Author: Andrew Baker

21 Nov 2022 AWS Cloud 👁 11 views

Auto-Renew Let’s Encrypt Certs on Linux with Cron

If you want to automatically renew your certs then the easiest way is to setup a cron just to call letsencrypt periodically. Below is an example cron job: First create the bash script to renew the certificate Now enter the script in the following format into nano: Now edit the crontab to run the renew […]

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21 Nov 2022 Macbooks 👁 20 views

Fix DNS Issues Using dig and whois on Mac OS X

When debugging DNS issues its important to verify the local DNS response with the authoritive DNS nameserver. With dig we can directly query the authoritative name servers for a domain, these are the DNS servers that hold the authoritative records for the domains DNS zone; the source of truth. If a correct response is received […]

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21 Nov 2022 Networking 👁 76 views

Find MTU Between Two Hosts Using Ping Do-Not-Fragment

If you have ever tried to use jumbo packets, or trace a weird slowness on the network – one of the things that frequently comes up is packet fragmentation. This is basically where a source machine is sending bigger packets than can be consumed along its pathway to a destination machine. This means the packets […]

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21 Nov 2022 Macbooks 👁 103 views

Find Max MTU Size on Mac OS X Using Ping (No Fragmentation)

If you have ever tried to use jumbo packets, or trace a weird slowness on the network – one of the things that frequently comes up is packet fragmentation. This is basically where a source machine is sending bigger packets than can be consumed along its pathway to a destination machine. This means the packets […]

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21 Nov 2022 Open Source 👁 22 views

Diagnose Your Linux Server in 60 Seconds: 6 CLI Tools

Imagine you have trauma and could figure out whats causing in under one minute. Obviously, the preference is an observability platform – but for my little wordpress site I don’t really have the budget. So I just use a few tools to isolate common issues. The idea behind this blog is to quickly isolate the […]

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19 Nov 2022 Cyber 👁 24 views

Scan SSL/TLS Ciphers With nmap and sslscan on macOS

To retrieve a list of the SSL/TLS cipher suites a particular website offers you can either use sslscan or nmap alternatively you can just use nmap (note: i use “-e en0” to bypass zscaler): Another variant (including cert dates, again “-e en0” is used to bypass zscaler):

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17 Nov 2022 Macbooks 👁 23 views

curl Command: Get HTTP Response Headers in Terminal

Web devs need to know the http headers their apps/webpages. This can be easily achieved using a browser plugin for Chrome or Firefox. But I prefer to use the command terminal, and curl makes this really easy.

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17 Nov 2022 Macbooks 👁 30 views

DNS Lookup with DIG: Query Records & Trace Resolution

DIG is an awesome command line utility to explore DNS. Below is a quick guide to get you started. Query Specific Name Server By default, if no name server is specified, dig will use the servers listed in /etc/resolv.conf file. To view the default server use: You can override the name server against which the query will be executed, […]

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17 Nov 2022 Macbooks 👁 29 views

Mac: Find Open Ports and IP Addresses with lsof & netstat

Below is a dump of examples of doing pretty much the same thing differently. I mostly use netstat and lsof, coupled with some bash scripts. You can argue that this is overkill, but below is a simple bash function that you can paste into terminal and call it whenever you want to see which application/process […]

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02 Nov 2022 Macbooks 👁 6 views

MTR on macOS: Fix Traceroute Issues with Zscaler VPN

If your on a zero trust network adapter like zscaler or netskope, you will see that traceroute doesn’t work as expected. The article below shows how to install mtr (my trace route) using brew: Next we need to change the owner of the MTR package and it’s permissions (otherwise you will need to run it […]

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