One Less Service on Alia

Alia, the latest in the line of servers hosted at home has one less service to host today. I've sacked the DNS service which had in the past provided primary DNS for some the public domains I had used. However, those are all now hosted by the DNS providers. I cleaned up the Bind configuration and closed that port so that it no longer forwards in from the Internet.

The last thing it was doing was DNS for local LAN - the internal DNS to lookup the printer (mostly). This is easily handled by DNSMasq in DD-WRT which is basically a tick-box to replace everything that Alia was doing for DNS. And it automatically adds the lookups for statically configured DHCP hosts so I don't have to setup a host once on the router for DHCP and then again on Alia for DNS.

At this point, it looks like Alia will be the last server I host at home. I've offloaded Jabber and now DNS leaving SMTP and HTTP. SMTP is almost ready to go already as there's only one personal domain for one user using that and that user may retire the domain otherwise we can move to Google Apps along with the other email. And that will leave HTTP which, since I can get shared hosting for less than $2 a month, is an easy one to offload. Not free, but shutting off Alia, even as an energy efficient system (low-power CPU and everything), will save just over $2 / mo in electricity consumption.

So we're coming to the end of an era. It really goes to show just how greatly improved hosted services are today and also the breadth of features you can get from consumer products for home. To have all the trappings of a full network that is so easy to use and so cheap, it is really amazing.

Patch Your #$%^!

According to SANS, the top security threat right now is *drum roll* unpatched applications! *gasp* *shock* Yes, it's blindingly obviously, but organizations (and individuals) are downright negligent in patching desktop applications. Applications that are highly targeted, again no surprise here, Adobe Flash, Adobe Acrobat Reader, Apple Quicktime, and Microsoft Office. And furthermore, "On average, major organizations take at least twice as long to patch client-side vulnerabilities as they take to patch operating system vulnerabilities. In other words the highest priority risk is getting less attention than the lower priority risk."

So patch your #$%^ or else Walter is going to come beat the #$%^ out of your new car while shouting "This is what happens when you find a stranger in the Alps!" .

Or block Flash, Acrobat Reader, and Quicktime - can't say I'd shed any tears for those apps myself ;)