A while back I did some consulting work for a small ISP who had received complaints from a few customers that believed they could not use the ISP’s SMTP server to send email to outlook.com or hotmail.com accounts. These customers claimed they never got any bounce message (Non-Delivery Report)  in return, so they firmly believed the problem resided with the ISP.

IPredator is a swedish VPN service offered with the stated goal of providing internet privacy.

BlueOnyx uses the PAM ABL module to mitigate brute force attacks. Though it’s not a good idea to rely solely on this module to protect your services, it’s definitely better than nothing. However, for some reason the database storing the failed hosts and users tends to corrupt easily on BlueOnyx systems.

This installation procedure will extract only  relevant libraries and executables from the BIND 9 package, and not install a full-blown DNS server. The installation method is also applicable on Windows 7 64-bit systems.

Head over to http://www.isc.org/downloads/ and download the BIND 9.10.0-P2 package. Select the 64-bit version and leave the 32-bit package as a last resort. The 64-bit version is dependent on the Microsoft Visual C++ Redistributable package, which you can download and install from http://www.microsoft.com/en-us/download/details.aspx?id=30679#

Instead of logging on to each of your external email accounts, you can retrieve all your accounts’ email messages directly from Zimbra. It’s one of those things you just expect to work with an enterprise ready solution like Zimbra.

I bought BioShock on a Steam sale once upon a time and finally got around to playing it. However, a few minutes into the game I realized that the lack of sound was not due to my character going deaf from an initial explosion.

After trying to tweak the sound settings without any success I came to realize that BioShock is rather old as it was released back in 2007. Thus, it’s not exactly certified for Windows 8. A quick fix was to run the game in compatibility mode for Windows XP (Service Pack 3) which immediately brought the in-game sound back to life.

What was supposed to be a quiet Saturday morning quickly turned into a couple of hours trying to mitigate an increasing strain on a  WordPress based site. After getting around 800 post requests per minute to the WordPress xmlrpc.php file, resources for the site in question was getting sparse.

I usually prefer VirtualBox for my non-commercial virtualization needs, but since I already had VMware Player 6.0.2 installed on a Windows 8.1 64-bit host I decided go with it for my Slackware Linux 64-bit guest.

After installing a new wildcard SSL certificate on a BlueOnyx 5106R server, I performed the mandatory system tasks to spot any potential problems. Unfortunately the system was rapidly throwing the following error messages:

I’ve not been doing any serious distro hopping since 2008 and figured it was about time to see if there is anything new under the sun. Enter Arch Linux, a highly touted and matured distribution with a development model and philosophy I can appreciate. Honestly though, writing a review of Arch is somewhat daft as each installation will depend upon your own choices and preferences.

What should have been a few relaxing minutes with (non Dana White approved) MMA related news on my Nexus 4, was soon to be turned into a browser hijacking battle courtesy of lovelink.us.

I did a review of Slackware Linux 14.0 a year ago and I was unsure as to whether I should make another one or not. There is rarely much change from a user point of view between different Slackware releases, and I expected to end up ripping off most of my previous review. Speaking of which, for a more well rounded assessment of Slackware Linux, please check out the Slackware 14.0 review.

Having a sick day, I jumped at the opportunity to download and install the latest Windows 8.1 release on my Asus ROG Tytan CG8480 Windows 8-based gaming pc. Since the update came at a solid 3.4GB I decided to let Windows handle this one on its own. When I came back to check out my new Windows system, I was informed that Windows unfortunately couldn’t complete the update.

During the easter holiday my Dell Studio 1735 died suddenly without hope of resurrection. This left me with my Windows 7 based gaming rig for all computer related endeavors.

A while back I bought the USB-N13 wireless adapter which slogan is: “simply insert, simply connect”. Well, after connecting the adapter I was able to detect available networks, but I was not able to establish a connection.