Tag: system architecture

A detailed how-to recipe of proper configuration of Asterisk for use with RingCentral provider with configuration file samples.

It is typical for a Windows server to have a auto-generated self-signed certificate for its Remote Desktop service. Not a good practice. Especially when RDP service is exposed on the internet (via TCP port 3389 that would be open in firewall). Here are a few simple steps to install a valid SSL certificate to be used with RDP to protect the host identity and encrypt your remote desktop sessions properly.

The issue happens because PuTTY user key stored in Windows registry under saved sessions with that server host name takes precedence over the key configured in Tortoise.

We were not able to alter MAC address of main network adapter inside a Windows 2012 R2 instance. No matter how we tried with registry hacks and even 3rd party software tools, the outcome was unsuccessful. Though for certain applications dependent on a particular MAC value it does not have to be on a primary network card. We realized we just needed another network card! That could be achieved by installing a dummy loopback network driver that would serve as an additional network interface. It can be assigned with a bogus IP while its physical (or MAC) address we may alter freely. Luckily, Microsoft offers such driver among most of its Windows distributions that is called KM-TEST Loopback Adapter.

In our initial post on the AWS topic we explained how to automate regular EBS volume snapshot creation using a small Linux instance as a controlling and automation server. Now it is time to fill in the gap of what happens next: automated copy from region 1 to region 2.

Reports surfaced recently that bypassing authentication of a Linux system equipped with Grub2 versions from 1.98 (December, 2009) to 2.02 (December, 2015) is as easy as pressing backspace key 28 times when the boot loader prompts for a username.

We have interviewed creators of CleanTalk, an amazing service that protects thousands of blogs and forums with their very efficient spam-filtering engine.

Amazon AWS instance may become very expensive when running 24/7. Our solution? An automatic shutdown when there is no need to have that server online. This recipe is simple when implemented with AWS’s functionality added not so long ago which was called CloudWatch monitoring.

We begin a series of posts on our first-hand experience with Amazon Web Services (AWS) hosting platform and accompanied technologies. While allegedly possessing ten times more cloud resources than the top 14 other IaaS providers taken together (according to May 2015 reports), Amazon today is that certain behemoth reigning over them all. Economics aside, what amazes us most about AWS is how tons of feature-rich offerings, abundance of documentation, and gazillions of online discussions present so little for a young pioneer that takes on her first AWS quest. That is easy with AWS to launch an instance, though most of subsequent steps require planning, in some cases profound research, or, in other words, a difficult path full of trials, tribulations, and overdrawn accounts. That pay as you go paradigm needs budgeting and verification to be efficient.

Nice and short overview of vulnerabilities hiding inside SSL tunnels from BlueCoat: