Facebook Accounts Are Almost Worthless

How much would your Facebook account bring you if you sold it? According to VeriSign, just a couple of pennies. I spotted an article on Dark Reading the other day detailing a recent black market advertisement for over a million Facebook accounts, sold in 1,000 unit increments for $25-$45. About 2 to 4 cents per account, which highlights how easy it has become for these accounts to get compromised and used to spread malicious software.

Secure the Edge: Protecting Exchange 2007 Connectors

Many small companies employ a service such as AppRiver to provide affordable messaging security, but not many take the time to properly secure their Exchange connectors afterwards.

Reflections on Google Apps

I just completed our first deployment to Google Apps Premier for a client and a had a great time with it. I've already moved my domain (paulhite.com) over to it and I highly recommend anyone who needs a mail system for their domain to consider it. Here are a couple thoughts on the overall process and results:

Procrastinator's Recipe for a Great Project Paper

I'm currently at step 6, and so was born this post.

1. Remove one great idea from brain. Put aside for several weeks.
2. Try really hard to remember what that great idea was. Decide on a different mediocre idea instead and write it down this time.
3. Let the idea simmer until one week before the project is due. Victory will taste sweeter this way.
4. Start preparing project paper. Don't research anything, it just slows you down. Stream of consciousness is most effective. Continue until you run out of thoughts, or approximately 500 words into the paper.
5. Ctrl+A, Delete. Repeat Step 4, that introduction page sucked anyways.
6. Mix 1 part great idea with 9 parts alcohol. Maintain the Balmer Peak for 72 hours and write 30 pages of really awesome sounding techno-babble.
7. Suddenly remember that great idea when you sober up. Repeat step 5 & 6.
8. Remove project paper from hard drive. Serve to reviewers at room temperature and really hope that none of them actually knows what "deep packet inspection" means.
9. Celebrate your success by repeating step 6. Great idea is optional at this point.

That's it. Good luck out there, WGU grads!

Notification: WSB Can Do Notifications

I had a client who, much to my dismay, purchased a new server from Dell and opted not to go with Backup Exec but rather the free Yosemite Backup application that ships with the RD1000 drives. Not a huge deal until I discovered after a good deal of troubleshooting that Yosemite does not work with Server 2008 R2. Long story short, we were left with no option but to use Windows Server Backup and find a way to configure e-mail notifications.

AOL Can Break Rules

While testing an SMTP connection to AOL's mail servers, I got this awesome syntax error response when I forgot to put a space between "MAIL" and "FROM":

220-mtain-mi12.r1000.mx.aol.com ESMTP Internet Inbound

220-America Online (AOL) and its affiliated companies do not
220-authorize the use of its proprietary computers and compuer
220-networks to accept, transmit, or distribute unsolicited bulk
220-e-mail sent from the internet
220-
220-Effective immediately:
220-AOL may no longer accept connections from IP addresses
220 which no do not have reverse-DNS (PTR records) assigned.
HELO paulhite.com
250 mtain-mi12.r1000.mx.aol.com
MAILFROM:test@paulhite.com
221 2.7.0 Error: I can break rules, too. Goodbye.
Connection to host lost.

Yes you can.

Study Time!

Updates to the blog will be more sporadic than usual as I concentrate on my last few months of college, my final design exam for the MCSE, and the upcoming Cisco course. Phew!