Mobile Banking, NameCheap, IPv6, OB2, mhddfs, GCP, CSS, Fake news

• S-Pankki one of Finnish banks, just unexpectedly disabled their mobile pin authentication. It just disappeared without any prior notice. Maybe they had some security issues and exploit problems? That's also happened during the summer vacation time. So, I'm sure it might have left a few users stranded when available authentication schemes are suddenly changed.
• So much about Namecheap fixing the DNSSEC root cause. Others are reporting similar issues, even if it should have been fixed already. Tweet. Anyway, they replied to that Tweet bit later and said that the Global DNSSEC issue has been fixed. How it's possible that global DNSSEC issue has been fixed, when they claimed there's no issue to begin with. This is typical corporate communication.
• Let's see if the S-Pankki thing I mentioned above comes out similarly. "There's no reason what so ever, why it's disabled. But it can't be used anymore". - Sigh, I guess that's the official reply.
• Simplifying customer IPv6 addressing Part 1 and Part 2. Yep, nothing new in that post. For ISP's the one /64 is never a valid choice. /48 for corporate and /56 for home users. RFC6583, CGN, NAT, IPAM. DHCPv6-PD, SOHO, SME, ISP, CPE, RFC6603, RFC7084, WAN, GUA, ULA, PMTUD.
• Awesome OpenBazaar 2.0 seems to be working perfectly with IPv6 too. It also seems to be quite hungry on file / socket handles. 1024 isn't nearly enough. Well, luckily that's easy to change with Linux.
• Configured mhddfs based solution for a friend. JBOD was the simplest way to go. Because all data is backed up to secondary location. This is also awesome solution, because each drive still got it's own independent file system. This greatly simplifies recovery and operations in case of some kind of failure. This is great when you've got bunch of reasonably sized files. Of course this kind of solution won't work for as example one massively huge database file or similar cases. Spanned / Concatenated volumes are one option, which I've been using mostly with Windows. What, no RAID? Well, no. Because the volumes itself are stored on raid. If high performance is required, then RAID 0 (striped) would work as well.
• Google Cloud London is Open. That's awesome, let's see when Finland follows. (Note, Finland GCP region is already open, this blog post is from my long long backlog of stuff to post about)
• CSS Grid Layout - I would have answered to that question I hate CSS. It's so painful, until you know all the extremely annoying traps and tricks, and even after that it's going to bite you again and again. But the really good thing in that article was the links. And of course the saying: "It isn't your fault, but it is your problem". Which pretty much describes the software and computing environments. On some sense, it's nice to outsource things. But that also often means that when there's some kind of problem, it's highly probable that you can't do anything to fix it. On some sense, it's assuring, but it might be also a really bad thing. That's why you need to have ultimate disaster recovery plan, which can be kicked in, in case something really horrible happens with your outsourced systems. I've spent too much time dealing with CSS and especially CSS Grids. HTML tables, everyone laughed at those, but hey, it was really simple, quick and easy to setup and use.
• Still laughing at the fake news stuff. This isn't anything new, this is millenniums old stuff. Propaganda, disinformation, alternative facts, 'fake news'. All the same. Or maybe just different view points, freedom fighter or terrorist? All countries seem to be providing fake news all the time, especially including the major fake news generators like Russia and USA. Thi doesn't mean that European countries wouldn't be full of fake news lies and political propaganda. Some targeting foreign nations and opinions and most of it targeting country's own population.
• There are a great examples in Finnish news and politics about Fake news, propaganda, etc. Being used to manipulate the local population. And purposefully confusing them about things, providing misleading information and avoiding seeing the facts. But this is nothing new of course. And it isn't Finland only of course. I'm just wondering how the Brexit promises turn out after all.

2018-09-23