Month: September 2011

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Benchmarking DNS servers with Java

I’m currently in the process of moving our DNS over to another provider and I was curious as to whether the old or new provider offers faster lookups. dig shows query times, but I didn’t want to just run that over and over. I decided to write something to do this, in Java since I like Java. I found this post, which has the meat of the work done already. I also read some of Sun’s JNDI/DNS lookup info, which was pretty dense. All I want to do is specify the name server’s IP and do the lookup. I don’t even really care about the result, just how long the query takes.

The thing I wrote only looks up A records, but can easily be modified to do CNAMEs or whatever. Here’s how you call it:

$ java -jar DNSTester.jar 4.2.2.2 www.google.com 25
Resolved www.google.com to 74.125.235.19 against NS 4.2.2.2
Performed 25 lookups in 233.29 milliseconds.  Average 9.3316ms per lookup.

$ java -jar DNSTester.jar 8.8.4.4 www.google.com 25
Resolved www.google.com to 74.125.226.146 against NS 8.8.4.4
Performed 25 lookups in 450.034 milliseconds.  Average 18.00136ms per lookup.

Code is in github here. Jar is available here.

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Fedora Core 15 & Gnome 3

Over a year ago, the hard drive in my primary desktop at home bricked itself and rather than going through the hassle of reinstalling Win7 on the new disk, I decided to go with FC12. I’ve been pretty happy with it in general, since I’ve always been partial to Red Hat and use CentOS primarily at work.
Continue reading “Fedora Core 15 & Gnome 3”

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Making sure SSLv2 is disabled in Apache (and Nginx)


Edit Jan 24, 2012: Deleted all the crap from this story and just left the recommended Apache and Nginx SSL cipher suites for maximum security without SSLv2 and without BEAST vulnerability (at least according to Qualys).

Apache httpd

SSLProtocol -ALL +SSLv3 +TLSv1
SSLCipherSuite ECDHE-RSA-AES256-SHA384:AES256-SHA256:RC4:HIGH:!MD5:!aNULL:!EDH:!AESGCM;
SSLHonorCipherOrder on

nginx

        ssl_protocols  SSLv3 TLSv1;
        ssl_ciphers     ECDHE-RSA-AES256-SHA384:AES256-SHA256:RC4:HIGH:!MD5:!aNULL:!EDH:!AESGCM;
        ssl_prefer_server_ciphers   on;

Source:

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Exchange (OWA) CAS crashes with 503 error – again

This just started happening again, with these errors appearing in the event viewer:

Log Name: System
Source: Microsoft-Windows-WAS
Date: 9/18/2011 11:16:33 AM
Event ID: 5011
Task Category: None
Level: Warning
Keywords: Classic
User: N/A
Computer: exch2010fe1
Description:
A process serving application pool 'MSExchangeOWAAppPool' suffered a
fatal communication error with the Windows Process Activation Service.
The process id was '3760'. The data field contains the error number.

Log Name: System
Source: Microsoft-Windows-WAS
Date: 9/17/2011 6:47:07 AM
Event ID: 5009
Task Category: None
Level: Warning
Keywords: Classic
User: N/A
Computer: exch2010fe1
Description:
A process serving application pool 'MSExchangeOWAAppPool' terminated
unexpectedly. The process id was '3108'. The process exit code was
'0x800703e9'.

Log Name: Application
Source: Application Error
Date: 9/17/2011 6:46:30 AM
Event ID: 1000
Task Category: (100)
Level: Error
Keywords: Classic
User: N/A
Computer: exch2010fe1
Description:
Faulting application name: w3wp.exe, version: 7.5.7600.16385, time
stamp: 0x4a5bd0eb
Faulting module name: KERNELBASE.dll, version: 6.1.7600.16385, time
stamp: 0x4a5bdfe0
Exception code: 0xe053534f
Fault offset: 0x000000000000aa7d
Faulting process id: 0x%9
Faulting application start time: 0x%10
Faulting application path: %11
Faulting module path: %12
Report Id: %13

After reviewing the IIS logs and the event logs, I think it has to do with the WebReady document viewer – the thing in OWA that renders and lets you view .doc attachments within the browser rather than forcing you to open Word or Excel. I think users were attempting to open corrupted files and that was causing it to crash. I’ve disabled Webready in EMC (Server Config -> CAS) and I’ll see what happens.

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