Noel's Muses

Mozilla, through firefox, is as of the end of September, going to be rolling out the forcing of DoH, or DNS over HTTPS for users of firefox, with the U.S.A first on the rollout. Google and others are also following, but in a very much limited way, where as firefox, will be blanket enabled.

So why is DoH so bad you ask?

DoH is currently at least, only paired with Cloudfares DNS services, this is fraught with danger, as Cloudfare does log requests and keeps them for about one month based on their original announcement, and even if they now claim they wont be logging when its fully operational, it's still very dangerous, because it's also centralising the Internet, sending all your DNS queries to one company, as you can imagine, doing so is incredibly dangerous and wrong!

As one who is a stickler for privacy (pretty evident if you've read a few of my posts), DoH must be pretty f'ked up for me to come out against it, Mozilla claims this is all about privacy, but that's something 90% of us already have.

Continue reading "DoH Erodes Privacy"

Need some data or phone cables and outlets installed in your home or business?
Moved into a unit complex and been told your service is active but your line is dead?

Who should you call? If you think Electrician, you may want to think some more.

Performing Telco and Data work must only be performed by a Registered Cabler, in most cases by one holding what's known as Open Registration with appropriate endorsements such as S for structured (data) cabling, F for fibre work, and C for coaxial cable (HFC) style work (this excludes Free to Air installers who do not need to be registered to install coaxial cables for TV antennas), all of which is stated on their Cabling Providers Registration card, which they must be able to produce when requested to do so.

Registration shows you are competent to perform such work, or, at least it should, but if engaging an Electrician, that might not always be the case as you are about to find out.

Continue reading "Telco and Data - Electrician or Registered Cabler?"

Post Updated February 25, 2021

I would like to thank Brian from Aristel who advises us of some recent changes in relation to lifts in Australian Standards.

Remember, Telstra are closing their 3G services in June 2024, so any 3G diallers will need to be changed out for 4G.

Emergency phones like those in Lifts, Security and Fire Alarm Systems with back to base monitoring are also affected by the NBN changeover and cut-offs, therefore building owners, tenants, and managers need to start considering what action they need to take, even if the NBN is not as yet active in your area, it likely wont be that far off, so you'll need to start planning for the changeover, it's also beneficial to change earlier, cheap PAYG M2M plans are more economical for standby emergency and idle telecommunications than PSTN line rental. As for Alarms, some B2B providers supply you with a SIM that includes all signalling calls in your monthly B2B plan.
Continue reading "NBN And Emergency Lift Phones, Alarms, And Other Fixed Diallers"

Whether it's DirectAdmin, cPanel, Plesk, or some other commercial hosting control panel, I pretty much dislike them all. They do their best to present an eye candy appealing image to help for good customer experiences, and I guess most of them do that well, probably far more appealing than the cobbled together scripts that I use allowing my hosts to manage their websites, but I guarantee you mine are probably more secure, efficient, scalable and redundant - capability beats looks any day!

In a few weeks time it'll be 2018, yet they still treat us like it's the 90's, limiting us to what daemons we can use on our own servers, limiting us to their choices of Linux distros, if it runs on RedHat, Debian, and FreeBSD, it'll run on SuSE, Slackware, Gentoo and others, but the biggest gripe of all, is they continue putting everything on one server. The process is along the lines of your customers sign up online, probably using Hostbill or WHMCS, it then shoots off to the current new hosts server's telling the Control Panel to set up the domain, its DNS, Email, Databases and Website structure - all on that one single machine, putting all your eggs in one basket, I guess they think hardware is infallible, where the truth is far from it.

Continue reading "Why I Hate Commercial Control Panels"

So your business is running an old analog multi-line PABX that you've used and trusted for years, you've also just been letter dropped that the NBN is ready for service in your area, ok, so that means you have 18 months to migrate to an NBN service before Telstra cuts off your existing copper services, you know it's wise to move sooner rather than later because you don't want to get caught out and be without a phone service when everyone waits till the last minute, and there's not enough techs to go round.

You decide you better start talking to some RSP's (Retail Service Providers), or worse - you get one of those pesky door to door sales people, either way, during your conversations all of a sudden your ears prick up because you've just been told that your trusty existing PABX wont work, it's incompatible with the NBN and you need to replace it.

Continue reading "NBN And PABX Phone Systems"

Australia's NBN, how it will affect your existing landline phones when you are migrated depends on how your home is currently wired and how many phones you have.

There's been a bit of rubbish being spread by RSP (Retail Service Provider - AKA: ISP) sales type people telling you your existing phones wont work when you're moved to the NBN. There is some truth to this, but no you likely do not need to re-wire your entire house or some such rot, or buy dect phones as only means of more phones, as many are being told, and despite other rhetoric from these sales geniuses, you can have more than one fix wired phone.

Continue reading "NBN With Multiple Phone Outlets"