Entries by Brendon

Why you should get a handle on Certificates

Many companies (especially smaller ones) feel they do not have the work force or time to deal with properly implementing signed TLS certificates across their organization.  This can lead to potentially serious problem because of the user’s perception while browsing the company intranet sites. If something potentially is hacked and everyone is accustomed to clicking […]

Open Source Hypervisors and Hyperconverged Environments

We recently started looking at some of the open source solutions such as KVM/QEMU offered by RedHat and Proxmox to replace Microsoft Hyper-V and VMWare vSphere. So far they do appear somewhat feature-full especially for smaller environments. It appears though they do fall short of Enterprise features. The performance and simplicity were definitely appealing with […]

Intel igb/e1000 driver showing dropped packets on the interface

Recently I ran into a strange issue where the Intel NIC was showing dropped packets on the interface. This particular server was having other issues (performance-ish type) so we were eager to get to the bottom of this. Symptoms and interesting finds… ifconfig shows dropped packets only for RX The sum of rx_flow_control_xon+rx_flow_control_xoff from ethtool […]

Wireless authentication with usernames and 802.1x

If you’re at all interested in keeping your network and data secure it’s necessary to implement 802.1x. This authentication standard has a few significant benefits over the typical wireless network password used by many companies. It makes sure wireless clients are logging into _your_ wireless network. It’s very easy for an attacker to create a […]

Understanding what NetFlow can do for your network

Traffic on the network can provide valuable insight into many areas of business and technology that would generally go un-noticed unless reported on or analyzed. NetFlow is one very simple technology that can be used to see what is really on your network. NetFlow can be used to analyze many things such as: Email trend […]

Are you ready for Windows 10?

Recently we started disabling the Windows 10 pop-ups for our MSP clients. We just feel that Windows 10 isn’t ready for the corporate environment. There are a few troubling things about it. The interface. Most people can get used to it relatively quickly, but the desktop environment is more of a touch interface than prior […]