DNS – An Introduction

Though you may not know it, DNS (Or Domain Name System) is probably the most used things on the Internet. In fact, you’re using it right now. For those who don’t know what DNS is or does, it is the system we use to translate Domain Names to IP Addresses.

What is DNS?

DNS was created to allow easy creation, distribution, and update of “Internet Names.”…

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Data Encryption – How it Works (Part 1)


I’ve decided to start a short series of posts on data encryption, which is becoming an increasingly important subject in IT as government regulations and privacy concerns demand ever increasing levels of privacy and security.

In this series, I’ll try to cover the more confusing concepts in encryption, including the three main types of encryption systems used today; Private Key encryption, Public Key Encryption, and SSL/TLS encryption.…

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Designing Infrastructure High Availability

IT people, for some reason, seem to have an affinity towards designing solutions that use “cool” features, even when those features aren’t really necessary. This tendency sometimes leads to good solutions, but a lot of times it ends up creating solutions that fall short of requirements or leave IT infrastructure with significant short-comings in any number of areas.…

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Resolving the Internal and External DNS zone Dilemma with Pinpoint DNS

Here’s an interesting trick that might help you resolve some of your DNS management woes, particularly if you have a different Public and Private DNS zone in your environment. For instance, you have a domain name of whatever.com externally, but use whatever.local internally. When your DNS is set up like that, all attempts to access systems using the whatever.com…

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What is a DNS SRV record?

If you’ve had to work with Active Directory or Exchange, there’s a good chance you’ve come across a feature of DNS called a SRV record. SRV records are an extremely important part of Active Directory (They are, in fact, the foundation of AD) and an optional part of Exchange Autodiscover. There are a lot of other applications that use SRV records to some degree or another (Lync/Skype for Business relies heavily on them, for instance).The…

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A Treatise on Information Security

One famous misquote of American Founding Father Ben Franklin goes like this, “Anyone who would sacrifice freedom for security deserves neither.” At first glance, this statement speaks to the heart of people who have spent hours waiting in line at the airport, waiting for a TSA agent to finish groping a 90 year old lady in a wheel chair so they can take off their shoes and be guided into a glass tube to be bombarded with the emissions of a full body scanner.…

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Anatomy of a Certificate Error

The most important step in diagnosing a specific security error involves determining what the error is telling you. There are a few things that can cause certificate errors, and what you do depends entirely on what is causing the error to begin with. Once you know what the error is telling you, it becomes much easier to figure out what you need to do next.…

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Theory: Understanding Digital Certificates

One of the more annoying tasks in administering a publicly available website that uses HTTPS (Outlook Web App, for example) is certificate generation and installation. Anyone who has ordered a certificate from a major Certificate Authority (CA) like Godaddy or Network Solutions has dealt with the process. It goes something like this:

  1. Generate a Certificate Signing Request (CSR) on the web server
  2. Upload the CSR to a CA in a Certificate Request
  3. Wait for the CA to respond to your Request with a set of files
  4. Download the “Response” files
  5. Import the files on the Web Server

Once that gets done, you will (usually) have a valid certificate that allows the server to use SSL or TLS to encrypt communications with client machines.…

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Email Encryption for the Common Man

One of my co-workers had some questions about email encryption and how it worked, so I ended up writing him a long response that I think deserves a wider audience. Here’s most of it (leaving out the NDA covered portions).

Email Encryption and HIPAA Compliance for the Uninitiated

In IT security, when we talk about encryption, there are a couple of different “types” of encryption that we worry about, one is encryption “in transit”, and the other is encryption “at rest.”…

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