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Joined 1 year ago
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Cake day: July 11th, 2023

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  • Bring free on cloudflare makes it widely adopted quickly likely.

    It’s also going to break all the firewalls at work which will no longer be able to do dns and http filtering based on set categories like phishing, malware, gore, and porn. I wish I didn’t need to block these things, but users can’t be trusted and not everyone is happy seeing porn and gore on their co-workers screens!

    The malware and other malicious site blocking though is me. At every turn users will click the google prompted ad sites, just like the keepass one this week.

    Anyway all that’s likely to not work now! I guess all that’s left is to break encryption by adding true mitm with installing certificates on everyone’s machines and making it a proxy. Something I was loathe to do.


  • After I followed the instructions and having 15 years of system administration experience. Which I was willing to help but I guess you’d rather quip.

    From my perspective unless there’s something that you’ve not yet disclosed, if wireguard can get to the public domain, like a vps, then tailscale would work. Since it’s mechanically doing the same thing, being wireguard with a gui and a vps hosted by tailscale.

    If your ISP however is blocking ports and destinations maybe there are factors in play, usually ones that can be overcome. But your answer is to pay for mechanically the same thing. Which is fine, but I suspect there’s a knowledge gap.





  • Yes, but first go check which list you want to use since they’re a good starting point to understand a kind of level of tolerance and expectations around your experience.

    There’s lots of lists around here’s a small sample:
    https://arstech.net/pi-hole-blocking-lists-2023/

    Be prepared for a bump in time outs as you work through things you might need (I blocked by accident a bunch of needed Microsoft services that I need to use during my job).

    I haven’t edited my white list in months, maybe over a year. It’s going very well. I’ve been running pihole on ubuntu for more than 5 years as two virtual machines. I’m happy.



  • I think the question is, where can you bet on a single coin flip? Maybe because I’m Australian, there’s only one day a year you can bet on a (two) coin flip legally here. Everyone else seems to generally understand that coin flips aren’t fair for gambling and therefore is illegal.

    If this paper was like ‘this is how corruption in sports…’ rather than ‘this is like that magician cup and balls trick’ then I’d understand your concern.

    But like you said, you don’t even have a coin in the house, so the practical side is day to day, perhaps not even once a year, not only are you not deciding on a coin flip, even if you were, you’d (or whomever was flipping it for you) have to learn a technique to see it affect you.


  • I’ve seen something similar to this before in remote desktop servers where user redirected printers end up bloating registries to the point login times exceed processing limits and so not all the configuration in the registry or group policy gets processed. Each redirected printer gets created and never pegged, and it’s unique to that rdp session so they are duplicated to infinity over time. Glad you found it out, the only point with the complexity is I was trying to explain that it being complex doesn’t mean it won’t be robust if it’s still implemented without conflicts so you can rule that out (if you’ve ruled out conflicts) . Sounds like you found the culprit in the end! Good work.




  • Hey, sorry to say but not seeing this at all. About 60 customers, each between 30-200 staff, in Australia region. Almost all of them have reasonable conditional access policies managing maximum login times per app, requirements for device compliance for data sync and geo-restrictions and longer login times for known sites, as well as standard mfa requirements.

    Id say there’s something else in your stack. We monitor many of our customers with 3rd party tools too, including Arctic Wolf for seim /SOC alerts and triage and isolation if AAD accounts are breached. Sentinel one with integration in aad too. Though personally I feel like most medium and small businesses would be better served with the already included defender for business. A topic for a different day.

    But no unusual requirement for cleaning cache and such to ensure the policies we configure act as we expect.

    I’ve seen different tenants act differently of course in the past. But nothing right now I can suggest. I’d personally start doing a/b testing and reviewing all logs relative and see what impact before and after has on logs.

    Anyway sounds frustrating so good luck.



  • Not possible without a domain, even just “something.xyz”.

    The way it works is this:

    • Your operating system has some trusted certificate root authorities root certificates installed from installation of the OS. All OS have this, Linux, Windows, iOS, macos, Android, BSD.
    • when your browser goes to a Web url and it is a https encrypted site it reads the certificate.
    • the certificate has a certificate subject name on it. It also may optionally have some alternative names.
    • the browser then checks if the subject name matches the Web url address. If it does, that’s check one.
    • next it checks the certificate validity: it looks at the certificate chain of trust to see if it was signed by a intermediary and then the intermediary was signed by a root certificate authority. Then it can check if any certificate has been revoked along the way.
    • if that’s all good, then you’ll open without a single warning, and you browse Web sites all day long without any issue.

    Now, to get that experience you need to meet those conditions. The machine trying to browse to your website needs to trust the certificate that’s presented. So you have a few ways as I previously described.

    Note there’s no reverse proxy here. But it’s also not a toggle on a Web server.

    So you don’t need a reverse proxy. Reverse proxies allow some cool things but here’s two things they solve that you may need solving:

    • when you only own one public IP but you have two Web servers (both listening to 443/80), you need something that looks at incoming requests and identifies based on the http request from the client connecting in ‘oh you’re after website a’ and 'you’re after website b".
    • when you have two Web servers running on a single server, you have to have each Web server listening on different ports so you might choose 444/81 for the second Web server. You don’t want to offer those non standard ports to public so instead you route traffic via a reverse proxy inbound and it listens for both Web servers on 80/443 and translates it back to the server.

    But in this case you don’t really need to if you have lots of ips since you’re not offering publicly you’re offering over tailscale and both Web servers can be accessed directly.


  • It’s possible to host a dns server for your domain inside your tailnet, and offer dns responses like: yourwebserver.yourdomain.com = tailnetIP

    Then using certbot let’s encrypt with DNS challenge and api for your public dns provider, you can get a trusted certificate and automatically bind it.

    Your tailnet users if they use your internal dns server will resolve your hosted service on your private tailnet ip and the bound certificate name will match the host name and everyone is happy.

    There’s more than one way though, but that’s how I’d do it. If you don’t own a domain then you’ll need to host your own private certificate authority and install the root authority certificate on each machine if you want them to trust the certificate chain.

    If your family can click the “advanced >continue anyway” button then you don’t need to do anything but use a locally generated cert.


  • Just fyi, as a sysadmin, I never want logs tampered with. I import them filter them and the important parts will be analysed no matter how much filller debugging and info level stuff is there.

    Same with network captures. Modified pcaps are worse than garbage.

    Just include everything.

    Sorry you had a bad experience. The customer service side is kind of unrelated to the technical practice side though.