We had to upgrade our mail gateway/anti-spam software on Sunday because one of our vendors requires us to use encryption when exchanging emails with them. The easiest solution is to use opportunistic TLS, where the server will always try to connect to the other server using the TLS protocol. If the other server supports TLS, then traffic is encrypted. If not, then the email is sent using just regular SMTP without encryption.

This is actually …

Another great open source software.

Untangle is basically a Unified Threat Management (UTM) solution designed for SMBs (up to about 300 users, although there are people who have successfully deployed it in much bigger environments, like this one, for example, with 1600+ users). Untangle packaged all these great open source security software together and then provided a really nice and very intuitive user interface for them simplifying installation and management. They also have commercial …

I’ve been using SSH Tunneling for a while now mainly to encrypt HTTP traffic when using public wireless access points. I won’t go into detail here, just Google for “SSH Tunneling” if you need more information. I’m also gonna assume you already have an SSH Server set up.

• Download PuTTY and save it to C:/.
• Open notepad, type in the command below and save it as securetunnel.bat (Note: removeusername@ and -pw passwordif you prefer to …

Ran into a problem last week where our vendor’s Cyclades TS100 devices couldn’t acquire an IP address from our Cisco 871 router’s DHCP service.

This was a big problem for us because we have about 70 locations using this router and all of them will have these Cyclades TS100s installed in the next two weeks.

After about two days of troubleshooting/testing and working with the vendor we finally figured out the problem. All we had …

To redirect http traffic to https in Apache, create a .htaccess file with the following content:

RewriteEngine On
RewriteCond %{HTTPS} off
RewriteRule (.*) https://%{HTTP_HOST}%{REQUEST_URI}

Place the .htaccess file in your website directory and that should be it.

NOTE: The rewrite module in Apache must be enabled for this to work. To check whether it is enabled, open your httpd.conf and make sure the line below is not commented:

LoadModule rewrite_module modules/mod_rewrite.so

If you’re running Apache …