Ziggo Internet, Juniper Firewalls and DHCP

At the house I have currently two ISP delivering broadband. Well, broadband isn't the correct word, since the the one of them is only a mere 256kbps (I think). The other is a 'whopping' 20Mbps.
The 20Mb connection is provided by XS4ALL, and the 256kbps is for free (if you have a phone subscription with Ziggo). The 256kbp is the minimum they provide to transport the phone calls, but if you're a masochist you can also browse the internet over that connection.

So, two ISP @ home. Combine that with a Juniper SRX firewall, and a dual ISP setup is born. The theory of that setup is that I connect both ISP's to the firewall, and use the 20Mb line as a default internet connection, but when that one dies, I automatically get switched to the backup line (256kbps).

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Gangnam Style

Total crap or brilliant? Haven't decided yet. At least it's different from the mainstream music crap. You decide.

A Weekend During the Summer of 2012

This weekend we escaped the rat-race and took some 'off-time' at/near the beach in Zandvoort (NH). The town is situated on the North sea coast, and during the (summer) holiday season packed with tourists....

Summer of 2012 Well, not this weekend (and I guess not even this summer season), because summer is slow at this year in Holland.

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Unable To Turn On Wireless In OS X Mountain Lion

Last night I was minding my own business on the couch, when the wireless connection on my MacBook (UniBody)  decided to call it a day. According to the symptoms (no bars visible in the WiFi icon in the menu bar, no visible wireless networks in the vicinity), the WiFi adapter was turned off. Turning the WiFi back on was not possible though.

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Private IP Addresses Showing In Public Webserver Logging

Today I was spelunking through some logging on the Squarespace backend, and found something peculiar.

The IP address marked by the red frame is a so-called private IP address.

In the Internet addressing architecture, a private network is a network that uses private IP address space, following the standards set by RFC 1918 and RFC 4193. These addresses are commonly used for home, office, and enterprise local area networks (LANs), when globally routable addresses are not mandatory, or are not available for the intended network applications.

These shouldn't show up in the logging of a webserver which is connected to the Internet. Further investigation revealed several other IP addresses;

07/29 at 10:29:20 AM 10.16.121.170
07/27 at 03:46:44 PM 10.31.238.253
07/27 at 08:27:18 AM 10.197.128.25
07/27 at 06:47:17 PM 10.31.245.14
07/25 at 02:08:42 PM 10.86.114.66
07/24 at 12:15:31 PM 10.71.209.105
07/28 at 02:27:47 AM 192.168.100.2
07/27 at 11:11:14 PM 192.168.14.63
07/27 at 03:28:20 PM 192.168.1.24
07/27 at 03:14:36 PM 192.168.7.17
07/27 at 08:25:04 AM 192.168.26.218
07/25 at 05:07:24 PM 192.168.10.2

I opened a support ticket @Squarespace to check if these might be internal addresses. If so, they are using a lot of internal networks.

Reset 'Open With' Dialog in Finder

After the upgrade of several programs I found that these programs had multiple entries in the 'Open With' dialog in OS X Finder. The following command (executed in the Terminal app) rebuilds the LaunchService database, and removes the duplicate entries.

Note that the following command is 1 (one) line of code, that you need to copy & past in the terminal window.

/System/Library/Frameworks/CoreServices.framework/Frameworks/LaunchServices.framework/Support/lsregister -kill -r -domain local -domain system -domain user

As far as I can tell, it works on OS X Mountain Lion and every earlier version (at least till 10.6).

Nicotine Vaccine... WTF?!

While browsing the news sites, I stumbled upon this Nicotine Vaccine video on Reuters. Nicotine (smoking)... Vaccine? Since when is smoking caused by a virus?

A vaccine is a biological preparation that improves immunity to a particular disease. A vaccine typically contains an agent that resembles a disease-causing microorganism, and is often made from weakened or killed forms of the microbe, its toxins or one of its surface proteins. The agent stimulates the body's immune system to recognize the agent as foreign, destroy it, and "remember" it, so that the immune system can more easily recognize and destroy any of these microorganisms that it later encounters.

What's next? A vaccine for Kleptomania? Bad driving? Being obnoxious? This is (in my opinion) nothing more than an effort of Big Pharma to have us take more and more drugs. They have to do something to keep their investors happy since more and more drug patents are expiring.

Best 'Unboxing Videos' Ever

It's the best, mainly because it's terrible. It's a montage of several unboxing videos of the Google Nexus phone/tablet thinghy. I guess I would have thrown the entire box + contents out of the window. Google can learn a lot from other companies like; Nikon, Canon, Leica, Apple... Hell, even the shrink wrap on Microsoft products are easier to remove. Unboxing is an integral part of the new gadget/thinghy experience nowadays.

Pearl Jam June 26th @ Ziggo Dome (NL)

Some photos and videos from the Pearl Jam concert @ the new music venture/hall Ziggo Dome in Amsterdam (NL). I hope you like them.

The new Ziggo Dome is a large version of the Heineken Music Hall; Especially built for live music performances. We probably had the worst seats in the house (top left corner), but even there the sound was excellent.

Junos Pulse, Apple iOS, and Split-Tunneling

When you create (SSL)VPN access for you employees, you might enable split-tunneling to save corporate bandwidth. No split-tunneling means that all traffic is forwarded into the VPN tunnel. So if you browse the internet with an active VPN, the traffic goes through the VPN, and accesses the Internet through the corporate Internet connection. This isn't a big problem with a couple of employees, but with hundreds on the road or working from home, this might frustrate the employees in the building.

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