Newsletter Archives

• Choosing your own domain name services

  Posted on January 13, 2025 at 02:41 CST by Susan Bradley • Comment in the Forums

  ON SECURITY

  

  By Susan Bradley

  There is a long-standing joke in enterprise technology: “It’s always DNS.”

  That’s because if something isn’t working, checking your domain name services to make sure they are set up and are working properly is a first step in diagnosing the problem. Misconfiguration has been the cause of many major outages — it’s not unheard of for incorrect DNS settings to take down entire firms or websites.

  Even for consumers, bad DNS settings can prevent access to the Internet.

  Read the full story in our Plus Newsletter (22.02.0, 2025-01-13).

  On Security DHCP, DNS, Domain Name Services, IP address, Newsletters

• Am I part of the attack bot?

  Posted on December 30, 2024 at 02:42 CST by Susan Bradley • Comment in the Forums

  ON SECURITY

  

  By Susan Bradley

  The other day, a headline popped up that made me stop and read the news story.

  It was all about the American government’s considering blocking the vendor TP-Link from selling routers. TP-link happens to be a vendor I rely on for my wireless access point, but it has also been called out by Microsoft and other vendors who say its products may be used in attacks.

  Many of these units not been updated by the vendor to fix issues that allow them to be used by other bad actors in group attacks.

  Read the full story in our Plus Newsletter (21.53.0, 2024-12-30).

  On Security DNS, Edge Devices, Exchange, Firewalls, Firmware Update, ISPs, Newsletters, Patch Lady Posts, Routers, TP-Link

• WhoisThisDomain — Where is that great deal coming from?

  Posted on June 3, 2024 at 02:42 CDT by Deanna McElveen • Comment in the Forums

  FREEWARE SPOTLIGHT

  

  By Deanna McElveen

  There are two non-techie things I really love: shoes and glass ornaments.

  Because of tracking cookies, advertisers know this, too. I really don’t mind that very much because while I’m on Facebook, I see only ads that interest me. Unfortunately, I also get questionable ads. How do I know the origin of these vendors and their great deals before I click?

  Read the full story in our Plus Newsletter (21.23.0, 2024-06-03).

  Freeware Spotlight DNS, Domain servers, Newsletters, WhoIs, WhoisThisDomain

• Hardening for privacy

  Posted on November 27, 2023 at 02:41 CST by Susan Bradley • Comment in the Forums

  PRIVACY

  

  By Susan Bradley

  Privacy means different things to different people.

  At the office, we want to keep our information private from certain individuals and certain departments, but not from ultimate business needs.

  In fact, we will often “spy” on our own employees. Want to know exactly what your users in the office do? Consider an analytics app such as ActivTrak to monitor the productivity of employees.

  Read the full story in our Plus Newsletter (20.48.0, 2023-11-27).

  Privacy DNS, DNS over HTTP, ISP privacy, ISPs, Mozilla Foundation, Newsletters, OpenDNS, Patch Lady Posts, Privacy, Quad9

• Freeware Spotlight — eToolz

  Posted on February 17, 2020 at 01:00 CST by Tracey Capen • Comment in the Forums

  BEST UTILITIES

  By Deanna McElveen

  If you’re a relatively young computer tech or system administrator, you’re living in wonderful times.

  The ability to show up at a worksite with all your tools on a flash drive was the stuff of dreams for us floppy-totin’ grayhairs.

  To your many portable tools, I suggest adding Austrian developer Werner Rumpeltesz’s eToolz. It’s your go-to app for everything network-related.

  Read the full story in AskWoody Plus Newsletter 17.7.0 (2020-02-17).

  Best Utilities AskWoody Plus Newsletter, DNS, Networking tools, Ping, Trace

• The Internet: How to find and change DNS settings

  Posted on March 25, 2019 at 06:23 CDT by woody • Comment in the Forums

  What’s a DNS and why should you change it? Third-party DNS servers offer speed and security that may be missing on your machine.

  Lance Whitney takes you through the pros, the cons, and helpful how-tos.

  Details in this week’s AskWoody Plus Newsletter 16.11.0, out this morning to AskWoody Plus Members.

  Other AskWoody Plus Newsletter, DNS

• Patch Lady Podcast – changing your DNS

  Posted on February 3, 2019 at 23:43 CST by Susan Bradley • Comment in the Forums

  Woody recently had a post talking about changing the DNS settings on your network adapter, but I think there’s an easier way – in your router.  So here’s a visual how to of how I do it on my router at home:

  (if you want to download the mp4 – the link is here)

  Video Player

  Media error: Format(s) not supported or source(s) not found

  Download File: https://www.askwoody.com/wp-content/uploads/2019/02/AskWoodyDNS.mp4?_=1

  00:00

  00:00

  00:00

  Use Up/Down Arrow keys to increase or decrease volume.

   

  Windows News DNS, Patch Lady Podcast

• Patch Lady – DNS anyone?

  Posted on April 2, 2018 at 23:36 CDT by Susan Bradley • Comment in the Forums

  For anyone  who remembers my benchmark things to do on a Windows system to make it more secure that I used to do (hey I need to do that over here don’t I?) I was (and still am) a big fan of alternative DNS providers other than the ones you are given by your ISP.  While DNS purests will lament about openDNS, but I’m still a fan especially in consumer world of something that helps to filter out the bad stuff before it gets to your systems.

  New on the block is one up from Cloudflare and a post I just spotted tonight talks about how …

  CloudFlare was the fastest DNS for 72% of all the locations. It had an amazing low average of 4.98 ms across the globe.

  If you want to try it out the easiest way to do so it to go into the settings of your router and enter 1.1.1.1 as the DNS settings.  In my house I have an “inner router” and the ISP provided Xfinity gateway device.  I place the DNS settings I want on my “inner” router.  It also means that I’m masking my devices a bit from Xfinity’s gateway.  I can’t use the advertised “pause” feature per device, but I do get more control over my DNS settings inside my home network as well as a stronger wifi broadcasting from my internal router rather than relying on my ISP’s device.  I do also go into the setting of the Comcast gateway and turn off the open wifi that the gateway/router ships with that allows anyone that has a username and password on the Comcast network to “hang” off the advertised wifi coming from your router. You can do this setting inside the web admin portal page, or from inside your Comcast account app.  I have a Netgear device that I set to pick up the Internet from my Comcast gateway – it’s set to have a static IP of 10.0.0.3 and then it hands out IP addresses inside my home using the normal local address range of 192,168.1.x.

  In the settings of the internal modem I have placed the DNS settings I want:

  

  Needless to say I might check out the new settings.  All I need to do is enter in the values of 1.1.1.1 and 1.0.0.1 and hit apply.  If you have a internal router that handles IPv6 DNS entries enter in 2606:4700:4700::1111 and 2606:4700:4700::1001

  By the way, if you’ve ever wondered what IP address your computer is, open up a command prompt and type in ipconfig /all  and hit enter.  Next to the active network connection will be the information about that computer’s IP address.

  Other DNS, Patch Lady Posts