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Showing posts from December, 2021

Business Bonus: AWS Outage (12/7/2021)

  There was an AWS outage a few days ago; You were probably impacted in one way or another. If any of my appliances would ever e-mail me, I think I'd die of shock. Every thing from Disney+ to McDonalds was affected, as US-East-1 was US-East-None for a few hours. Even Amazon delivery drivers and warehouse workers couldn't complete their breakneck, no bathroom, tasks. My Alexa couldn't reach AWS. "Guess I better attach it to the new hotspot..." I thought, before moving on with my day and not doing that. Turns out, my hotspot wasn't the issue.

Case Study: The Offline/Online Laptop

  alt: Three panels of a dog with a toy. Panel 1: 'Pls release IP address'. Panel 2: 'No release', Panel 3: 'Only hold onto expired IP' It's not practical for home internet services to let end users distribute their own IP addresses to their devices. The option is there, but it's far easier to let people use DHCP - You get a pool of addresses for your devices, and the router does the work in distributing them. That way, your devices can talk to each other (Somewhat - in a L2 network, they don’t need IP addresses) and reach the internet! But what happens when one Windows 10 device is unused for months? The device is totally off. It holds onto an expired IP address - and then it can't get back on. That's what happened this week. After scanning with Wireshark, no DHCP packets were being sent at all. The laptop didn't want to connect to any home internet router, of which there were two - The main one and the extender. Flushing DHCP didn&#

Two Factor Authentication and AWS Cognito Identity Pools

There's always a video to watch. Things to learn, labs to try - and a thought hit - What service does AWS provide that allows users to log in with Two Factor Authentication (2FA)? A refresher; 2FA is a combination of what you know, who you are, what you have - and in the future, probably what you ate for breakfast - to log into sensitive systems.  As of 2021, Google made 2FA mandatory for logging in to your Google accounts For the DoD folks out there, that keycard you use to log into a computer is a form of 2FA.  A fingerprint scanner, or an authentication app on your phone also count. Back to the question - Does AWS have options for 2FA if you use their Directory options?