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Simulating WAN links used to be a difficult process. I would load FreeBSD with a dummynet driver and play with the settings to tweak where I needed it for the activity. OpenBSD with ALTQ made this a step simpler with the ease of bridging adapters. On a recent project for Spec Ops Technology, I needed to simulate a WAN with latency, loss, and randomness. I decided I needed to dig more into the netem work included in most recent linux distributions. Netem has matured to the point of being a very potent utility for setting up quick testbeds. Additionally with most any modern Linux distro you are online in minutes. I will post a very quick script to get you online: ...

“Friends, Romans, countrymen, lend me your ears!” This year alone I have been in 12 countries and accumulated over 500k miles of travel and want to share my tips and tricks to make us better citizens of the globe. I want to provide some tips from my many days on the road. It is my hope this transforms you from clueless tourist to world citizen. **Learn the basic language – **The quickest and easiest way to make connections with people is to approach them with their native tongue. You will be surprised after being a few places how easy it is to pickup “Hello and Goodbye” and “Please and Thank You” ...

Microsoft Lync is prevalent through the corporate world. Honestly its a pretty decent product on a Windows machine. On Linux and Mac though it is really a half-baked product of varying working status. On Mac the official client burns through your battery due to requiring the Nvidia graphics card on my Retina Pro?? I am a big fan on Pidgin (or Adium on the Mac) and have been struggling to get Lync support working on Mac/Linux using this client. Today I was finally able to connect. ...

—- Cross Post from the Spec Ops Technology Blog —- Spec Ops Technology prides itself on taking difficult problems and providing practical engineering solutions. Quite often this real world experience is born of a real world problem we personally faced. There is a passion we look for in our engineers that breeds a team that, by nature, develops creative fixes. As the United and Lufthansa ticket counters can attest, I spend a lot of time on the road. In today’s connected world I depend on a secure and platform agnostic internet connection. There a few major hurdles that make this difficult: ...

Apple must have been reading my blog when I wrote-up how to use two locations for Time Machine. Now in Mountain Lion it is built in and is much more seamless than my band-aid hack. Backups were always such an elusive concept for people, but Apple has really done a great job here. If you own a Mac and do not use Time Machine…shame… The two locations here are a Whole Disk Encrypted external FW drive and a Debian file server with an encrypted volume. ...