For my link archive:
Microsoft live/passport account Security settings are at https://account.live.com/proofs/Manage
–jeroen
Archive for the ‘Cloud’ Category
Microsoft live/passport account Security settings URL
Posted by jpluimers on 2017/11/13
Posted in Cloud, Infrastructure, Microsoft Live, Power User | Leave a Comment »
New steps for Slack on Twitter: “@thorduri 😣 You can always disable emoji conversion in Preferences > Emoji > Convert my typed emoticons to emoji. 👍”
Posted by jpluimers on 2017/09/18
After: @thorduri You can always disable emoji conversion in Preferences > Emoji > Convert my typed emoticons to emoji. [WayBack]
We live in the form-over-function era [WayBack], so of course this setting is not reachable by URL, only reachable by using these steps:
Share this:
Posted in Cloud, Cloud Apps, Infrastructure, Internet, Power User, SocialMedia | Leave a Comment »
How to turn on your lights the Philips way
Posted by jpluimers on 2017/06/23
This was too funny to let go unnoticed: [WayBack] How to turn on the light at home, Philips Version – Kristian Köhntopp – Google+.
It was shown during [Archive.is] Google Cloud Next 2017 in Amsterdam and immediately reminded me of The Big Bang Theory – How to turn on a lamp below.
A few notable entries from the comments:
- Wie viele Server braucht man bei Philips, um eine Glühbirne zu wechseln?
- Apple macht das wohl ähnlich, hier dient ein AppleTV oder ein iPad als “Bridge zur Bridge”.
- They’re at least honest — the icon of the cloud in the upper left prominently displays a “waiting” circle animation. I also notice the use of the word “looks” rather than “works” in the title, which is probably also accurate.
–jeroen
Share this:
Posted in Cloud, Fun, Infrastructure, IoT Internet of Things, Network-and-equipment, Power User | Leave a Comment »
Google DNS, Open DNS or your ISP DNS servers?
Posted by jpluimers on 2017/05/26
There are various arguments for using Google DNS (8.8.8.8 or 8.8.4.4) or Open DNS servers or not. A few are listed here:
- How can I choose between using my ISP’s DNS, or Google’s 8.8.8.8? – Server Fault
- Why using Google DNS / OpenDNS is a bad idea – APC
It basically comes down to two things:
- DNS speed
- CDN speed (Contend Delivery Network providers like CloudFlare, Akamai, etc)
If your DNS server isn’t close to you, it might select a CDN server that is far from you. If you rely on CDN, then you need to weight in that factor.
This is how I decide:
- devices not needing CDN: use Google DNS or Open DNS
- devices needing CDN: use Namebench to pick fast DNS servers that are nearby based on Namebench reports with “Recommended configuration (fastest + nearest)”
–jeroen
Share this:
Posted in Akamai, CDN (Content Delivery Network), Cloud, Cloudflare, DNS, Google, Infrastructure, Internet, Power User | Leave a Comment »
Amazon 2FA Account Recovery HOWTO I had enabled 2FA on my amazon.de account,…
Posted by jpluimers on 2016/11/25
[WayBack] Amazon 2FA Account Recovery HOWTO I had enabled 2FA on my amazon.de account,… – Kristian Köhntopp – Google+
Quoted in full as it is too important to forget where I put this:
Amazon 2FA Account Recovery HOWTO
I had enabled 2FA on my amazon.de account, and the device running the only copy of the TOTP seed has been destroyed. I wanted to disable 2FA on my account in order to be able to access the account until a replacement phone was available.
To enable 2FA on an amazon.de account, you have to login to amazon.com using your amazon.de credentials and then go through the 2FA procedure.
Calling the german hotline for help did not work. They did not know about 2FA disablement and were unable to help me. They did know about 2FA in general, have been able to verify and validate my identity and were generally friendly. They have been calling me back repeatedly.
I later remembered how I enabled the 2FA and did try to login to amazon.com, giving my german credentials and ended up on the “Enter 2FA code” screen. There is a link at the bottom, “Did not receive code”.
Clicking that link takes you to a screen where you can choose between Google Authenticator and SMS identification.
I chose SMS auth, did receive a 6 digit code, entered that and was able to auth. I then was able to temporarily disable 2FA and regain control of my US account. This also disabled 2FA for my german account, and I now have my German account back.
–jeroen
Share this:
Posted in Amazon.com/.de/.fr/.uk/..., Cloud, Infrastructure, Power User | Leave a Comment »
The IoT strikes back again: half a million IoT devices killed DYN DNS for hours, but fixing this will be hard
Posted by jpluimers on 2016/10/22
Less than a month after The IoT strikes back: 650 Gigabit/second and 1 Terabit/second attacks by IoT devices within a week the IoT struck back again: an estimated half a million IoT devices was used to perform multiple DDoS attacks against Dyn Managed DNS that took around 11 hours to resolve.
Google DNS appears to “live” near me in Amsterdam
High availability usually involves a mix of DNS TTL and/or BGP routing. That’s typically how CDN providers like Cloudflare work (it’s one of the reasons that global DNS servers like Google’s 8.8.8.8 appear near to you and over time routes – some MPLS – to it change). Short DNS TTL can help CDN, requires a very stable DNS infrastructure and is similar to but different from a Fast Flux network.
Last months attacks were on a security researcher and a single ISP. The Dyn DNS attack affected even more internet services (not just sites like Twitter, WhatsApp, AirBnB and Github). So I’m with Bruce Schneier that Someone Is Learning How to Take Down the Internet.
Handling these attacks is hard as the DDoS mitigation firms simply cannot handle the sudden increase of attack sizes yet. BCP38 should be part of mitigation, but the puzzle is big and fixing it won’t be easy though root-causes of bugs change as a lot of research is in progress.
I’m not alone in expecting it to get worse though before getting better.
On the client side, I learned that many users could cope by changing their DNS servers to either of these Public DNS Servers:
- OpenDNS 208.67.222.222, 208.67.220.220, 208.67.222.220, 208.67.220.222
- OpenDNS does a good job of handing “last known good” IPs when they can’t resolve.
- Google Public DNS 8.8.8.8, 8.8.4.4
- Level 3 DNS 4.2.2.1, 4.2.2.2, 4.2.2.3, 4.2.2.4, 4.2.2.5, 4.2.2.6
Some more interesting tidbits on the progress and mitigation on this particular attack are the over time heat-maps of affected regions and BGP routing changes below.
Share this:
Posted in CDN (Content Delivery Network), Cloud, Cloudflare, DNS, Hardware, Infrastructure, Internet, IoT Internet of Things, Network-and-equipment, Opinions, Power User | Leave a Comment »
“We looked at the latency of Google Compute Engine in the US Central region.…
Posted by jpluimers on 2016/07/28
It describes why a stable latency helps Google and SysEleven to outperform other cloud providers.
–jeroen
Share this:
Posted in Cloud, Infrastructure, Power User | Leave a Comment »
Less than two decades of Google Data Centers – from corkboard x86 hardware via GPU to TPU – now they make their own chips too
Posted by jpluimers on 2016/05/20
First corkboard production server by Google in 1998
Remember the image on the right? It was the first “corkboard” production server Google used in 1998 (it’s a museum piece now).
From there they were using commodity-class x86 server computers running customized versions of Linux for a “long” time which around 2005 even got their own 12V battery as UPS inside the machine and running 1160 machines in a 1AAA shipping container.
Later whey started using a mix of CPU and GPU increasing the performance per watt and recently went from 12V to 48V and even contributed 48V DC Data Center Rack to Open Compute.
In the mean time, Tensor Flow and AI got even more important for Google and during the Google I/O 2016 keynote, they revealed yet another step: TPU chips especially made for TensorFlow providing even better performance per watt for machine learning than GPU. The TPUs are not FPGAs (popular for instance when mining BitCoins), but ASICs that perform orders of magnitude better.
So in about 18 years, Google moved from cleverly assembled commodity hardware to highly specialised custom chips.
Exciting times are ahead of us. I’m really looking forward to the next steps.
–jeroen
Sources:
- Google platform – Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
- Google “Corkboard” Server, 1999 | National Museum of American History
- Google uncloaks once-secret server – CNET
- Open Hardware Paves the Way to Commodity Water Cooled Servers | ClusterDesign.org
- Google, Intel Prep 48V Servers | EE Times
- Google Contributes 48V DC Data Center Rack to Open Compute | Data Center Knowledge
- Google Has Built Its Own Custom Chip for AI Servers | Data Center Knowledge
- Google’s Making Its Own Chips Now. Time for Intel to Freak Out | WIRED
- Google’s Tensor Processing Unit could advance Moore’s Law 7 years into the future | PCWorld
- TensorFlow – Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
Share this:
Posted in Cloud, Google, History, Infrastructure, Power User | Leave a Comment »
Two opinions on Netflix and blocking: they hate Netflix or contact tr@netflix.com and try to solve …
Posted by jpluimers on 2016/03/28
Basically there are two opinions on Netflix and blocking:
- TL;DR: People use VPNs for security, Netflix fucks them up, they hate Netflix for that and just torrent that shit.
- tl;dr If you have issues with Netflix on public Wifi, contact the provider and forward tr@netflix.com to them so they can settle issues.
I’m not a netflix user (or user of any form of DRM) as I really dislike the fact that DRM means for any reason your license can be ended. I’ve seen too many players going out of business or taking decisions turning.
So I buy CDs, DVDs, BlueRays or DRM-free media files. Now it’s my problem of making proper back-ups to ensure future access to them (:
The DRM walls and ladders war^w game has gone so far that in this case, Netflix is blocking even though the WiFi provider / proxy / VPN is in the same country like the below imgur image:
Share this:
Posted in Cloud, Infrastructure, Netflix, Network-and-equipment, Power User, VPN | Leave a Comment »
It was fun while it lasted: Barracuda Copy – Copy End-of-Life
Posted by jpluimers on 2016/02/05
Copy had some advantages and disadvantages. For instance, it was better handling long file names, character encodings in filenames and a lot easier to configure over a CNTLM proxy than DropBox, but unlike DropBox didn’t keep history of changes.
Alas no more copy.com as of 20160501: [WayBack] Barracuda Copy – Copy End-of-Life.
They suggest using [WayBack] Mover with OneDrive as target: [WayBack] Barracuda Copy – Moving Your Data from Copy
Note that Mover has many more connectors, including cloud storage ones (Box, Copy, Dropbox, Google Drive, OneDrive and Yandex.Disk are free):
[WayBack] Connectors • Mover: FTP, Dropbox, Box, GoogleDrive, Copy, Egnyte, Amazon S3, SharePoint, MySQL the list goes on!
For me it means it’s time to think about what kinds of cloud storage I want to use and how to share what data with others at which access level. As I’m already contemplating on how to use ZFS, I now have two storage concepts to think about.
–jeroen
Share this:
Posted in Cloud, Cloud Apps, Cntlm, Copy.com, DropBox, Infrastructure, NTLM, Power User, SocialMedia, Windows, Windows-Http-Proxy | Leave a Comment »
The Wiert Corner - irregular stream of stuff 