you and talking about computers bores you even more to the point of never having anything to do with stories and stuff about them unless there's the chance of getting or winning something in return.

Which reminds me - subscribe to my LDTV YouTube Channel LDTV for a chance to.....

Re-subnet a Cisco Switch, The Easy Way! **With Pictures**

In good old internet backwardness, here is my first Vlog, taking 14 minutes to explain how to re-subnet a Cisco switch in seconds.

Monitoring With MRTG

After much more of a battle than I was expecting, I finally have MRTG running on a Pi and generating some useful graphs about my home network and it's boxes.  If you're not familiar, MRTG is the Multi-Router Traffic Grapher (although it almost stood for Memcard Reformatted Totally Gone).  It gets it's information via SNMP and then draws pretty graphs with the data.

October News

OCTOBER NEWS

Well, it's been a while since my last post, I can only apologise for my absence. I haven't been totally idle in that time, I recently acquired a Cisco Catalyst 3750 which I've been tinkering with.

Enabling WiFi roaming on Raspberry Pi

wpa_roam:-
Gives priority to wireless networks.

Click to read more....

Build a RADAR for Bournemouth Air Festival!

With #BmthAirFest just around the corner, now is the perfect time to build yourself a Radar system for a grand total of about £10!!

All you need is a USB stick with a Realtek RTL2832U chipset -- commonly sold as DVB-T tuners (TV tuner dongle).  You can get them off eBay for around £7-10.

Radar instructions are in this post.

Fact-Up Friday: TimBL - Bournemouth Bloke Who Invented The Web

Did you know that the World Wide Web was in fact invented by an Englishman?  Not only that, but he used to call the South Coast home?

OK, the title is a little white lie - he wasn't from Bournemouth, but the inventor of Web sites lived in Colehill, Wimborne, for a time and worked for Plessey in Poole, J D Nash in Ferndown, and for over 3 years he worked at John Poole's Image Computer Systems, Ltd, in sunny sunny Bournemouth!  In fact, he is a patron of the East Dorset Heritage trust to this day.

Doc's Deals: Get A GiffGaff SIM And Get £10 Free Credit

 

ONLY AVAILABLE AUGUST 2019

For a limited time get a GiffGaff SIM from the Doc and you'll get £10 free credit.

No strings attached, no contracts, no conditions.  After you top-up at least £10 or buy a Goodybag worth £10 or more, you'll get £5 free credit to do whatever you want with.  Then within a maximum of 72 hours, you'll get another £5 free credit added to your balance.  So £10 free credit that you can use on calls, texts or buying Goodybags.  Offer expires 31/08/2019 after which it reverts to just £5 free credit.

Google Assistant on Ubuntu 18.04

So I decided to do a step-by-step guide to how I got Google Assistant working on my laptop running Ubuntu 18.04.  I can now say, "OK Google" and ask/change/trigger all the usual things.

You will need:

• PC/laptop/SoC running Ubuntu 18.04
• A Google account
• A working microphone (or headset)
• A working speaker (or headset)

Complete guide can be found at https://linuxdoctorafcb.blogspot.com/p/google-a.html

My Head(ache)'s in The (Google) Clouds With Google Assistant on Linux

I decided late last night that the one thing my battered, slow, old and full of crap laptop absolutely could not go without any longer was Google Assistant integration (I want to say "OK Google" to my Linux laptop, basically). I've now done it, understand it and just need to polish it up a bit, write a few scripts, change a few settings and then I'll put up a post on how to do it.

In doing this, though, I have just re-met the Google Cloud Platform... 'Kin' Ell there's a LOT of shit in there, and I mean a lot. So, in summary, Google Assistant on Linux laptop guide to follow, then probably 4 months of posts as I start hacking* the shit out of Google Cloud Platform.

* don't get excited, I mean hacking in the old old sense of the word, not "gaining unauthorised access of a computer or network or device that does not belong to you".