Outlook, Hash, Projects, SPAM, Multihash, IIS, UBCD, nmcli, Testing

• Microsoft failed, Outlook totally broken, can't send or receive emails. They've added new a MX which makes me wonder if they're trying to migrate Outlook.com with the business Outlook. Or more likely it's just a temporary backup option to queue up email to relay while the primary email mail systems are down. Confirmed it's exactly what they're doing. New temporary primary server is: outlook-com.olc.protection.outlook.com. But it won't handle messages for custom domains.
• Replaced every hash in one project with Blake2, it replaced SHA1 and SHA256. Thanks to variable length outputs. But actually SHA1 is faster than BLAKE2b and and BLAKE2s is around as slow as SHA256. For things which do not require cryptographic hash, but very light digest, there are much lighter alternatives out there. It's also a great question if 32 or 64 bits are enough. Why use 256 if that kind of accuracy and 'address space' isn't required.
• Sometimes some projects are just so utterly ridiculous. One organization has now complained for two years that one change hasn't been made. Actually it has been made, two years ago. But their team never accepted the new version for production, nor gave list what to change so it can be accepted. Therefore is pretty ridiculous to complain about it being broken. Plz, just validate the latest version, and either, give list of actions to complete or confirm that it's good for production. Funniest part of this is that they have to do things manually, because automation doesn't work. But they still don't want to order the change(s) if there are any. Which would probably require whopping 1 - 2 hours of work. - Afaik, this just doesn't make any sense. But yeah, business as usual. Maybe the manual work they're now forced to do, is free? I guess it is.
• BarracudaCentral blocked our SMTP server. Well, first of all, they don't provide adequate information, why. Also it's funny when people who use that list, then complain about not receiving email. How about deciding if they want our mails or not. If the emails are so important, why they haven't whitelisted the mails? Well, this is just so classic topic. Endless fruitless discussion and that's it. If you decide to filter your email, then you're not receiving all mail. That shouldn't be any kind of surprise.
• OpenBazaar nicely uses multihash with base58 encoding.
• Lot of IIS configuration tuning, disabling caching for some files, configuring static / dynamic compression as well as Cache-Control headers and so on.
• More fun with PXE, NBP, TFTP. Added UBCD and Ubuntu Live. It took me a while to figure out that UBCD and Clonezilla live are using different versions of syslinux. After I figured that out, everything went forward very smoothly and quickly. IIS serves files over HTTP and Serva servers lpxelinux.0 file and required DHCP PXE boot information, primary dhcp servers rest of DHCP data. Now everything is loaded over HTTP around 110 MB/s. Works well, boots very quickly and easily. Nice. As well as all UBCD tools work and Clonezilla works as well. - This is something which has been made wonderfully complex. It's interesting to see if someone with medicore tech skills tries to get all that work for first time. ;) It's pain and suffering and more pain and suffering.
• Google announced Global IPv6 Load Balancing - Very nice indeed. I wish I would have some time to play with it.
• Studied nmcli manpage. Now everything VPN related is fully automated and monitored, logged, etc. Very very handy for a small servers behind VPN tunneling.
• About root cause, fixing and attitude. Some companies got incredibly bad service and attitude. Our Air Conditioning system has been serviced over 20 during this summer. It always fail. Then the repair team takes almost a week to arrive, and then they 'fix it'. In around one week, it fails again. So, I would say it utter BS, that they 'fix it'. It's just like rebooting computer fixes race condition in operating system which causes it to crash. I've got absolutely zero appreciation for that kind of incompetent bleeps. - How about knowing what you do, and getting things done thoroughly and properly? - Yep, too much asked, it seems. - It's also painfully obvious that they don't got remote monitoring capabilities for the system. Like IoT would be way too complex thing for those bleeps. It's also blatantly obvious from the sounds it keeps, that there's something seriously wrong with bearing or so. But they haven't done anything about that.
• Laughing again, one organization want's desperately that we test it, and that it needs to work correctly. When I ask could you please define me exactly what work correctly means. They go silent again. Yeah, just normal. But it's kind of hilarious and getting me fed up at the same time.

2019-01-20