Higher Ed. Blogger

Just so I don't forget about it when I get home, I need to add this site to my list of daily reads, it belongs to another Sysadmin in Higher Ed who also runs NetBackup.

Wireless Hacker

I hacked my first wireless network today, but don't worry, I had my white hat on. One of the neighbors had left their wi-fi network wide-open to anyone and everyone, and didn't even bother to change the default password. It took me 15 seconds to gain control of their access point, but once I did, I merely changed their wireless channel. If you have a wireless access point, please set it to something other than channel 6, as that's the default channel of almost every brand of access point, which leads to a lot of access points (4 in range of the house here) that are speaking on the same channel, which is a bad idea. It's too bad I couldn't easily identify which house the network belonged to, or I'd have set their password for them, and let them know that they need to secure their network better, but I don't really have any easy way to track that down.

Training Day

Well, my first day of training was a bit slow at times, but I think the week is going to be well spent overall. My trainer seems extremely competent, and is very willing to answer other questions. When I got back from training, I set up a wireless network in my aunt & uncle's house, when I opened my laptop up to test it, I discovered *four* other wireless networks in range, and was able to jump on them and start browsing the web. I'm going to secure their network so that won't happen here...

To Washington

I'm leaving for Washington today, flying from Wateroo -> Minneapolis -> Dulles. I'm going to be attending some Veritas Netbackup 5 Solaris training for a week, which costs more than a year of college. For this price, they should include a free Sun workstation...

Heritage Foundation

I see the Heritage Foundation is now talking about how privacy advocates have it wrong when it comes to Gmail, this part sounds a lot like what I wrote last week:

Keep in mind that e-mail is notoriously insecure. It is trivial, for example, to send messages that appear as if they came from another address. Messages are generally sent over the Internet as plain text and travel through several mail servers: Anyone determined to do so could intercept an e-mail message. Moreover, while encryption is possible, it is not popular. Those most concerned about privacy should avoid all unencrypted e-mail, including most Web-mail services.

This does not mean I'm giving up my status as a card carrying ACLU member, however. :)