Category: Networking

21 Nov 2022 Linux 👁 9 views

Mac OS X: Using dig and whois to resolve DNS issues between your DNS server and the authoritive DNS Server

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 Linux 👁 48 views

Linux: Find the maximum packet size (MTU) between two hosts (using do not fragment flag)

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 👁 75 views

Mac OS X: Find the maximum unfragmented packet size (MTU) to reach a host

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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19 Nov 2022 Cyber 👁 19 views

Mac OS X: Using nmap or sslscan to review the ciphers supported by a website

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 Linux 👁 14 views

Mac OS X or Linux: Use terminal to get http/https response headers of a url using the curl command

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 👁 21 views

Macbook: Exploring DNS using DIG (Domain Information Groper)

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 👁 13 views

Macbook: Show which applications have ports open and to what IP address

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 👁 4 views

Macbook: MyTraceRoute an alternative ICMP route tracing which works with Zscaler / Zero Trust architecture

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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10 Oct 2022 Macbooks 👁 45 views

Macbook: Alternative to Ping (using TCP rather than 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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01 Sep 2022 Macbooks 👁 6 views

Macbook: View the list of DNS nameservers used for resolution

To view the list of nameservers your mac is using, simply open Terminal and paste the following: Alternatively, you can copy the DNS servers to clipboard directly from the command line (using pbcopy):

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