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Macbooks 21 Nov 2022 👁 90 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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Open Source 21 Nov 2022 👁 20 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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Cyber 19 Nov 2022 👁 22 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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Macbooks 17 Nov 2022 👁 26 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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Macbooks 17 Nov 2022 👁 24 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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Macbooks 02 Nov 2022 👁 4 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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AWS Cloud 20 Oct 2022 👁 15 views

SCP Files to EC2: Mac & Linux Command Guide

I always forget the syntax of SCP and so this is a short article with a simple example of how to SCP a file from your laptop to your EC2 instance and how to copy it back from EC2 to your laptop: Copying from Laptop to EC2 scp -i identity_file.pem source_file.extention username@public_ipv4_dns:/remote_path scp: Secure copy protocol-i: Identity […]

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Macbooks 10 Oct 2022 👁 62 views

macOS TCP Ping: Replace Ping on ZTNA Networks (No ICMP)

A lot of companies are moving to ZTNA (Zero Trust Network Architecture). This is generally a good thing, it helps cyber posture and it and makes life a lot easier as you no longer need to login to VPN tunnels to manage your cloud environment/s. But one of the few downsides of ZTNA is that […]

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